Communication by Nancy L. Eady

I was born into a world where the most widespread method of long-distance communication was the rotary telephone, and the quickest communication came by telegraph. That didn’t count for overseas calls, though. We lived in Taiwan during the Watergate years, and we almost never telephoned people back in the United States. It was difficult to do so, and expensive. We would record cassette tapes with various things on them to send back to our grandparents. 

When I got married in 1987, communication had changed little beyond the invention of the push-button phone and the answering machine. If my husband went to the store, and I forgot to tell him something we needed, my only choice to get the missing item was to wait until the next time one of us returned to the store. The closest thing we had to a computer at home was a scientific calculator. My husband learned how to use a slide rule in high school, although I never had to. 

Things in the communication and computer realms heated up once we hit the late 1990s and early 2000s. I can still remember the first time I ever used a cell phone. My boss had asked me to take his car somewhere, and he had a car phone installed in it. While in the drive-through at McDonald’s, I called my husband just because I could. I was almost giddy and a little silly during this quick conversation, forgetting that the drive-through speaker was two-way. When I turned the corner to pick up my food at the window, the McDonald’s staff was in gales. 

We bought my first car phone in the mid-90s. I was going to school at night, driving about fifty miles each way through very rural areas, and Mark worried about what would happen to me if I broke down in the middle of nowhere. The early car phones came in a bag, and you had to charge them through the car charger for them to work. I was bad about not remembering to charge it. One night, my car broke down, and I had forgotten to charge my phone, so I had enough battery to dial our home number and have him answer with, “Hello.” Then the phone would die, and I couldn’t tell him what was going on. He figured out what was going on, and came and found me, but he was furious. 

It wasn’t until 2001 that I broke down and switched from my bag phone to a flip phone, but after that the updates continued roughly every two years until today, when I now have a phone that I suspect is smarter than me. 

Reflecting these changes in my writing can be challenging. I have to remember when plotting that it is very rare these days for someone to be both out of touch and unreachable. This means for a character to be in true peril, completely left to her own devices, she either must be without a cell phone, in a dead zone (they’ve gotten rare but they still exist) or be in close enough proximity to the bad guys that they remove her phone. There are other plausible possibilities, but it’s not as easy to be isolated these days as it was in the days of the rotary, plug in phone.

How have your plots had to adapt to changing technologies? What do you find most challenging to write about with modern communication and computer gadgets? 

 

Bluetooth Tips and Other Geeky Stuff Writers Should Be Aware of

By Heather Weidner

Bluetooth and wireless technology have made our lives so much easier. We’re no longer tethered to a device, and we can be portable. Bluetooth is now an everyday part of our lives in headphones, keyboards, cars, personal digital assistants, TV, and the list goes on and on. 

Where the Name Came From - The trademark for this technology is named for King Harold “Bluetooth” Gormsson, who united Denmark and Norway in 958. He had a bad, discolored tooth that led to his nickname. King Harold was one of the last Viking kings to rule over Denmark, Norway, and parts of Germany and Sweden, and he is buried in Poland. 

Here are some things you need to be aware of to keep your devices safe from bad actors.

Bluejacking - This is a term to describe when someone sends unsolicited or unwanted messages through Bluetooth on your wireless devices. It’s a nuisance, and it could be dangerous if the message has viruses or other malware.

Bluesnarfing - This describes when a hacker gets access to one or more of your wireless devices and can steal information. 

Bluebugging - This is when a hacker takes control of your devices through your Bluetooth. They have full access to your device and its information. This can include anything from full access to your texts and contacts to listening or watching you through a camera.

Things You Can Do 

• If you don’t need wireless access to a device, turn it off.
• Don’t accept pairing requests (the process that allows your wireless device to connect) from sources that you don’t know.
• Know what Bluetooth devices you have and the ones that are paired with your network.
• Know your environment or surroundings when you are using Bluetooth. Are you in a very public place with lots of people nearby? Remember, hackers don’t have to be at the table next to you. 
• Review your device’s security settings and security options before you pair your device. Take advantage of options to secure your devices.

Technology brings so many efficiencies and opportunities, but it does have its share of risks. Make sure that you’re aware of your security settings and who or what has access to your devices.

