Kindle Paperwhite: First impressions

I’m a 'late adopter' to reading eBooks. I usually have at least four or five paper books on the go at once and never felt the need to go electronic. Then I joined the NetGALLEY review site and the choice was taken out of my hands, as they provide advance review copies free of charge directly to your e-reader.

Paperwhite or Kindle Fire?

I was already convinced that the Kindle was the answer, as the feedback from friends and family was great. The problem was the amount of choice. I looked at the Kindle Fire which comes with a lot of options, before deciding on the new generation Kindle Paperwhite.

There’s not a lot of difference in the cost, so a big factor in my decision was the non-reflective white screen and the special ‘nightlight’. (The picture at the top of this post was taken with bright sunlight shining on the screen.)  I should also add that I have the new iPad, which does all the other things on the Kindle Fire.

Setting up and accessing my eBooks was so easy I didn't even have to look at the instructions, as I just needed to follow the on-screen prompts. I did invest in a good quality leather cover, which protects the screen and gives it a nicer ‘feel’ when you are reading it.

Paperwhite Nightlight

One of the unexpected things about the Paperwhite is how it has already changed my reading habits.  As it says in the specification,  the Paperwhite ‘guides light towards the surface of the display with its next generation front light – unlike back-lit tablets that shine in your eyes – so you can read comfortably without straining your eyes.’  This means that if, like me, you tend to wake early and feel like reading, now you can do it without disturbing anyone by turning a light on.

Battery life

I’ve been using the Paperwhite almost every day for two weeks and it still has plenty of charge left from when it was delivered.  On that basis I’m fairly sure most users only need an occasional top up (via the USB port.)  This is an important consideration, as it makes you think of it much more like a book than a 'tablet device’.    

Kindle Features

I am very happy with the ‘reading experience’ on the Paperwhite. The screen is sharp and clear, with whiter pages and darker text than the earlier models. The new generation also has an ‘experimental’ browser, which you can to set to something like Goodreads or Netgalley.

I’d just like to round off by mentioning some of the Kindle features which apply to all their readers and may interest people who think eBooks are not for them.  If like me you review several books at once, one of the problems is bookmarking points to remember when you write the review. On the Kindle you simply drag your finger across a sentence to highlight it for future reference.  All the highlights are then saved in a ‘clippings’ folder for future reference.

I like the way the percentage you've read is displayed in the bottom right corner. The Kindle also does its best to estimate how long it will probably take you to finish  the current chapter (displayed bottom left.) It must also be useful for some readers to be able to instantly look up definitions of words by simply holding down your finger on them.  I experimented with this and was impressed by the choice of dictionaries bundled with the Kindle  - and there is a quick link to Wikipedia if you need more information.

Finally, I like the way you can search an eBook to see all references to particular ideas, characters or places, as it makes that review so much easier.  Did I mention I didn't feel any need for an eBook reader? OK, I do now.

Book Launch: The Surprising Mr Kipling: An anthology and re-assessment of the poetry of Rudyard Kipling

Available on Amazon UK and Amazon US

Kipling is seen by some as a stuffy Victorian imperialist devoid of the finer sensibilities. In fact, as Brian Harris contends in this new anthology, his poetry deals with the timeless themes of pain and suffering, forgiveness and redemption, love and hate.

Concerned with ‘the mere uncounted folk/Of whose life and death is none/Report or lamentation’, he berated officialdom for averting its eyes from the poor and hungry peasantry of India and dragged the dirt and squalor of the battlefield into England’s elegant parlours. Familiarity, the author argues, has dulled the effect of Kipling’s most well known pieces, while other, equally fine, poems have been neglected.

What is lacking, he suggests, is not another selection of Kipling’s ‘best’ poems, but one which demonstrates the extraordinary width and depth of the poet’s talents and the light which they throw on their great but enigmatic author. Harris concedes that this is a risky strategy which has not been tried before, but believes it is one that, if judged correctly, could introduce many new readers to the full splendour of the poet’s verse. 

The anthology is rounded off with a brief life of Kipling, an account of the extraordinary ups and downs of his reputation and a critical analysis of his verse.

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About the Author

Brian Harris a retired lawyer whose previous books have been mostly concerned with forensic matters. He says 'It was during a long hot Summer childhood that I chanced upon Rudyard Kipling’s short stories on the bookshelves of a family friend’s house in the country, and immersed myself in them with joy. It was not until much later that I discovered his poetry and began to wonder why so little of it was well known.' You can visit Brian's blog at http://theancientlawyer.blogspot.co.uk/

See Also:  Rudyard Kipling's Writing Habits

Agatha Christie’s Writing Habits

Dame Agatha Christie earned her place in The Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling novelist in the world with sales of over four billion books. She is also the third most widely translated author, beaten only by William Shakespeare and the Bible.

Reassuringly for anyone struggling to follow in her footsteps, after four years working on her first novel, even she was rejected by all the leading publishers of her day, before The Bodley Head press took a chance with her.

  

It seems the writing process was not easy, even for such a prolific writer.  When asked how she went about her writing, Christie said “There is no agony like it. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off."

