Andrea Phillips's Blog, page 6

Health, Work, Discipline, and Pandemic 2018

Yeah, hi. Hi! Hello there! I am writing to you live from my living room, which is nothing short of a miracle on several fronts: I am not asleep, I am not buried under a pile of tissues, I am upright and dressed in daytime clothes, I’m even well enough that I feel like I have spare brain cycles and words to spare for a blog post, rather than pursuing any of my more pressing interests or obligations. Whew.

We won’t talk about my coughing fits, though. 

You may correctly surmise from this that I have had the flu. This is true! I had the flu, but the cough stuck around, and something-something bronchitis plus nose and throat inflammation, something something secondary infections, no seriously are you SURE you’re not a smoker...? (I am not a smoker. I have never been a smoker. I had to assure them several times. They didn’t seem to want to believe me?) 

This blog post, then, is made possible by no less than six prescription medications because asthma sucks, and so do secondary infections following influenza. Get your flu shots, kids, wash your hands a lot, and this year, if you get a sore throat and cough three times, get to the doctor ASAP for Tamiflu. Be quick about it. Tamiflu doesn’t do much if you don’t start it within a day or so.

So I haven’t done a lot of work over the last *looks at calendar* wow, three weeks. To be sure I’ve done some work — some few thousands of words of novel-writing and light scheduling — but nothing like the volume I’d set for myself as my January goals. I’d hoped to have almost twice as many words written than I have. I’d hoped to be on top of my email. These things have not happened.

Oh, but I’ve been sick. I can’t possibly expect myself to work when I’m sick, can I? Or... can I?  Health fails us all in the end, and if I don’t find a way to work even when my lungs don’t quite work right, even when my head is full of biowaste, even when I’m tired, surely this means I lack the discipline to pursue my craft and I should...

Shh, shh, stop laughing so hard, you’ll make a scene. People will stare.

There are many true facts underpinning this spectacularly flawed logic. One is that you can’t and shouldn’t wait for everything to feel and be right before you embark in your creative work. There will always be another set of dishes to be washed, another errand you should run, another loose end you really need to tie off before you can focus. And you do have to be disciplined to write. Doing the writing inevitably means not doing something else — maybe that something is a video game, but maybe it’s also laundry.

That other thing you are not doing so you can write should not ever be “resting so that your health improves.” 

It’s also true that one of the not-very-joyful joys of age involves an increasing degree of disability for most of us, and we all eventually need to find ways to work within the framework of our capabilities. I mull over this from time to time, wondering if I’m really feeling so poorly, or if I’m just making excuses to be lazy. But this working-through-the-pain should never happen at the cost of meaningful recovery, or if that’s not the hand you’ve been dealt, at the cost of worsening what level of health you have.

I think a lot about how Jim Henson died of pneumonia. It was a secondary infection after the flu. If he had arrived at a hospital eight hours earlier, he might have lived.

Take care of yourself, blossoms, and rest when you need it, and see a doctor if you possibly can. The future needs you much, much more than right now does.

 

Time Out for Burnout

It’s funny how you can mean to take a week or so completely off, and instead you wind up running around like some kind of domestic berserker trying to deal with holiday-related cooking and cleaning, not to mention months of accumulated medical appointments and paperwork, restocking the pantry, all of those necessaries that make your life run more smoothly. Seriously, there is nothing like announcing “I am taking today off” to induce record-breaking productivity.

...Is that just me?  It can’t be just me.

The last month of the year, I wanted so hard to take a week or so off. But there were some looming pieces of work I had to finish by Jan. 2, not to mention those countless other things popping up like new heads on a hydra. I simply didn’t have it in me to burn through it all in a glorious two or four days. So instead I settled for half-measures; a little work, a little not-work, limping along to just meet my deadlines in time while not grinding the poorly lubricated gears of my brainmeats too hard.

Shockingly, this half-vacation punctuated with personal obligations did not actually cure my burnout. I know, I know, who could have guessed that still writing is not as good as not writing! So I was dreading work, procrastinating, the whole shebang. All I wanted to do was sleep in until 2pm and play video games until 2am, rinse and repeat.  

All of this half-holiday time was good for feeding new media and new experiences in to my brain, at least. I played through Gorogoa and tried Civ VI for iOS; I finished Null States and a series of LitRPG books; I watched The Good Place, The Last Jedi, and the last couple of seasons of Psych and its movie. I made ricotta cheese; I did some sketching; I started exercising and cooking for my family reliably. But I still wasn’t feeling quite myself.

Well, I finally did it. Thanks in part to the snow days in the Northeast, I squeaked out five whole days in which I did no writing, no edits, no meetings of any kind.  For most of them, I didn’t even leave my home, or my pajamas.

Funny thing, though. By day two, I kept thinking about my novel whenever my mind wandered. About the characters, the themes, the intersecting web of interactions.  By day three I was starting to get really excited about this book again. By day four, I was impatient for the kids to hurry up and get back to school so I could get to work putting some of this on paper.

This is how I work best; when an idea has worked its way into my brain and become a puzzle I’m trying to solve, constantly in the background. A low-level obsession. It’s like when you’ve played too much Tetris, except with narrative. I love it, but it’s been a really long time since I’ve felt like this. Definitely not since August, and maybe not since January.

