So the Apple’s long-mooted tablet PC has been unveiled at last today.
It’s a big iPhone. It won’t fit in your pocket. Perhaps being seen wearing an iPouch to carry the thing will be the new fashion statement? But I can’t see many people buying it as a phone.
It is Kindle-esque in its proportions, but with a colour screen. Surely the screen won’t be as easy to read as the Kindle’s eInk screen?
Perhaps it’s aimed at home laptop users … who don’t want a tactile keyboard, don’t need to run more than one app at once, and who are happy to only run iPhone OS apps (not Mac OSX apps).
At first, I’m not sure where Apple intend the market for this. In effect, it’s a technology convergence, portable home-media device, but in a recession it must be hard to justify buying one - it costs more that a Kindle or a Netbook. However, no doubt, early-adopters will throng to it. We’ll just have to see where it really settles at home.
Clearly, Apple do intend it as an eBook reader. The incorporation of the new iBooks* strategy is proof of that. It also runs all existing iPhone apps, as I predicted, so existing iPhone book apps would probably command more downloads now that a larger reading surface is there to entice readers.
So it’s ready to go. Time to package up my book for iPhone/iPad after all? However many or few devices they sell, this can only mean more ebook downloads for authors. However, I would be very curious to know the terms & conditions under which Apple are giving publishers access to sell in the new iBook store. Like the success of the iPad itself … that detail will come out over time.
http://www.apple.com/ipad/
* iBooks appears to be eReader software, using the ePub format, linked to Apple’s own new iBook store.
January 27th, 2010
With my new year’s impetus I dived into my backlog of books to read. Top of the list (because it was thinnest) is a book I’d intended to read for a while, a book I’d heard much about: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I knew nothing about it, but was determined to find out what all the fuss was about. I still haven’t found out. I have, however, read the book. I can cross it off my list.
I can understand that it may have been controversial at the time it was published, especially in a time where the memory of the harsh sacrifices war was still fresh in the adult generation, and a time when the teenager generation had not yet been given their iconic advocate of James Dean in Rebel without a Cause. But today, perhaps a youth that is disillusioned, confused, and truant is no longer a worrying pointer of the future, but is now an engrained issue in society. When we hear regular news bulletins of happy-slapping, drug and alcohol abusing teenagers, teenage gangs, knife crimes, etc., then Holden Caulfield’s peccadillos seem tame by modern society’s standards.
The voice of the protagonist was certainly strong and convincing and of its time, but everything “killed” him. That killed me … after a while. While reading it, I wondered if a modern equivalent novel of disillusioned youth, laced with OMG!s and Whatevaar!s would attract as much interest as this book.
The biggest disappointment for me was, while the character voice was strong, the story was weak. It meandered. It went nowhere. Maybe that was the point. Maybe it was a clever way to show the lack of any purpose or trajectory in Caulfield’s life. Ok. I get that. But, I didn’t think it was very well done. Look at Karoo as an example. It had a similar type of meandering tale with a strong character voice. Karoo, in a way, is a middle-aged version of Caulfield’s character. I think the big difference was humour and irony. Caulfield’s was a humourless character. Karoo had a wry way of looking at the world and things happened to him. Aren’t things supposed to happen to a protagonist? Karoo certainly had a definitive ending. And something happened. Something that made you realise how much the character had grown on you. Holden Caulfield? I was glad to say goodbye to him. His story didn’t end, it just stopped, where it stopped. Not because it had arrived anywhere. It just stopped. So did I. It was a disappointment that (in my view) didn’t live up to the hype. Maybe it’s just not my taste.
So onto the next classic. I might try a little Dostoevsky this time.
January 26th, 2010
I’ve discovered again the power of the written word. I finished a book that was on my reading list called “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. One powerful gem of insight therein was the notion that creative people are most likely to procrastinate because it is their imagination that inclines them to see all kinds of off-putting negative outcomes. So it seems the deck is well and truly stacked against writers!
It’s over a year ago now since I wrote a post about procrastination. That post might have seemed a bit macabre, flippant, or even comic, but like most things macabre or flippant or comic it disguises something more serious, namely fear.
I know from personal analysis of my own procrastination that fear is the root cause of it. It’s not fear of work. No. For after all, why would anyone fear to do work that would bring them success? There’s the rub, and the essence of what I meant in my previous post on procrastination. We do not fear to do the work that would be successful, but we fear to do the work that will make us a failure, that will get us ridiculed, or in my case, my greatest fear is work that is simply … wasted. No one in their right mind would want to do that kind of work, would they? So we delay. We avoid. And then the fear becomes self-fulfilling, because by avoiding the work we fail for certain.