Through the years, Heather Weidner has been a cop’s kid, technical writer, editor, college professor, software tester, and IT manager. She writes the Pearly Girls Mysteries, the Delanie Fitzgerald Mysteries, The Jules Keene Glamping Mysteries, and The Mermaid Bay Christmas Shoppe Mysteries. You can find out more about her at her website. 

In Which I Tackle Technological Challenges by Nancy L. Eady

 I am convinced that most technological items, like remotes, have a gender bias that allows them to work perfectly for males but mess up when females follow the same steps the males did. For example, we have a very scary universal remote. I couldn’t find it while writing this blog, but the Sony remote from our TV (which fortunately we never use) is just as scary-looking.

Using this, my husband can turn on our devices effortlessly. I can follow the same steps, but it won’t work for me. Ergo, it has a built-in gender bias. My husband laughs at me, but I remain convinced.

In an ironic twist of fate, I manage the IT equipment, computers, networks, internet phones, and monitors at my office. I won this honor for two reasons. First, I learned early that 95% of the technological problems that occur with a computer are fixed if you unplug it, wait a little while, then restart it. For the other five percent of problems, I work diligently to be sure we have very good vendors we can call for problems. Second, when IT vendors throw out acronyms or terms I don’t understand, I stop them to ask what the acronyms or terms mean. I’m not trying to make their life difficult, but how can I decide if I don’t understand what they said? Sometimes, it’s funny to see the look on their face as they try to explain a term that no one has ever asked them to define. One word they often use that makes me cringe is “leverage.” “We will leverage such-and-such to accomplish so and so.” Just substitute the word “use” for leverage and you’ve got the meaning down.

But I digress, as often happens. In spite of my technological handicap, besides blogging for Writers Who Kill, I have in the past written two blogs of my own, workingmomadventures.com and footballnovice.com. I accidentally let the domain registration for The Football Novice lapse, and it has been several years since I published more than sporadically in Working Mom Adventures. I want to write more for Working Mom, but when I tried to do a lengthy post last year, I realized that the user-friendly Wordpress.com platform I started out with in 2010 has morphed into something I have trouble using. And because I didn’t renew my domain name for the Football Novice in time, I lost every single one of my football posts. I cannot tell you how much it irritates me to write something I know I have written before but lost. It never comes out the way the first one did, and to me, it’s never as good. I’d like to revive that blog as well, but figured it was hopeless because of the lost posts.

And then, through a law clerk last summer, I discovered “the Wayback Machine.” Located at archive.org, the “Wayback Machine” is “a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.” They started in 1996. Curious, I looked up my old football blog and was thrilled to discover all my posts were there! So I have purchased my domain names back and am working on relaunching the blog, which explains the basic rules of football for new watchers, puts out TV football schedules for the week in the NFL and the SEC at a minimum, and talks about the history of the game. Because I am no match for the WordPress of today, I bought a WordPress manual to start the football blog from scratch (except for the posts, which I will reuse). I am about a third of the way through the manual, which discusses a topic, then leaves you with a checklist to complete from the topics discussed in the chapter.

And therein lies the challenge. In the first chapter, I learned that wordpress.com was not the way to go, but rather wordpress.org. The book thinks it's cheaper. I spent an evening trying to load WordPress onto my computer. I’m still not sure I actually did so, but I finally was able to proceed to the exercises in Chapter 2 and complete them successfully. The book has yet to reach the editing/writing part of WordPress, something called “Gutenberg,” but I have hope we’ll get there eventually because I keep running across sentences like “This is where you’ll find X for Gutenberg, but don’t worry about that yet.”

What does this have to do with writing mysteries? Quite a lot, actually. Yesterday, Sunday, January 21, Sarah Burr published an excellent post, https://writerswhokill.blogspot.com/2024/01/prepping-for-press-in-new-year-by-sarah.html. In it, she offers advice on preparing a press kit for speaking engagements or interviews, which includes adding links in your press materials to your websites. A writer needs a “platform” website for their works to help promote their writing. While neither Working Mom nor The Football Novice will count as “platform” websites, working with them will help me create and publish my platform website when it is time, and give me a wealth of back material.