And yet here we are. I’m back, and I’m writing, and I am so excited, because this is going to be so great, friends, seriously I love this thing I’m writing, gahhh Kermit flailing I love it so much. And I hope one day in the not-too-distant future you’ll love it, too.  And in the meanwhile: gosh, it is so great to feel like myself again.

Happy New Year

I love New Year the way that some people love Halloween or Christmas: deeply, fiercely, reverently. I look forward to it for months, and I put as much care into planning out the celebration as I do if I’m hosting Thanksgiving.

....But less actual cooking, per se. It’s all fancy cold-served snack foods up in here, and movies in our PJs, with our family all piled up together like puppies. This year’s going to be gangbusters — we’re planning seven kinds of cheese alone, including one we’re making ourselves!

My affection for this particular holiday shouldn’t surprise those of you who have been around here for a while. I love New Year so much that I’m even given to throwing a New New Year a few months on, whenever I feel like I need a clean slate. (Try it sometime! I highly recommend it. There is power in giving yourself a new chance to be and live the way you mean to whenever you need one.)

But I also love this stretch of days leading up to our collective fresh start. Right now we’re in the liminal space between 2017 and 2018, looking backwards and forwards in equal measure. It’s the time for weighing, judging, and planning. Time to discard ideas and practices that bring us harm and shape new ones.

This is particularly difficult as we leave 2017. It’s been a hard year, and 2018 shows no signs of being any easier on us. Unfortunately, the struggles many of us face are imposed on us by the circumstances of the world, and lie well outside of our own control. What’s the use in resolving to lose ten pounds or drink less when everything will still be on fire if you succeed?

But the point of it all is that we are still here. Our spark has not been extinguished, and as long as there is breath in us, there is always more and better we can do. So in this quiet week of reflection, I would urge you to take some time to look within and find the spark burning inside of you. Don’t undervalue what you can do with your time and your care. Even kind words can be great works if you apply them in the right time and place.

Remember that New Year is all about hope and renewal. The light is coming back. It always comes back. 

 

Stuff I Did in 2017

I usually look forward to writing these posts: a nice bow, bright and neat, wrapping up my accomplishments into a tiny package that I can pull out later as evidence that I do in fact do things sometimes, and that everything is not always horrible. They are not something I procrastinate on; rather, they’re the thing I write when I’m procrastinating on something less pleasant but more important.

But this year, in the quiet spaces between one tab and the next, between rounds of Gardenscapes, at stoplights and in checkout lines, a thought keeps popping into my head: I am not OK. It’s not that there’s anything in particular wrong with me, exactly. In every objective measure my life is pretty great, and in just about every subjective one, too. I’m not unhappy.

But there is an incredible emotional weight to discovering that the bedrock foundations of the world have shifted. The things I thought I could rely upon cannot be relied upon anymore. Like all of us, I carry that burden with me, everywhere I go. So: huzzah, I published a story! (But the world is still on fire.) Hot diggity, I got to visit Zurich! (But the world is still on fire.) Sah-weeeeet, I got to play Horizon Zero Dawn! (But... the world is still on fire.)

It’s not that I’m not OK, as such. It’s that the aggregate of all of the things going on are not OK.  I can’t hold the foundations of the world in place, but still I strain against the weight of them, trying to keep back the uncertain horrors that would emerge from their absence.

But I am nothing if not an optimist. No, truly! And so I am going to determinedly look back on the year and see how bright the bright side is, exactly.

What I Shipped in 2017Novelettes

The Revolution, Brought to You By Nike (Fireside)

 Hard Bargain, Bookburners Season 3 (Serial Box)

Into the Woods, Bookburners Season 3 (Serial Box)

Patch Job, ReMade Season 2 (Serial Box)

Chosen One, ReMade Season 2 (Serial Box, out December 29) 

Short Stories

Three Laws (Fireside) 

 TeleTravel™ Release Notes (Patreon)

 Informational Survey for Benefit of Profit (Patreon)

Games

Waking Titan (No Man’s Sky ARG with Alice & Smith)

Kiss of the Revenant (The Secret World ARG with Alice & Smith) 

Spy Virtual Race (Macmillan Cancer Support and Six to Start) 

 Zombies, Run! The Board Game, Guest Mission (Six to Start and Naomi Alderman)

Podcasting

The Cultures (with Naomi Alderman and Adrian Hon) 

 

There’s also one more ReMade episode I’ve written that won’t be out until late January. I will also have written two more episodes of Bookburners by the New Year, but since they won’t be published for some time, those go on next year’s ledger.

Aside from all that, I’ve written a number of essays and articles that I frankly haven’t kept track of; three more sets of scripts for other audio dramas; an all-new short story, written and sold but not yet announced; I’ve almost given up on selling another short, which I love desperately but cannot seem to place in a market; and I very noticeably have not written a novel, which fact I felt a lot worse about before I realized I’d written well over 80,000 words in various other forms as well as designing and writing for an old-school, work-hours-heavy alternate reality game this year. Plus, you know, parenting school-age children with heavy extracurricular schedules.