I can content myself that I pushed through that, wrote a competent thriller, attracted the interests of two different agents, and learned of the strengths and possible weaknesses of my work. But I didn’t push through, against my fear of waste, just to have it sit in a drawer forever. I honestly believe (as do others) that it is worth publishing.
A period of reflection, based upon the last rejection feedback, has left me considering some other edits that I’m now incorporating into a final draft. I’m making it as best I can, but I’m starting to get concerned that the edits might lose some of the spirit of the story. So I’m going to have to stop revising after this. This brings matters to a head. If no agent wants to take it on. If I can’t revise to make it more attractive to an agent then I’ve to live up to my threatened promise of taking it on myself. So at least all this effort won’t be wasted. But before taking that road, I’ve one last chance. While finishing this edit, I’ve one last agent to pitch to…
January 20th, 2010
Sorry I haven’t been keeping up the blog this last week. I said I would have some articles to put up on it, but life got in the way. Work and illness.
2009 has been, without doubt, the second worst year of my life. I haven’t said much about it during the year, because I don’t like to complain, and it would be tiresome to hear it too. But I always look for meaning in even the bad things that happen to us. This year, I have learned to be sympathetic to those in pain, in a way that you can only when you’ve experienced pain. I hope to bring that sympathy with me through to 2010 and beyond.
As much as I can find purpose in this dire year, I really want a better one for next year. Come January, I plan to set about making it just that.
This year I learned something about my writing too. I’m not as talented a writer as I thought I was. Actually, it’s not that I thought I was hugely talented (in some vain way), it’s that I just always assumed I had what it takes to “make it”. In the end, despite what anyone will tell you, publishing, like life, is a bloody lottery, even though you do your best. What I do about that in 2010, we’ll see.
For now 2009 is limping to a close, and me right along with it. I’m exhausted. Blindsided by a bad year that came out of nowhere. And a stomach bug over Christmas too, just to see out the year consistently! But I’m looking forward to the new year of hope.
I won’t wish you all a happy new year, because we can’t know what will come our way. However, I wish that you learn to have a good 2010, in all its sorrows or joys.
December 26th, 2009
I was ambivalent about going to watch Avatar. The trailer, as with many Hollywood trailers nowadays, doesn’t leave a taste of mystery, but rather exposes too much of the thrust of the story, and revealed it to be a fairly standard, even cliched, tale.
And so it was.
Dances with Smurfs, as South Park lampooned it.
The story wasn’t a surprise, but the visuals were. The sheer amount of them. They were endemic in the film. In 3D, the film certainly looked 300 million dollars (or whatever it cost). With a budget like that I suppose the last thing they could afford to do was take risks with the story. It ticked all the psychological boxes, straight out of film-writing school: hero with a goal that changes half way through, meets beautiful girl, falls in love, earns the hand of said young blue maiden, big battle with the baddies at the end, good prevail over evil.
The themes of the story are surprisingly prescient, considering the story must have been written years earlier. James Cameron tapped into the zeitgeist of the time, and it seems even stronger now. Like many American films, the military figures dominantly, but this time they are the bad guys (or rather the unquestioning warmongering mentally is the enemy). It has a strong ecological theme too. It reminded me, in many ways of Final Fantasy. Remember that one? The last great reinvention of film, before Avatar. How quickly we forget reinventions!
One of the striking differences of the visuals in Avatar is the use of colour and light. Why is it that CGI has always been to represent dark a gloomly things thus far? It was nice to see something artificial realized so vivaciously. It enhances the themes too - the good guys full of colour and light, and their militaristic counterfoils in bland steel greys and muted khakis.
Is it the groundbreaking reinvention of cinema claimed by the hype? No: after all, how many films will have a budget like that? Perhaps it is a milestone though, a landmark consolidation of the state of CGI, thanks again largely to Weta Digital. The reinvention will come when such quality visuals become even more affordable for the average film budget of a non-blockbuster film that can afford to take risks with more original stories.
My expectations were low, but I did enjoy it more than I expected I would. At the very least, Avatar is a fantastic, immersive, vibrant, and entertaining sojourn from the real. Much needed in these times.
December 18th, 2009
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