I’ll let you know once I’m able to write fresh posts for Working Mom. I’m not sure when I’ll make The Football Novice public: either right before the NFL Hall of Fame game in August, or right before the new spring league, the United Football League (created by the merger of the XFL and USFL), starts in March.

What adventures have you experienced in working on your on-line sites? Is there a “one size fits all” manual not restricted to a specific platform? I’d love to hear from some of you who have tackled this challenge successfully to know there’s light at the end of my tunnel.

 

Tech Tips to Help Authors Test Their Website by Heather Weidner

By day, I am an IT Quality Assurance and Governance Manager.

My team tests software, computer-based training modules, and websites for defects and to make sure the site has a consistent look that matches our brand. Some of our routines can help authors ensure their websites and other social media platforms are working correctly and looking good. Here are some key things that we look for when we test:

 

Website/Blog

·        Check each page and make sure they appear correctly. Sometimes, if photos are too large or too small, they don’t look as you would have hoped.

·        Most websites optimize your site for the device that is used to read it. (For example, computers and tablets usually present the page horizontally for viewing on a larger screen, while phone renderings are usually vertical. That means the parts of your page get moved around.) It’s a good idea to look at your pages on a tablet, laptop, and phone to make sure the layout is correct. Long blocks of text and large photos are usually the culprits when something looks wrong. Lots of dense text causes users on mobile devices to have to scroll too much. Check these paragraphs to see if you can make them more succinct.

·        Test your website on different browsers (e.g. Edge, Chrome, Safari, etc.). Some browsers portray features (usually links, forms/widgets, and graphics) differently.

·        Click on every link on your site to make sure it’s working correctly. Broken links frustrate visitors to your site.

·        If you have forms (or widgets) on your page, fill in the fields and submit it. Verify that the information is received. If you have a registration widget for your newsletter, make sure it’s connected correctly. You don’t want to miss out on connecting with readers because your sign-up feature doesn’t work.

·        Make sure all your author photos, biography, and book links are current.

Email

·        Look at your email signature and make sure it’s correct. If you use a different signature for your reply emails, make sure to check that one, too.

·        If you include links in your signature, verify they work.

·        If you list series or books under your signature, make sure the content is up to date.

Social Media Platforms

·        Check all of your major social sites and verify that your biography and book lists are correct.

·        Make sure that any links work correctly.

·        Check your author photo. It should be a current (professional) headshot.

·        Verify that your social media pages have a similar “look and feel.” You want readers to know that the site is yours. If you use colors and graphics that are radically different on each site, the look isn’t unified and doesn’t express your writing brand.

·        Many of us have our primary sites and a ton of others that we don’t use as much. Make sure to check these often-forgotten pages once or twice a year to keep them current.

·        Create a list of all of your social media sites with the links. This makes it easy when you go to make updates. It is also helpful if you need to provide links for guest blogs or interviews.

Your website, blog, and social sites are key to your branding and marketing. It’s important to check them regularly to make sure the information is current, and everything works. Broken or outdated pages aren’t inviting, and visitors won’t stay long on your site. I always cringe when I visit a website, and the upcoming events are from 2017.

What else would you add to my list?

About Heather: Through the years, Heather Weidner has been a cop’s kid, technical writer, editor, college professor, software tester, and IT manager. She writes the Pearly Girls Mysteries, the Delanie Fitzgerald Mysteries, The Jules Keene Glamping Mysteries, and The Mermaid Bay Christmas Shoppe Mysteries.

Her short stories appear in the Virginia is for Mysteries series, 50 Shades of Cabernet, Deadly Southern Charm, and Murder by the Glass, and she has non-fiction pieces in Promophobia and The Secret Ingredient: A Mystery Writers’ Cookbook.

Originally from Virginia Beach, Heather has been a mystery fan since Scooby-Doo and Nancy Drew. She lives in Central Virginia with her husband and a pair of Jack Russell terriers.