Wow. I guess this is why I do this end-of-year recap, huh? No wonder I’m feeling so burned out lately.

Of all of these pieces, I suspect The Revolution, Brought to You By Nike is the most significant and impactful thing I’ve done this year, and will not doubt be one of the highlights of my entire career. It is extremely political, and simultaneously the most personal thing I have ever written. And it was published in February, which has led to a curious hangover the rest of the year, a certainty that my most important work is behind me, and that none of the rest of it counts as much. I realize this is ridiculous, but there it is.

So that’s work. What about everything else, though?

Punditing, Travel, and Activism

After a lengthy hiatus, I started taking speaking engagements about transmedia storytelling again this year. And I found I quite enjoyed it, after my break! I even had conversations with a couple of universities about teaching at various games programs over the last year, but ultimately discovered that they couldn’t pay me enough to justify the opportunity cost — I would love to teach, but not as an adjunct. The math just didn’t work.

On the other hand, I took a year mostly away from science fiction conventions, which turned out to be for the best given how hard I was working, especially over the conference-heavy summer months. So I went to Confusion in January, and then spoke only at C2 in Montreal in May and CILECT in Zurich in October. (I also traveled to London for business in late June, and my family took a glorious trip to Disney World in August.)

I also tried to volunteer with the NYCLU, but I don’t think my skills and availability suit their needs, alas. If I’m going to serve the world, then perhaps my best path is imagining my way to a better future. (I’m working on that.) Meanwhile, there’s always more calling my congresspeople to do. And voting. Always voting. (I registered as a Democrat for the first time this year, after staying as an Independent since I was 18. It felt like it was about time.)

One thing is abundantly clear, in any event. The overall volume of work I’ve put out this year is unsustainably high, and I’m going to need to think some hard thoughts about how to more efficiently direct my efforts going forward. Especially because...

Health and Wellness

This was not a super great health year for me. I took a tumble down the stairs at Confusion early in 2017. Inauguration weekend, in fact. Two sprained ankles and a bruise turned into an antibiotic-resistant infection, and it seems the antibiotic that finally killed it may have also killed my Achilles’ tendons, which did not become apparent until I sharply increased my swimming length dramatically in June. (Magnesium supplements are apparently a miracle cure for me where five weeks of physical therapy was not.)

On top of that, I burned both ends of the candle very hard over the summer and through October to hit a cascading series of deadlines and other commitments, the net result of which was losing several weeks to a series of respiratory infections ultimately followed by several more weeks of asthma in which I could not so much as walk across the room at a normal pace without causing a sharp spike in my heart rate.

I have learned a lesson from that, and the lesson is that sleep is important, and I am no longer 24, and I need to be more cautious with my body if I want it, and ergo me, to stick around for the long haul.

What’s On Deck in 2018? 

Wow, I’m not sure. This is the first time in a long time I’ve stared at a new year without a long list of things I want to accomplish. I’m just... really tired, friends. Really, really tired.  Trying to hold up the foundations of the world takes a lot out of you, I guess. Plus, uh, all the work.

I want to write a novel for real in 2018, and I’ve made some thousands of words of progress in that direction. I want to do another season of Lucy Smokeheart, very, very much, and I think a lot of you want me to do that, too. I’m going to Confusion again in January, and then after that... ???

Aside from all that, I genuinely don’t know what I want or where I should go. Do I want to try to break into VR? Or put together a team to make some indie games? Do I want to start building a full-on transmedia franchise? Break into film? Should I just focus on prose writing? Build a direct-to-Kindle erotica empire? Should I quietly shut down all of my digital presences and take up a more serene life as a yoga instructor instead? Ha ha ha just kidding. Probably.

Well, I guess we’ll all find out together. Hit me, 2018. I’ll be ready for you.

Patreon Changed the Game

Hey, friends!

I’m cross-posting this from Patreon for the sake of posterity, and my apologies if you wind up getting this message more than once.

I’ve never been good at Patreon. I’ve written about how uncomfortable it makes me before, but a lot of that comes down to cognitive dissonance on my end. There’s a mismatch between how patrons approach their funding and my perception that I need to provide value for the money that people give me.

But in reality, a lot of people who back a Patreon never actually read or listen to the content they’re allegedly buying; I know I don’t even do that myself. I just like the creators I support, and I want them to have money so they can keep doing good in the world.

That’s probably the same for a lot of you. You’re not very interested in whether I write a story for the Patreon this month, or ever. You just like me, or at least my work, and want me to keep doing the things I’m doing. (OMG!) And all of us who pledge based on that philosophy are doing what Patreon started out to facilitate: provide a way for creators with teeny-tiny audiences to get enough support and encouragement to keep going. It’s a foundation to build on, so that maybe one day we might become another John Green or Amanda Palmer.

The conversation going on right now about Patreon’s changing fee structure has made it clear to me that their direction as a company is pivoting dramatically. They’re not interested in helping creators with teeny-tiny audiences anymore. They want to focus on the people who are John Green and Amanda Palmer right now... and that’s for sure not me.

