My PC laptop officially reached the “I’m just not going to work anymore” stage. So I put all the crap I’d saved to the desktop in dropbox, and it was nearly that easy to switch. The husband found a tool to synch my browser settings, and it took about a minute to tell the mail program where to find my mail. It was really fast and painless.
And now I’m getting used to the cord being on the opposite side and a slightly different keyboard (although I like the springyness of it) and remembering to hit the apple key to do keyboard shortcuts. Mainly I’m noticing that life is easier on a Mac. I actually started using the Macbook last week for Drupal work, which gave me some transition time, but I was really hoping to finish books in progress on the other laptop. I didn’t want to change tools in process, but now that change has been forced on me, I’m glad. Sometimes it’s good to change.
Yes, I’m doing some Drupal work. I’ve been thinking long and hard about where publishing is and where I am as a writer and what my goals are, and I decided that one of the best things I could do for myself was to find a way to earn money that wouldn’t require 50 hours a week and all my brain power, leaving nothing for writing. But would, at part time, offset the vagaries of publishing and allow me to write what I wanted to and not worry about whether or not it sold, and not feel pressured financially to take a deal, any deal, whether it was good for me or not. I decided that over a year ago (Drupal has a steepish learning curve) and now I’m doing the work. Very part time. But it’s had the wonderful unexpected effect of recharging my creativity. I’m getting scenes downloading from my brain, I’m getting new story ideas and plots and feeling very excited about a new project I can’t wait to work on.
And what about Kindle, you may ask? Am I not thinking this is the answer? I think it’s a path to explore, certainly, and now that I’ve read on an iPad, I think it’s a game-changer. So yes, I will have 2 projects coming straight to Kindle/iPad, hopefully this summer. I’ve been around ebooks for too long to think this is a magic wand, but I do think it’s a viable option to the writer willing and able to do a lot for themselves. And it will allow me to release ebooks in a very visible way while retaining the rights to them.
This is very much an experiment, and I see it as part of an overall approach to publishing that includes traditional routes. But for some projects it makes a lot of sense. My shiny exciting idea could only be done on an iPad, really.
There’s a lot of change going on, in the world, in publishing. And like hanging onto the laptop that was blue-screening, really, sometimes it’s better to just embrace the changes. They offer some pretty nice options.
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