Website

When A Writer of Spy Fiction Hates Technology By Sandy Manning

I write espionage thrillers, which means by definition that technology has to be involved. After all, in today's world much of the work of intelligence gathering is done through interception of electronic communications and through surveillance of social media. Cameras are omnipresent, not only fixed cameras on traffic intersections and on shops but those little computers in our pockets that also allow us all to record events that happen in front of us.

 

And yet - I hate reading about (or writing) technology. But I love spy novels.

 

What I like about spy novels is the challenge of someone using intelligence and nerve in a battle of wits with a dangerous opponent. I like to explore how people use deception and sleight of hand (so to speak) to ferret out information, and I particularly like to explore the sometimes not so moral choices that my characters have to make (and what it does to them) in pursuit of a greater good.

 

So how to write those kinds of novels without drowning in technology?

 

One way is to write about events from the past. I just moderated a panel on spying for Sisters in Crime. One panelist wrote about spying during the Revolutionary War. Another panelist wrote about spying in 1975 in connection with events in India. (The third panelist didn't write about spies, but she was a veteran of the CIA.)

 

I've read historical spy novels - and they're excellent. The technology that's used is not very, how shall I say it, technical. The emphasis is on the battle of wits, on the moral questions, and on questions of character. And of course, it's easier to do that in the past. In George Washington's day, the technology might have been putting notes inside a statue. In the 1970s, agents could bug a room or use a camera the size of a lipstick, but the cameras still used film, and the film had to be transported and developed.  There wasn't instant communication, with a spy able to immediately transmit data through a cell phone. The NSA wasn't gobbling up millions of electronic transmissions around the world and using algorithms to sift through and find anything of interest. And people's whereabouts couldn't be tracked by a phone that they carried.

 

But I don't write historical novels. We live in the here and now, and the political and social issues of today are what I want to write about. For example, my last novel, Bloody Soil, was about the rising threat from the far right, with the history of the Holocaust intertwined. In my novels, I want to not only give readers a thrilling experience with engaging characters, but to increase their awareness of issues that matter to our lives now and in the future.

 

So how to do that without writing too much technology?

 

One way I deal with it is by turning technology into another challenge for the characters to overcome.  Characters know that cameras are watching, that people are listening to communications and reading emails, so they act accordingly. They find ways to get around it. They communicate in code. They use disguises to get around cameras, much as they would have done in the case of human watchers. In Nerve Attack, Kolya, my protagonist, operating inside Russia, wears layers of clothes and a hat and scarf to conceal his face. After he's forced to kill an FSB agent, he ducks into a bathroom, removes his topcoat, and dumps the hat and scarf.

 

My spy world (and the world of intelligence) can also use technology against the enemy to give misleading information. I did that to some extent in my first novel Trojan Horse while keeping the focus on the characters involved.

 

But my books - and intelligence gathering - continue to have a focus on the human.

 

In the world of intelligence, human intelligence (HUMINT) remains vitally important. Some of the world's bad actors have learned not to send emails or texts and not to carry a phone. They use burners. They stay off social media. They can also use technology to send misleading information. That's why the best information still comes from an inside source who can reveal an organization's (or nation's) secret plans. That's why in Bloody Soil, my protagonist has to join the neo-Nazi group instead of just listening to transmissions or reading emails. Penetration of a dangerous group not only provides vital information, it is dangerous for the agent doing so. Being undercover can also put an agent in a position of having to commit a crime to conceal who he really is and what he's really doing. Not only can this happen in real espionage, but when a writer uses those situations in a novel, they make for great suspense and character development. I use the latter situation in Bloody Soil when my protagonist has to commit a murder or be killed himself.

 

So, it is possible to write about espionage in the here and now without being a techno whizz, both because it can be worked around and because not every kind of espionage requires advanced technology. And writers still create gripping tales of espionage that are set in our time frame without a degree from MIT.

 

AN AWARD-WINNING WRITER, S. Lee Manning is the author of international thrillers, Trojan Horse, Nerve Attack, and Bloody Soil, which uniquely feature a Russian-Jewish immigrant to the United States working for American intelligence. Her latest novel, Bloody Soil, deals with the threat from far-right extremists. Manning spent two years as managing editor of Law Enforcement Communications before embarking on a subsequent career as an attorney that spanned from a first-tier New York law firm, to working for the State of New Jersey, to solo practice. After taking a class in stand-up at the Vermont Comedy Club, she was a semi-finalist in the 2019 Vermont’s Funniest Comedian contest, and she still performs stand-up on occasion. Manning lives in Vermont with her writer husband James and their very vocal cat, Xiao.