I personally think this is an incredibly short-sighted business strategy, because the internet is made for the long tail. Amazon didn’t become Amazon by selling only the fifty most popular best-sellers; you go there because you can get anything, no matter how obscure. And more to the point, Amanda Palmer wasn’t born Amanda Palmer — she had to hustle hard to get to the point where a VC-backed business like Patreon is interested in skimming their percentage from her.

But Patreon can’t know which of their teeny-tiny creators are going to become the next big thing. I may yet become John Green one day — but now, if and when I get to that point, I’m not going to be interested in Patreon, because they weren’t there for me when I really needed it.

This Patreon was already dormant, but now you shouldn’t expect it to ever come back to life, because I don’t mean for it to. Please feel free to delete your pledge to me, and I’ll know it’s nothing personal. I’ll be looking into deleting the account entirely in the days to come. And may we all find each other again one day in a better, wiser place.


 

The Mirage of Free Time

I’ve had a pretty intense year, and I’ll be working up my year-in-review post to tell you about it pretty soon. (Probably next week, since I can’t imagine I’ll publish or ship anything new between now and the New Year.) The one thought that’s pulled me through the most trying spells is a vision, like an oasis on the horizon, of what I will do and how I will structure my day when I finally get a pause to catch my breath. 

Surely, the logic goes, at some point the avalanche of deadlines and publicity and appointments will slow down, and I’ll have a few weeks to rejuvenate myself, or a month, or even two. When that happens, I can spend a week reading. I can focus exclusively on my novel. I can fold all of the laundry. I can make healthy dinners and swim three hours a week (and yoga twice!)

I can do all that. I can get everything under control soon. After this week, I’ve got nothing else coming down the pike. I just need to finish these edits, and pull together that draft. It’s happening. It’s going to be glorious. I just need to get through the next week. The next month. It’s only six weeks away, and then—

It’s inevitable. What happens is that a new set of deadlines pops up, and that beautiful, illusory break never arrives. Or it does, but it’s only a few days and then I’m back to the churn as hard as ever. And in that brief time, I’m so tired, so burned out, that I don’t write a word of my novel, I don’t read any books, nothing. Often I find that week consumed by illness or appointments I’ve been putting off. 

This is a high-quality problem, in that it means I’ve built a robust enough pipeline for work that it doesn’t run completely dry even when I really kind of wish it would. But it points to the challenge I’ve wrestled with for as long as I’ve been a freelancer. How do you balance the long-term big-picture stuff against the short-term requirements of your existing commitments?

You’d think a decade would be long enough to solve that problem. 

It’s easy to say “Silly girl, you should be working on your big-picture items little by little, some every day, as you go along.” But that assumes that you have extra time and creative power that you’re squandering right now; and the truth is, sometimes putting energy into spinning a new plate, even slowly, means letting another one fall down. 

And so here I am, staring at a week where I’m somehow planning to get through three distinct sets of edits, two promo pieces, an AMA, a Bookburners draft, three two-hour appointments, and all of my holiday shopping, cleaning, and wrapping.

It’s going to be tough, but I think maybe I can get through it all. And then next week, my plate will be completely clear, and then I can focus on my novel. Or maybe read a book. Or... 

90 Days No Laptop: Switching to the iPad Pro

In mid-August, faced with an increasingly crashy Macbook Air, I started looking at my upgrade options. My findings were eyebrow-raising, to say the least. The hardware available now is only an incremental improvement over my top-of-the-line mid-2013 device, and I’d still be running the same software that was causing me grief. 

So I decided to try switching to an iPad Pro as my main work and leisure device. Here, reader, is a complete accounting of how that’s worked out for me so far. 

The Problem Space

For those of you who are new here: I’m an author and freelance game designer, so my life is completely wrapped up in my keyboard and digital presence — but I don’t need to run any specialty software or write code, so your needs may vary from mine right there.

I was betting on three main benefits to the switch. 

1. Less physical pain. Mice wrecked my wrists decades ago. But even trackpads create pain for me; the spot where my palm rests next to the trackpad becomes agonizing and even disabling, particularly on long strings of days when I do a LOT of writing. Apple’s Smart Keyboard doesn’t have a trackpad extension, and so there’s nothing to press against my wrist and injure me.

2. Less logistical pain. In the course of my regular work, I do a fair amount of puzzle design, story boarding, and sketching out pieces of ideas. Historically that takes the form of doodles on paper, that I would then photograph or scan and send to my team. Or, worse, doodles on paper I would show to my webcam in the middle of a video call. Sketching in a digital-native place to begin with seemed like a big win.

3. Lost in tabs. A lot of my workload was relying on an increasingly unreliable web browser: email, Google Docs, calendars, Hangouts, various social streams and pieces of research. I lost a lot of time looking for stuff among my tabs and getting distracted. And I’d find myself with four Gmail tabs open because I couldn’t find any and kept opening new ones. I had a theory that the iOS paradigm of apps rather than websites would take enough strain off the hardware to make everything smooth and peachy again.

Everything is Awesome

Here’s what I bought: a 10.5-inch iPad Pro with 512 GB of storage space, along with the Apple Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil. (It turns out I didn’t need all that storage space, though.)

