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It really delighted me to come back from running errands to find that this post, which I reblogged on Tumblr to talk about my teenage celebrity-picture scrapbooks (vintage Tumblr, basically), had spawned a bunch of reblogs of people talking about doing the exact same thing. It's always nice to know you're not the only one.
Packing, packing .... I am about 95% sure that I'm not going to take my laptop to England with me. The fic I just posted, Chasing Lightning, was mostly written on my phone while I was traveling earlier in July. It was an experiment -- I bought a cheap Bluetooth keyboard (because I can't type on my phone keyboard to save my life; even my texts are picked out one key at a time) to see if I actually could use the phone as a functional laptop substitute for writing. The experiment was mostly successful. The keyboard is a little frustrating because it often fails to pick up all my keystrokes and, even more annoyingly, it'll sometimes fail to notice that a key has been released (so I have to be careful not to end up with two pages of "ddddddddd" -- or, worse, get the delete key locked down; I got in the habit of deleting blocks of text by shift-clicking to select, rather than holding the delete key, because it was so easy to try to delete a sentence and end up deleting two paragraphs instead). I also discovered by tragic accident that it is VERY easy to unrecoverably delete a file with a single tap in the Google Docs android app. Fortunately I was being incredibly paranoid, writing my fic in smaller files of about a thousand words each, AND c&p'ing that into a backup file in a different plain-text app. And my phone-written fic requires a lot more editing than my usual fic; normally I write very clean drafts, do a lot of on-the-fly editing, and don't do much more than a SPaG and continuity edit before posting. However, the combination of rampant keyboard-related typos + only being able to see one paragraph at a time on the phone screen produced a rough draft that needed a lot more cleanup than normal.
But it did work! I don't really like traveling with my laptop because it's not only large and expensive, but the consequences of losing it would be too personally devastating; even though I back up regularly, my whole life is on there. Plus, it's really amazing how much space it frees up in a carry-on if there's not a 15" Macbook stuffed in it.
In theory, I should be able to use the phone + keyboard to do everything I can normally do online (post to DW/LJ/Tumblr/etc, answer comments, and so forth). In actual practice, there may be a lot of frustrated screaming as I try. XD
Packing, packing .... I am about 95% sure that I'm not going to take my laptop to England with me. The fic I just posted, Chasing Lightning, was mostly written on my phone while I was traveling earlier in July. It was an experiment -- I bought a cheap Bluetooth keyboard (because I can't type on my phone keyboard to save my life; even my texts are picked out one key at a time) to see if I actually could use the phone as a functional laptop substitute for writing. The experiment was mostly successful. The keyboard is a little frustrating because it often fails to pick up all my keystrokes and, even more annoyingly, it'll sometimes fail to notice that a key has been released (so I have to be careful not to end up with two pages of "ddddddddd" -- or, worse, get the delete key locked down; I got in the habit of deleting blocks of text by shift-clicking to select, rather than holding the delete key, because it was so easy to try to delete a sentence and end up deleting two paragraphs instead). I also discovered by tragic accident that it is VERY easy to unrecoverably delete a file with a single tap in the Google Docs android app. Fortunately I was being incredibly paranoid, writing my fic in smaller files of about a thousand words each, AND c&p'ing that into a backup file in a different plain-text app. And my phone-written fic requires a lot more editing than my usual fic; normally I write very clean drafts, do a lot of on-the-fly editing, and don't do much more than a SPaG and continuity edit before posting. However, the combination of rampant keyboard-related typos + only being able to see one paragraph at a time on the phone screen produced a rough draft that needed a lot more cleanup than normal.
But it did work! I don't really like traveling with my laptop because it's not only large and expensive, but the consequences of losing it would be too personally devastating; even though I back up regularly, my whole life is on there. Plus, it's really amazing how much space it frees up in a carry-on if there's not a 15" Macbook stuffed in it.
In theory, I should be able to use the phone + keyboard to do everything I can normally do online (post to DW/LJ/Tumblr/etc, answer comments, and so forth). In actual practice, there may be a lot of frustrated screaming as I try. XD
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It is so frustrating! When I upgraded my desktop I ended up with a wireless keyboard, not realizing it wouldn't work with my desk, what with the monitor being on a shelf at eye level. It doesn't read about a third of my keystrokes.
Have fun in England!
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Hmm... you haven't looked at a tablet? I have a samsung 7' (which I could easily get a keyboard for if I need it, but I'm not a writer like you are). I have taken it on trips because it holds tons of books/fic to read, there are lots of places that have wi-fi when I needed it and it's very portable. Much easier to lug around than my laptop (which is much bigger than a macbook), and larger and easier to read a book than a phone.
I got the samsung because it was a good android tablet, and cheaper than the ipads.