Kobo Vox

When my boss said he'd arrange for me to spend some time with a Kobo Vox at our staff Christmas party, I thought he was going to borrow his girlfriend's.

He didn't.

He gave me one.

It's pink.

I made noises of enthusiasm that I'm reasonably certain my coworkers had not previously produced by a human.

The Kobo Vox is a backlit ereader with wifi accessibility. This means that, whenever I am in range of a wifi network (school, home, Starbucks, the library), I can download as many books as I like directly to my ereader. It also means that I can check my email, browse the web, and watch Youtube videos, if I like. One of the highlights so far is that it lets me read Google Docs easily, so I can read my friend's novel-in-progress on the bus to work.

Having not had a cell phone in three years, I was a little concerned that a touch-screen, and especially a touch-screen keyboard, would frustrate me beyond all rationality. But the keyboard has proven well-spaced, so I mis-type only about as often as I do on a physical keyboard.

The automatic bookmarking is a nice feature, as well. I find I'm curling up more frequently and more easily with my ereader than with a book or my laptop, and it's fantastic.

Google Plus

So I finally succumbed to Blogger's promptings and integrated this site with my Google Plus profile. It doesn't appear to have changed anything on the front end, which is great. I guess this means I can delete the Google Plus link from the list of links for other places to find me, with this integrated.

There's something to be said for a unified web presence, and people being able to track you across multiple media. It introduces people who may know you from one area - a comic or group blog, for example - to other things you're good at, like prose writing or editing or whatever else you do.

I know I treat this very much as a hub site: every social networking site I'm on links here, even if I don't link to all of them in my sidebar (because, really, if you're coming here to find out about my editing rates, you don't particularly need to find my OKCupid dating profile, do you?), and that works well for me. I get frustrated when I find authors who have an author site, and a Tumblr, and a Twitter, and no mention is made on any of them that the others even exist, or if mention is made it's buried somewhere in the archive never to be seen again. So all of the projects I work on that are ready for public consumption are linked here for everyone's convenience.

The biggest downside to the integration with the rest of Google's services is a fairly new thing to the rest, too: the interface is now very white, and I don't like the aesthetics of the navigation.

Biggest positive might be that I no longer have to update as many places with a new profile picture whenever I get a haircut.

Next week I'll be talking about the Kobo Vox, as I get to play with one at my office Christmas party tomorrow.

Island Writer Launch

Island Writer is now available for free download here: http://victoriawriters.ca/?page_id=16

The launch went very well. We had a lovely evening of readings from our contributors. One of the interesting things that came out with the readings that wasn't as apparent when we were putting together the magazines was how dark a lot of the stories were: we'd joked at our editing meetings about a common thread of police involvement and hard liquor, but it was quite prominent hearing them aloud that a lot of our contributors had really gone for the gritty side of life for this issue.

This also marked the first time Island Writer has gone digital, so I hope everyone takes advantage of it to read the fantastic stories and poems within.

Reading list

Judy Burgess - A is for Arthur

Lee-Anne Stack - The Bouquet

Daryl Baswick - Rainbow Park

Cathy Van Elslande - Gee Whiz

Laura - Tokyo Experience

Judith Castle - Doll

Derek Peach - a birthday poem that was not published

Ulrike Narwani - After The Opera on Humboldt St

Sheila Martindale - Under Police Escort

Oh. Right

So, I exist. Sort of. Mostly. I passed my class, and now just have licensing to face down before I can work as a paramedic in BC.

This means I get to rejoin the adventure of looking into what's new with publishing (while not working at the place that pays me or on Island Writer or Theory Train). Anne McCaffrey's death on November 22 was sad: I loved her book The Ship Who Sang. The Kindle Fire is deliciously pretty, and I am in lust for either it or the Next 7, since both perform as lightweight tablets as well as e-readers.

Amazon is looking like a better and better route for independent authors, as you are competing with the entirety of the market there. Smashwords has become what looks like much more of a niche where only the self-published live. Which is great for readers looking for indie writers, but there aren't enough of those yet. Feedbooks, where I published my novella and downloaded Wuthering Heights, is now showing me mostly porn (word deliberately chosen over erotica) under the 'New and Popular' tab. That's disappointing, as they encouraged Creative Commons licensing, where Smashwords won't accept it at all, or wouldn't last I checked.

Regular updates will, I hope, resume this Wednesday with a write-up of the launch of the latest issue of Island Writer.