Let’s get right to the point. I’ve been really happy with my switch. Everything I expected was accurate. My wrist hasn’t bothered me in months — not even after days where I’ve written 5,000 words in one shot. Ironically, I haven’t had any need to sketch for other people lately, but the Apple Pencil has been genuinely game-changing. And as I hinted earlier in the week, my levels of distraction are way, way down. 

That Smart Keyboard

I want to talk about the Apple Smart Keyboard in a little more detail, first. It took a little getting used to the action, but when I have to go back to a regular keyboard now, they feel hopelessly clunky and cheap. The materials of the cover feel really gorgeous to the touch, and I, uh, stroke the faux-leather while I stare into space thinking about things now. And I don’t have to worry about spilling my drink or crumbs and making sticky keys, since the whole thing is one piece.

As a stand, it’s not quite as stable as a laptop is, but I’ve found it fine for propping up on a pillow or my lap and typing away. I rarely work at a desk or table, and I haven’t suffered for it. I haven’t missed not being able to adjust screen angles, either; it turns out that’s not really something I did, anyway.

Sometimes I’ll bounce up from the sofa a little too hard and the keyboard and iPad will flop down one way or the other. I don’t find this a dealbreaking issue to struggle with, especially not stacked up against the extra decade of typing I’m going to get from losing the trackpad and its associated injury. 

It took me a little while to work out how to fold the cover as a stand without the keyboard, because it doesn’t come with instructions and it’s not... super intuitive. But YouTube can hook you right up and you’ll be a champ in no time. 

And it turns out that iOS respects a lot of the keyboard shortcuts I’m used to using. In particular, I use cmd-tab a lot to switch from app to app — and that still works. And cmd-H take you to the home screen. In many applications, just holding down the cmd button will display a list of keyboard shortcuts you can use. At the same time, the touch screen is always there, and I’ve found switching from keyboard to touch goes so smoothly that I hardly notice I’m doing it. It really is the best of both worlds.

Apple Pencil OMG

I’m also really in love with the Apple Pencil. Oh my god, where WAS this all my life.

I was hoping I’d be able to do a little more art with it than the watercolors I’d started with a year or two ago, but the sheer amount of doodling I’ve done has been surprising. 

I tried Adobe Sketch for a while, but I’ve settled on ProCreate as my drawing app of choice. (Your needs may vary!) I’ve even used ProCreate and the Pencil to throw together a quick slide I needed for a presentation, and I expect more quick one-shot fixes like that going forward.

The Pencil always needs charging, so it seems; but it charges so quickly that it hardly matters — I can plug it in, go get myself a drink, and by the time I’m settled into my seat, the Pencil is charged more than enough for whatever I’m planning to do that day.

Perhaps most surprising: I’ve taken to doing bullet journal-style pages in Notes. Digital tasking has never worked for me, and now, for the first time, I can do paper-style tasking in a digital format. It is glorious. The main problem with that is the overwhelming guilt I feel about not using the kazillion blank notebooks I have stacked up in my office... 

A lot of these uses emerge solely due to the sheer portability of the device. I can tuck it into a regular handbag on my way out the door to dinner, or to go shopping for shoes with my kids, or wherever. It feels like less of a production to pull out an iPad than a laptop; more worth it for two minutes. So I bring it with me most of the time, and then I can, say, sketch my margarita while I’m waiting for dinner to be served. Easy-peasy.

Other Surprise Upsides

That increased portability has a lot of other implications for how much use you get out of a device. It’s easier to bring through airport security. Or... anywhere, really, and no dedicated laptop bag needed. Thanks to the lightning cable, I can charge with the same charger I bring along for my phone — but the battery life is so long that it’s hardly necessary. I didn’t get an iPad with cellular, but tethering to my iPhone in an emergency has been a snap in the couple of instances where that’s been necessary.

You know that thing where the person in the airplane seat in front of you suddenly reclines and almost cracks your laptop screen? Smaller screen, smaller problem. Huge relief. 

Microsoft Word for iOS has been a revelation. On a desktop, Word has become the worst kind of bloatware — loaded with specialty features, and prone to crashing and losing your work. Especially in a document with a lot of comments in it. Like, say, notes back and forth between you and your editor. 

The iOS version of MS Word has a totally different interface; it’s cleaner and much, much simpler. And I haven’t had a single issue with crashing for comments (or anything else!) yet so far. It seems as stable as a rock. Given how much of a writer’s life happens in Word, this is a huge, unexpected improvement. 

And I can’t overstate how much clarity the app paradigm has brought to my life. It turns out all of that stuff I thought I liked — apps bouncing in the Dock for my attention, alt-tabbing between the fifteen programs running, keeping fifty tabs open to remember to look at them later — were all time killers for me. I just work... better, now.

The Downsides

I won’t lie and say there have been no bumps in this transition. But I’ve only had to actually go back to a laptop for three things in ninety days: one, appearing as a guest on a podcast that uses Zencastr. Zencastr doesn’t support iOS. I’ve also had to grab a laptop to make design changes to my site in Squarespace; their drag-and-drop design tool is close to nonfunctional in mobile Safari. And when I needed to change an old Photoshop file, I picked up the laptop again, not because I didn’t think I could do it on the iPad, but because I didn’t want to invest two hours of research into apps and pricing just to solve a two-minute problem.