SOMETHING NOT IMPROVED BY TECHNOLOGY by NANCY L. EADY

We have been preparing to install rails onto our front steps. (I use “we” in the royal sense, since Mark will be doing most of the work while I merely bring various tools to him). In preparation, we have watched at least thirty YouTube videos on how to install outside stair rails. All of which were very helpful until we discovered Saturday morning that not one of the thirty odd videos had adequately discussed the right hammer drill bit for drilling holes in brick. The one recommended by the hardware store Friday night drilled one hole, then was too dull to use. So were the subsequent two drill bits we tried.

Daisy

Which was how instead of finishing our stair rails, we ended up at the Pell City Animal Control Shelter looking for a dog to adopt. Our beautiful Darwin died a few weeks ago at the ripe age of 15, and our remaining dog, Daisy, a 40 pound border collie/Jack Russell terrier mix, needed a companion. Daisy is a wonderful dog, but brave she is not. One dog she met at the Shelter was young and friendly, but rambunctious and scared her to death. The shelter workers watched that meeting, then brought out another dog named Penelope. Penelope is so gentle that not even Daisy could be afraid of her, so that’s who we brought home.  She is brown and white and Daisy is black and white, so now no matter what we wear, any dog hair our clothes pick up will show quite well.  

 

Penelope

Sitting in the car between the two dogs on the way home, watching both tails happily waving and spreading copious amounts of dog hair all over my seats, I realized that some of the best things in life can’t be improved by technology. 

Daisy and Penelope Playing

Black Box Concerns

I started out my home computer life an Apple guy. In 1985 I bought an Apple IIe. The “e” meant it was enhanced from the original Apple II. I chose the 128KB of RAM memory instead of the standard 64KB because I was a heavy computational user. My most recent computer, a Dell XPS 8700, has 8GB of RAM (a 62,500 times increase). For a few bucks more I could have had another 8GB of RAM, but I didn’t need it. My first machine handled 8 bits of data at a time; the new one handles 64 bits. Processing speed differences (how quickly data is processed) are just as great.

I opted for two external 5.25” floppy disk drives on my Apple IIe. Each disk held (I think) about 360KB of data. Then came double density disks with 720KB of data. Today I have an internal drive with 1TB of data and external drives with 2TB of data and cloud storage of another 2TB of data. I even have little thumb drives that carry 32GB of data (over 40,000 times as much storage as one of those floppies). Those Apple disk drives were great, though. They could read mud on cardboard. That computer still functioned, as did its disk drives, when I finally gave them to my father (circa 1993) to act as backup for his own Apple IIe system that contained all the backup material for his published textbook.

I cannot tell you how many crashed hard drives and thumb drives I have had to pitch since then because they no longer worked.

But surely, you say, my life is better with this more advanced technology. In my IIe days I had a spreadsheet program (Visicalc) that even in its early versions would still do 99+% of the work I do on spreadsheets today. I had a word processing program (whose name I no longer recall).

The only major word processing improvements in the 30 years since that I would find it difficult to do without are Microsoft Word’s style sheets and review functions. Occasionally in the old days I could get in a typing groove and get ahead of the computer recognizing keyboard strokes. There was a buffer so I didn’t lose the work, but it did force me to slow down every once in a while.

So why do I use Microsoft-based products now instead of Apple? Well, despite writing the first program to determine the cost of post-retirement medical programs for our clients on my little Apple IIe (it took 20 hours to execute with a Fortune 10 company’s data!) my employer moved to the “Wintel” computers (Windows operating system and Intel chips) and it made sense for me to follow suit.

So why, you wonder, this burst of nostalgia? Just the ramblings of an old man who walked ten miles to and from school each day and it was uphill in both directions? A strong desire to return to a circa 1985 squarish green screen and flashing white cursor? Hardly.

