Yes, I’m outraged. Appalled. I never thought I’d ever end up writing my books on an iPad — then again, I never thought the iPad would become such an integral part of my every day existence.
The thing is that the iPad is handy, portable and you can see it in the dark — and I’ve gotten very attached to the Auto-Correct feature. Okay, it’s lazy and does half the work for me, but you can’t deny it lets me write at whatever furious pace and most of the tricky bits are done for me. I have to say Auto-Correct is surprisingly accurate.
So the next step was to buy an external, bluetooth keyboard, because the one thing that fails is that the on-screen keyboard takes up a lot of screen real estate. Woo-hoo! I scored a schmicko Logitech job at a super discounted price at the local post office — they obviously didn’t know what they had.
Guess what? Thanks to some glitch in the Apple iOS no external keyboards support the Auto-Correct. Aaaargh! Are you fucking joking? I have to spell this shit properly for myself now?
When I first started writing a million years ago my dream writing machine was a golf ball typewriter. They were cool, but expensive. Next, my brother gave me a Tandy computer that used 8 inch floppy disks and a dot-matrix printer that printed pages continuously in this concertina pile, or like a folding toilet roll. My (at that time new) agent was seriously pissed off I sent her a 150K word manuscript on one piece of paper.
Probably the next stage was the first cartridge ink printers. They were extremely slow and printing out a whole manuscript was an overnight exercise, except they could never load more than 50 sheets of A4 and you had to set some kind of alarm to reload the paper feed. Worse, they often jammed and printed your entire book on a single piece of paper… (sigh) start again.
These days printing an MS is rare — unless you want to submit to Tor Books — and it’s all about writing. And I thought I had it figured out. An iPad, a decent app’, and now a bluetooth keyboard.
Except I’m expected to spell for myself. I’ve done my hard yards. The dodgy typewriters, the dot matrix printers… surely by now I don’t have to spell stuff properly as well?
Like I said, outraged.