I can’t do anything about Zencastr or Squarespace, though fingers crossed that Squarespace is making improvements. I’m writing this on their blogging app and it’s... actually a lot better than their browser interface was. And more stable, too. So you never know.

All right, let’s get into my laundry list of minor friction points and complaints. 

iOS Copy/Paste is Still Garbage

This is probably my biggest ongoing complaint. Writers need to rearrange text sometimes! And when I’m blogging I need to highlight to make links, etc. etc. But selecting text in iOS is fiddly on a good day, and certainly less smooth than mouse-select ever was.

This seems like a great use case for Force Touch, and I am perpetually annoyed that it hasn’t happened yet. It’s likely that my writing process will streamline to require less rearranging over time, which is a more disciplined way of working. But that doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it. 

Shout out here to Autocorrect, which I have a love/hate relationship with. It’s made some things much, much better for me. It’s made other things much, much worse.  I haven’t decided yet which way the balance goes.

Some Websites And Apps Are Super Broken

...Or at least a little broken, or at least not integrated the way I wish they were.

Google is one of the biggest offenders, here. For example: I can’t change my profile photo for my Google account... because the “confirm/save” button is literally off the screen, and there’s no way to scroll to it. Worse: in a Google Hangouts video call, the iOS version doesn’t have access to the same instant messaging/chat window that desktop users see, so if other people in your group are trading links, or someone’s got audio problems and is just typing in, you’re screwed.

Worst of all: Google Inbox doesn’t integrate with Dropbox. At. All. Or the iOS 11 Files system, either. That means attaching your work and sending it out is... well, it’s impossible, frankly.  I’ve tried other email applications, but all of them fail me in a variety of ways, and some of those ways are even worse.  So I’ve become real handy at creating Dropbox links and pasting them into an email.

It’s not great.  

And some apps aren’t optimized for the iPad, or don’t have a landscape view like you need with a keyboard. Amaroq, the Mastodon client, is one of those, but there are dozens more. Maybe hundreds.

And of course I gave up on my complete Steam library to do this. Alas. Well, I was always more of a PlayStation girl anyway. And the iOS games ecosystem gets better every day.

Ugh, Subscription Software

Shifting to software-as-a-service is tough on the budget, and for good or ill, there’s a lot of that in the iOS ecosystem.

I’ve already made peace with shelling out money every month for services like Dropbox that I get amazing and ongoing value from. And I can grudgingly see the sense in paying a monthly fee for MS Office 365, another real workhorse of productivity.  If I were a working artist, I’d be happy to pay for Adobe’s software every month, too, but as a dabbler it’s a lot harder to justify, so I’ve gone elsewhere.

The subscription paradigm is a lot less reasonable for pieces of software that I use lightly and infrequently.  One of the biggest problems I’ve run into is a dearth of good invoicing software for iOS, at a price point that I could live with. See, invoicing software tends to run a monthly fee of between $7 and $20 a month, which sounds perfectly reasonable for a small business that might be sending out dozens of invoices every month. But I’ll sometimes need to send out three in a month, and then nothing for three or four months, due to the feast-or-famine nature of my business. And paying $7 per invoice seems, ah, a bit steep. 

I’ve defaulted for now to making invoices in Pages, of all things, since I have found literally nothing better. But if any of you out there are an app developer looking for a project, listen, iOS invoicing software for the creative freelancer is an unmet market need. Multiple clients and multiple currencies necessary. Hook me up? 

Scrivener for iOS

Since I’m a writer, I feel like I should give a little more detail on Scrivener for iOS in particular before we wrap up here. 

I do a lot of different kinds of writing: prose fiction of every possible length, scripting for video and audio drama, nonfiction essays, you name it, I write it. Scrivener was a revelation for me when I first discovered it, and it quickly became the cornerstone of my writing life.

I haven’t been ideally pleased with relying mainly on Scrivener for iOS. But it’s not because the iOS version is BAD, it’s just that the desktop version is BETTER.  What I’m missing are features that I used to have, and don’t now.

I wish I could edit two scenes side-by-side, for example, but in iOS you can only bring up a reference doc in the side panel. You can’t adjust how much real estate each pane gets, and you can’t edit the reference doc at all. You also can’t expand and collapse folders in the binder to see a whole structure at once; you have to go into each folder, one by one.

There’s a real problem for me in not being able to see a page view for length, too. For scripts in particular, knowing how far down the page you are is an important visual cue for how much time the scene takes up, and very often a script needs to stick to some very tight timing. 

But the biggest thing I miss is the integrated word count calculator — wherein you can tell Scrivener how long a piece needs to be and when it’s due, and it calculates a daily word goal for you. iOS Scrivener can’t math up a goal for you, you have to do that yourself. And you have to manually tell it when you’re beginning a “session,” too, instead of it resetting at midnight all on its own. 

None of these things make it impossible to work. It just puts a little more friction back into my environment, and these tiny snags over time can add up to real frustrations. 

