New Stories

As promised, I've just posted a couple new free stories to the site! Though I wrote them at completely different times (months apart), they are strangely similar: basically ultra-strict punishments of strong females. The one is called Agonizing Decision and is about an FBI agent being punished.

The other (called The Princess), I just wrote on my new Apple iPad!

iPad

I wanted to practice typing on the virtual (glass) keyboard so I wrote the story as an experiment. It worked, but sadly I have concluded that the virtual keyboard is not appropriate for fiction: the quotation mark is buried under a "second keyboard," meaning you have to press a key to change the keyboard layout, tap the double-quote mark, then press the original key again to release the second keyboard. That's a lot of work for one character, and I found that dialogue-heavy scenes were a nightmare of stops and starts. It felt like I was typing with fingers stuck in molasses!

This is not a huge deal for me as I did not buy an iPad for story writing, but it is interesting. For most other content the iPad keyboard works surprisingly well. And of course, you can use a Bluetooth keyboard with it in which case all those typing issues go away.

(Other than that minor quibble, the iPad is awesome. I would not at present call it a work machine, though you can already do real work on it, but work tasks will become more viable as more software becomes available. I consider it more of a lifestyle device. It's there for entertainment, portability, and light tasks like email. I've considered and rejected netbooks for a long time because I couldn't figure out how they'd be better than my laptop except for being smaller and less comfortable. But the iPad, being all screen, is wonderful for movies, games, and reading, and with its light weight and incredibly long battery life, I'm far more likely to take it with me and use it for mild work tasks while I'm out and about. Recommended if you can spare the 500 clams.)

Part of the reason I got an iPad is to see how my ebooks work on it. (I'm converting them to epub format so they'll work on the Apple Bookstore.) So far, they're working pretty well, though I've found some minor formatting issues and I'm still tweaking. I'll make an announcement here when I've got things perfect.

The existing PDF editions, of course, work great, but they are fixed size (the user cannot change the font or text size, which may be inconvenient for some people). BTW, if you've bought my ebooks and have an iPad, I highly recommend the app GoodReader, which is only a dollar. It lets you import in PDFs wirelessly (via several different methods) and -- important for the types of books I write -- allows you to store them in folders within the app and password protect those folders, so you don't have to worry about Aunt Elma playing with your iPad and coming across a naughty book!

Anyway, that's it for now. Enjoy the new stories and feel free to drop me comments!

Frank
The Flogmaster