No, for the last month I’ve had to deal with Windows 10. Microsoft has reported over 100 million computers now run the Windows 10 operating system. I have two of them and the experience has been anything but satisfactory for me. I won’t belabor all the issues I’ve had; suffice it to say I have spent many hours searching for fixes, finally finding (most of) them, and implementing them. One computer was a brand new desktop that came loaded with Windows 10; the other is a laptop I migrated from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10.

All those hours I spent repairing my Windows 10 installations, a bloated product that includes myriad things I do not want, were hours I did not spend writing, or reading, or watching birds, or photographing nature or any one of the top 1,000 things I would do with my life if I had not tied myself to the computer world. It also got me thinking of the hidden costs of our technology.

My recent frustration and time spent getting Windows running properly is only a small part of the hidden cost of my long-ago choice to use computers. In the Apple IIe days, I could pop the lid and add a printer board to connect to my dot matrix printer or add a second operating system (CP/M) to access a freeware word processing program. There were so few parts, I could fix anything and understand what I was doing.

Now, unscrew the cover of a laptop and you likely invalidate the warranty. And it might not even do much good—one accidental move and you may fry your motherboard. And don’t get me started on the software. Programs were efficient in the dark ages because there was no room for inefficiency. With the early Apple operating system, I could peek and poke and adjust anything (those are actually technical terms). Now almost all software are black boxes.

I give it some input; it gives me some output. I have no idea what happens in between.

That’s life in America. Ask Google or Siri a question and a list of possible answers appears. Your answers will not be the same as the ones I get because one of the software’s algorithms has been paying attention to our preferences. Ask two GPS devices how to go from point A to B and you might get two “best” answers. How am I to know which to choose? Do I have to look at a paper map or do a third search to break the tie? When I was traveling from Savannah to Raleigh to attend Bouchercon, my phone’s GPS knew that I-95 was closed through much of South Carolina because of recent flooding. My Garmin GPS (which has in the past told me of even minor delays along a route) had no clue and kept trying to get me to turn around when I took the detour.

It’s a black box problem.

We confront more of them daily. We provide input; a black box provides output; we have no idea what happened in between. We have to trust the process and even when we know it is broken, we can’t fix it.

We don’t know how Google (or Bing or whoever) determines what articles appear first on search. If we’re authors we need to learn about and worry about and fret about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). For example, when you type in “James M Jackson Author” I want my name to come up first. And when Google decides mobile friendly websites will be favored in their searches, we must rush to comply with their desires to retain our prized search rankings.

We shop online and often an algorithm (not a person) determines what price we see based on other posted online prices, the time of day, day in the week, month of the year, where else our cookies tell them we have looked. Everywhere we examine things closely we find more black boxes.

Some say this is efficient, good for us, definitely progress.

I sense this further disconnect from understanding how things actually work is not a good trend. I can’t prove it, but I sense it.

Or maybe I’ve gotten to be the old man who walked ten miles to school each way and both ways were uphill.

  

~ Jim

A Love Letter to Technology

I’ve written many times in this space about how I try to regulate and maintain my writing time despite having two small children, a full-time job, and need-to-do freelance.

I talk about it so much because it’s difficult.

And I know I’m not the only one who finds it so.

You’d think our passions would come the easiest, but instead it’s often easiest to push them aside for “real” things you have to do every day—pay the bills, make dinner, give kisses every night.

I wrote in January about how I’d started the New Year trying to write at least a hundred-word snippet each day, no matter what. It was my way to avoid letting a day go by where I didn’t exercise my passion, even just a little bit. (And I’m further motivated by a sticker chart…so WIN.)

And though I’ll talk in greater detail in an upcoming post about how well that resolution to myself and sticker chart have turned out, I thought today I’d talk about something that has made me much more successful in my writing goals than I thought I’d be back when I had my daughter in September: my phone.

I’ve had various iterations of a smartphone for years, and right now I have an iPhone 6 that I got just a week after my daughter was born. Obviously, these phones are amazing inventions—little machines that can do so many things, so quickly, that I have a friend who used to call them “God phones” because it seemed like there was nothing they couldn’t do. She was kidding, but you get her drift.