Wrapping Up

In all, this hasn’t been a perfect experience. But it’s been pretty great, and I have no regrets. I got what I wanted out of the change, and for me, the problems I’ve found are more than worth the trade-off in benefits I’ve received.

But your needs aren’t mine, and it’s possible you have questions I haven’t addressed here. If so, feel free to pop into the comments (or onto my social media) and ask me about it. I’ll do my best to help you figure out if the iPad Pro life is meant for you, too.  

Gotta warn you, though. Once you’ve made the switch, a regular laptop feels like it may as well have been made in the 1990s. There’s no going back. 

Launch Day for ReMade Season 2!

It’s here, it’s here! Today I am tickled to announce the launch of ReMade Season 2. Just to catch you up, ReMade is the sci-fi YA post-apocalyptic serial I’ve been working on over at Serial Box, along with Matt Cody, E.C. Myers, Gwenda Bond, and Amy Rose Capetti (plus season one’s emeritus writers, Kiersten White and Carrie Harris!) It’s like a season of TV — short ebooks or audio books that come out each Wednesday. Starting... today!

I have the tremendous honor and anxiety of getting the very first episode of the season, and it’s a pretty big shift in gears from where we left off — you’ll see what I mean. But all of the things I love about ReMade are even bigger this season: the characters, the relationships, the murderbots, the SF setting.

Episode 1, Patch Job, is available for 100% free right now, to read or to listen, so you should definitely hop on that. And you can still catch up on all of Season 1 on podcast, too. Let me know what you think!

Out of Sight...

Back in August, I made the switch to an iPad Pro as my primary working device. No laptop. No desktop. Nothing but me and iOS in this thing together. It’s unsurprisingly had a huge impact on how my life and work both operate, and this week I’m going to write about that in some detail.

To warm up, though, I want to talk about a problem I’ve been having lately that I only rarely encountered on a laptop. Friends, I am finding myself bored on the internet. 

This isn’t a new problem; rather a cyclical one, found mostly in the spaces when internet use as a whole is shifting. In the early 90s, browsing Yahoo’s hand-curated index of the World Wide Web and chatting with friends on IRC was enough to occupy as many hours as I had to spare, and more, until it wasn’t. Later, groups and forums filled my time, until they didn’t. Then social media was born, and we all know what happened then.

My RSS reader is light on updates these days. Twitter, at least, seems to be drying up as people tire of Nazis and bad news, and accordingly seek out sunnier digital climates. But none of that is new since August. So why am I feeling listless and bored now?

There’s a piece of diet advice that goes around: put your healthy snacks at eye level, and hide away your cookies so you don’t spot them when you’re hungry.  Well! Apparently I’ve put myself on a very serious media diet. Because I still in theory have access to near-infinite content on Medium, Wikipedia, YouTube. There are podcasts and videos galore I have not yet even dreamt of, and enough art and snark on Tumblr to fuel a galaxy.

But I put those apps in a folder, and so they might as well not exist.

This is an astonishing and true fact, and bears repeating: once I put an app in a folder, I might as well not have it, because I will not think of it unless a specific need arises (and how often do you have a specific need for Tumblr or YouTube, truly?) I theorize that hiding the icon from easy and habitual view allows me to subconsciously forget about the app as a category of activity I can participate in. Evne where it used to be a habit! Where once I spent a lot of time visiting Google News, now I forget to open any of my half-dozen news apps. Likewise I forget about my RSS reader. I forget about the lesser social sites that didn’t make it into my dock. I forget about Duolingo, and the thought of playing games hardly crosses my mind on the iPad. 

The same goes for browser tabs. Where once I always had dozens open, now I keep it down to a manageable four or five, excepting specific research periods. iOS handles clicked links in such a way that you’re subtly nudged to finish reading an article before returning to the app that sent you there. Which means when I pop into my browser to see if there’s something I meant to read later, there’s... nothing. I did it already. 

Being bored on the internet sounds kind of terrible, but it is in fact a true and perfect blessing. It means nothing less than that I am reclaiming time that I had spent on the laptop idly clicking from one tab to another, trying to find something to do, or trying to trigger the memory of what I’d intended to get done. 

And the apps that almost haphazardly wound up in my dock or on my home screen, unfoldered, are the ones I’m spending more time in. Example: I do a lot of idle sketching now, a habit I’m pleased to come back to, since ProCreate is just... always right there, looking at me. Shockingly, my email inbox is the leanest it’s consistently been in... gosh, it must be a decade. I’m reorganizing my Dropbox folder structure, not because it’s any worse than it was in July, but because I’m in and out of the Dropbox app all day long.

That leads into a hypothesis that I’m testing now. Can I intentionally shape my days simply by rearranging my flipping home screen? Or a more specific test: If I put the Kindle app on my home screen, right there prominently in the corner, will I remember more often that reading is a thing to do, and accordingly read more books?

I can’t know for sure just yet, but since I moved the app into the light, I’ve read 50 pages more in a day than I did any other day in the last month. Signs point to yes.

Sooooooo in turn, the question becomes: what version of myself do I want to be? How do I wish my time usually looked? Which self do I want to be? Because all I need to do to become that person, it seems, is put the healthy apps a little closer to eye level.

