I want a Kindle, please

One more great thing about Youtube…

I’ve been messing around with stuff on the net since this thing began in the early nineties and I was a tech journalist. Still, it never ceases to amaze me, not least because of its sheer persistence. Fifteen months ago I was in the middle of the campaign to defeat a thoroughly nasty development [...]

Scrivener: it just gets better and better

I wrote here back in August of how I’d moved my fiction writing to the wonderful and ridiculously inexpensive authors’ word processor Scrivener. But that was when I’d just completed the seventh Costa book, which was begun in Pages. Now I am starting from scratch, and determined to set up Scrivener to handle the task [...]

Pixmania: avoid at all costs

A decade ago, when my fiction career was in its infancy, I was still working as a journalist to pay the bills. It was a cosy slot, covering technology for the Sunday Times through as weekly column. One of the many interesting aspects of the job was that I got to cover the birth of [...]

Service Hong Kong-style

One thing that bothered me in Bangkok was my little camera, a Casio Z1050. I like having a shirtpocket one for carrying around for general snaps, particularly in Rome. The Casio replaces an earlier model I thought was great. This one…. Let’s put it bluntly. It’s not that sharp. Yes, you can fiddle around with [...]

A review in Japanese

You have to love Google. They keep on adding all these buttons to the Firefox toolbar it’s impossible to stop yourself clicking them to see what happens. One of them just popped up the fact that someone in Japan has written about A Season for the Dead, which came out there last year through Random [...]

Scrivener… at last an author’s word processor

The seventh Costa book is just about finished and will turn out to be the first novel I’ve ever produced that has never been edited in Microsoft Word. Yes, it will get turned over to the old beast at the close of the process. Publishers use Word as their de facto standard for the publishing [...]