so, how many people actually write stories on a palmtop?
Me.
I went away for a long weekend while I was writing All Stirred Up, and it did me 'ead in. I managed to find some paper and spent a number of hours writing in longhand, because I was in that wonderful/terrible state where I have to write or explode. Then I had to type it all in when I got back, and that was extremely tedious and annoying.
Within about a week, I'd bought myself an HP Pocket PC. Hunt and peck with the stylus on the touch-screen keyboard is awful, but the character recognition is reasonably good, so I can write looking at the developing story instead of at the keyboard. And there's word extension to cut down the strain on my writing hand - I no longer have to type more than 4 letters of "Superman".
Best of all, it has a flash card slot, which it treats almost like ordinary memory. I've got a 128 MB flash card for it - that's a fair number of stories to read in the train or while the kids are at gymnastics lessons.
And because we already had a flash card reader to read the photos from our digital camera, it's a quick and painless way to transfer files between the pocket PC and my desk-top. The alternative is to use a serial cable, which I believe is pretty slow and annoying (I've never bothered to try.)
So now I can write on trips away (like on the canal boat last year, when I would leave the tiller intermittently to scurry downstairs and scribble a few more paragraphs of Yvonne's birthday fic.) I can write in the garden, and while the kids are playing at the village playground, and on weekend mornings before I get out of bed, and even in the bath. I still need my desk-top screen for editing, because I need to be able to see more than a paragraph at a time, but it's a
huge improvement over paper.
Mere