Awards, the Engines of Anxiety

If you were trying to come up with a system specifically meant to drive a set of writers mad, you couldn’t do a hair better than to set up a major industry award and then tell them they’re eligible this year. Every step of the process is beautifully calculated to create misery and self-doubt. Every one.

We’ve apparently begun talking about what we’ll be nominating for various genre literary awards next year — the Hugos and the Nebulas, most notably. Best of Year lists are going around, and never mind that we have several weeks of new releases to come. Starts earlier every year, doesn’t it? Just like Christmas.

I say to you with no exaggeration that I want to hide under a warm blanket and not come out again until it’s all decided.  I know from experience: no good can come of participating in this conversation, as someone who, in theory, has skin in the game.* Not for me, and not for many of my colleagues — maybe even most of them. 

It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that writers are not the most emotionally stable and healthy group of human beings around! A lot of that is because of the nature of the work itself. The process of writing is incredibly personal and isolating, and the link between the work and any recognition is so small and tenuous that it may as well not even exist. Criticism of your creative output can feel like criticism of your deepest heart. It is the worst. It’s no wonder so many of us have various degrees of depression and anxiety.

Awards are, in theory, one of the ways to make up for it. We offer glory to those works we feel have extra merit, in order to encourage writers and honor their achievements.

The casualties, though, are not low. 

How Much Do They Love You? 

The emotional turmoil that awards cause begins early, as soon as the lists begin circulating. (Or, honestly, even earlier — since there are running reading lists kept up all year.) Let’s say that you, dear reader, have written a story this year, or perhaps a novel. Perhaps it was well-received. Perhaps one or two people have even said the A-word in talking to you about it.

Well, it’s only human to wonder if your work has made it onto any of those lists after all, and so perhaps you peek at a wiki or a spreadsheet or a reading list to see if your name is there on any of them.

Writer friends, never do this. Never. No good can come of it. There is no outcome from this action that leads to excellent mental health in the months this process takes.

But you look anyway (and by you, I of course mean me). Maybe your name is on one or more of the lists, and a seed of hope begins somewhere in you, that this could be your year. This hope is small and bright and hot, and you’re afraid of it, because you know that the more you hope, the greater your disappointment will be if it doesn’t come to pass. So you try as hard as you can to snuff it out and persuade yourself that really, truly, you don’t deserve it. You’re not worthy. It will never happen.

If your name isn’t there, that disappointment starts right away — because your brain lies to you in a hundred different ways at once, and somehow this omission becomes a proxy for your work not mattering, and how nobody loves you, everybody hates you, obviously your output is amateurish and weak, and my goodness, wasn’t it arrogant of you to even dream for a second that you might have produced a real contender? How dare you hope. How dare you look.

Then, when nominations come out, the same cycle repeats. The hope gets brighter and hotter and more frightening if you’re actually nominated; the disappointment is fiercer, here, if you were on those lists, and if you did think you had a fair shot at being recognized, but your name is nonetheless missing from any ballot. 

Winning and Losing

Let me tell you a secret. I’ve won a fair share of professional awards for my non-publishing work — more than fair. And yes, losing when you were so close is a grave disappointment.

Winning, though? That can really mess you up. (Especially if you’re very early in your career, and not yet accustomed to losing.) Because those lies your brain tells you when your name isn’t on a list are a faint shadow of the ones that happen after you win.

Suddenly the award means that from now on, people will expect a certain benchmark from you, and any future work that does not win as many awards is a step down — a grave disappointment. Never mind that it’s impossible to win every award for every work you write. Or perhaps you convince yourself that it was just a fluke — and again, people will be disappointed with you moving forward, when they find out what your work is really like ordinarily. Or perhaps it means that your best work is now behind you, and all you can look forward to is a sad decline into obscurity, no matter how hard you work.

I know this from hard experience. Many years ago, I worked on a non-publishing project that won buckets of awards. It was thrilling! ...Until I tried to start something new, and was buried under a false sense that it had to mean something.

This is a difficult problem to talk about, because it can sound like ingratitude for your recognition; a weird sort of complaining about a problem that other people wished they had. So you can’t really talk about it, or bring in your usual support networks to help you cope with it.

But. It was at least a year before I was able to work again without intense anxiety.  A year.

Does this mean I am against awards and don’t want to win one ever again? HA HA HA no, I wish I was so evolved, but I’m not. I am absolutely a mercenary careerist, and awards genuinely help your visibility and marketability forever. That’s part of the whole pernicious problem. If awards truly were meaningless, it would be much easier to ignore them. But they do mean something. That sweet, addictive external validation matters to your future prospects. 

So I want it. I won’t lie. I want it a lot. And no, if I get a nomination, I’m certainly not going to decline, be it this year or another year. But in the meanwhile? The best thing to do, for me and probably for you, too, is to step away from the whole conversation. You can’t control it. All you can do is try to keep working. Better and healthier to focus on that.

 

 * As I write this, I’m in the position of having written an eligible work that, yes, I think could be a contender this year. Or at least it was widely read and very well received? But I’ve spent months trying to argue myself into believing it’s impossible. Even saying “yes, I hope,” feels like unforgivable arrogance. Awards, man. They really mess you up.