Finally: My Perfect Writing Environment

Not much time for blogging today; between meetings, travelling, and doing some paid writing work, this old blog has been sadly neglected. (And yes, I’m aware I owe you a “redundancy two months on” and a “nine years of One Man & His Blog’ post.) But I have learnt one very important lesson from use of my iPad as my main computer for the last 30 hours or so: I’ve found my perfect combination for long-form writing:

• iPad in vertical orientation
• Keyboard (in my case, the keyboard dock)
• iA Writer

It’s such a clean, focused writing environment that my attention stays focused on the job, and the words just flow out of me. Honestly, I wish I’d had this combination back in the days when I was bashing out 5,000 to 10,000 words in a day to hit a deadline on a White Wolf book. It would have made life so much easier.

In an odd way, it’s the closest thing to a typewriter I’ve seen modern technology produce, combining the basic proportions and aesthetics of that writing experience with all the comforts of spell-checking and immediate access to the web for research that modern technology brings.

I suspect I’ll be using this combination for much of my writing, even once the MacBook Pro is back in play.

(I suspect I owe Mr Belam some credit for introducing me to iA Writer. But he’s my arch-enemy, so I won’t give it to him… 😉 )