With the baby (who turns six months old today!), I spend a lot of time on my phone. Not only have I spent waaaaay too much time taking and posting pictures of her, I also have managed to squeeze in a TON of writing time on my phone.

The notes function I have is complete genius. I can type out dialogue a few key lines or even a whole chapter (yep) on my phone during stolen moments when I’m feeding the baby or in the middle of cardio at the gym, and it’s right there waiting for me when I want to revisit it.

Most of the time, I type things up at night or first thing in the morning and then open the same notes app on my Mac and watch it populate with what’s on my phone. Then, I type what’s fresh into my actual Word document (I could cut and paste, but you know from my last post that I like to revise as I go) and ta-da, instant forward momentum on a manuscript.

Honestly, if any of the three manuscripts I’m working on right now ever becomes a real, live book, I’ll probably thank the geniuses at Apple for helping me carve out writing time.

Oh, and though I do enjoy handwritten notes to myself on my work, I must say this is much more convenient and eliminates the chances that I can’t read my handwriting (which happens a little too often).

In what way does technology help your writing?

There's an App for That!

Last month I received a hand-me-down Smartphone and an iPad. In the interest of full and honest disclosure, I’m a technological underachiever and don’t desire the “latest thing.” But with my new-to-me electronic gadgets, I was ready to jump into the 21^st century. Then I learned about apps. What an eye opener. I knew that the American Dialect Society voted “app” as the word of the year in 2010, but I didn’t know they are changing the way we live.

For instance, my sister-in-law called from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport because she missed her connecting flight on the way to visit. She was tense and said she needed to meditate.

Confused, I asked, “Is there a class for that in the airport?”

She replied, “No, I have an app for that on my phone.” So, off she went to create a peaceful oasis in the middle of chaos by meditating using her cell phone and ear buds.

After arriving at our house, my sister-in-law admired my phone and patiently showed me how to use it. Joking, I told her I would probably forget most of what she taught me.

She said, “There’s an app to help you practice remembering and increase your brain power.”

Of course there was.

I mentioned that instead of using a game-like app to increase my memory, I should probably be more physically active. She showed me a 7 minute workout app.

Apparently, there are apps for everything. Consider these unusual apps that have varying degrees of usefulness:

·        Tired of blowing out candles on your birthday cake? An app called Blower turns your iPhone speaker into a fan.

·        If you’re vitamin D deficient like 80% of Americans, Dminder can help. It checks your local outdoor vitamin D potential and notifies you when to get sun exposure based on the time of day.

·        Spirit Story Box claims to detect and message nearby ghosts and spirits. It only costs 99 cents!

·        You can combine your iPhone, a metal detector and an app called PETALS to help find unexploded landmines. (I was seriously impressed by this app.)

·        When your teenager makes you crazy, try Annoy-A-Teen. It produces high frequency, undesirable sounds audible only to teenagers. (Does the sound also annoy dogs?)

·        If the aforementioned teen is the cause of sleepless nights, iNap@Work will help you get away with napping at work. It makes “productivity sounds” so your co-workers hear typing, stapling, and mouse clicks instead of snores.

If there are apps for everything under the sun, are there apps for writers?

Appsolutley!

I found a mind boggling number of apps for note taking, journaling, editing, creating character names, and poetry. There’s even an app for people who don’t like poetry, but for some reason have to write it.

Also, there are numerous ambiance apps—gurgling water, Zen bells, waves, birds sounds—to listen to while writing. One of my favorites is Coffitivity which features ambient coffee shop soundtracks. It’s based on research that found low levels of background noise, like chatter and the whoosh of an espresso maker, create the optimal level of sound for maximum creativity. There are three coffee house sounds: Morning Murmur, Lunchtime Lounge (According to my niece, this one is a bit “clangy” because of the silverware hitting dishes while people are eating.), and University Undertones.

But are there specific apps for mystery writers?

Well, that's where I found a distinct appsense. There are plenty of crime and mystery games but nothing to help writers craft a mystery story. After puzzling over this, I’ve decided that while some apps are useful to writers, nothing can replace human imagination and hard work.

Are you comfortable with technology and apps? If so, do you have any advice?