Plotting ideas

Agatha Christie liked to keep an exercise book to hand for jotting down plot ideas and would carefully organise her notebooks with labels. She still managed to lose track of where she had jotted things down though, as she invariably had half a dozen notebooks on the go at the same time.

One of the first authors to understand her commercial genre, she would start with an idea for a method of murder, then move to the murderer and come up with an interesting motive. Only then would she start plotting all the other suspects and what may motivate them. It was fairly easy then for her to devise the all-important ‘clues’ and plant a few false trails.

She said plots came to her suddenly. She was always on the lookout for a “neat way of covering up the crime so that nobody would get it too soon”. Agatha would then go on long solitary walks across Dartmoor to think over her plot ideas and saying her dialogue out loud. At other times she said she would be walking along the street “when suddenly a splendid idea pops into your head.” She would also study the newspapers, looking for details of what she called “a clever bit if swindling.”

Developing characters

Agatha would observe people in restaurants and social gatherings as a starting point of creating her characters, jotting down their mannerisms and phrases. She had a strict rule about not using recognisable real people and felt strongly that the writer must always "make up something for yourself about them." She once said that the only time she tried to put a real person who she knew well into a book, it wasn’t a success.

She often worked on her favourite Remington Victor T portable typewriter on a sturdy table, as she didn't have a study until late in her career. Part of the secret of her astounding productivity was that she usually worked on at least two books at the same time.

Agatha also tried dictating to her secretary, Carlotta Fisher, but felt much happier writing in longhand and then typing it out, as this helped her keeping to the point.

In her later years, after she broke her ‘writing wrist’ she also used a Grundig Memorette dictaphone and said "It is odd how hearing your own voice makes you self-conscious and unable to express yourself."

Interestingly, her grandson Mathew Prichard, discovered over twenty of the old tapes in a cardboard box, long after her death. The tapes turned out to be the material on which her autobiography was based. Also discovered in 2005 were 73 handwritten notebooks, which have been published by Agatha Christie expert John Curran as Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making, available on Amazon US and Amazon UK

Other Posts on the Habits of Famous Writers:

Daphne du Maurier’s Writing Habits

Dean Koontz’s Writing Habits

Ernest Hemingway's Writing Habits

George Orwell's Writing Habits

Jane Austen's Writing Habits

John Steinbeck’s Writing Habits

J. R. R. Tolkien’s Writing Habits

Roald Dahl's Writing Habits

Rudyard Kipling's Writing Habits

Stephen King's Writing Habits 

Thomas Hardy’s Writing Habits

Book Review ~ Josephine: Desire, Ambition, Napoleon by Kate Williams

Available on Amazon UK and Amazon US

I can’t remember ever approaching a historical biography knowing less about the subject.  In fact, what I knew about Josephine could fit comfortably on the back of a postcard and would include the immortal lines ’Not tonight, Josephine.’ This meant Josephine, the new book from Kate Williams, historian and award winning author of England’s Mistress, a biography of Emma Hamilton,  was a revelation with every page.

Arriving in pre-revolutionary France from Martinique, the young Josephine was almost illiterate and her front teeth were black from her father’s sugar cane plantation. This book tells the amazing story of how she prospered to became an Empress and one of the most powerful and influential women in Europe.

Kate Williams take us through an often harrowing yet very readable account of the French revolution and its aftermath. It seems something of a miracle that Josephine survived the revolution at all, to meet the anti-hero of the book Napoleon Bonaparte. Inevitable her story then becomes his. Through painstaking study of the many preserved letters between them, Kate tells a very personal and compelling story of how they fell in love and conquered Europe together.

Their later life was marked by astounding extravagance. While Napoleon’s soldiers were starving on the Russian Front, forced to eat rats (and each other, apparently) Josephine was being forced by Napoleon to never wear the same dress twice.  (In one year she bought nine-hundred dresses, five times as many as the unfortunate Queen Marie Antoinette.)

I was fascinated by Josephine’s home at Malmaison, (now a Museum) where she had at one time twenty ladies in waiting and over a hundred servants. Among the many surprising facts Kate uncovers is that Josephine was a talented botanist, introducing many exotic species, now well known,  for the first time to Europe. She also collected rare animals, including an Orangutang which she dressed in clothes for the delight of her many visitors.

The picture of Josephine which emerges is of an incredibly resourceful woman, capable of whatever she set her mind to. There is no question Napoleon would not have achieved so much without her skill at charming those he so casually upset. I am also convinced that he would have returned to her after his exile on Elba.

A real page turner, Josephine is everything I hoped it would be and has renewed my interest in this fascinating period of history. Highly recommended.  

P.S. I found that The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations attributes the phrase ‘Not tonight Josephine’ to a popular song from 1911 composed by Seymour Furth and sung by Ada Jones and Billy Murray.

About the Author

Kate Williams studied her BA at Somerville College, Oxford where she was a College Scholar and received the Violet Vaughan Morgan University Scholarship. She then took her MA at Queen Mary, University of London and her DPhil at Oxford, where she received a graduate prize. She also took an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway. She now teaches at Royal Holloway.

Follow Kate on Twitter @KateWilliamsUK  and visit her website

Rudyard Kipling's Writing Habits

Rudyard Kipling
(Wikimedia Image)

Rudyard Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the world in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1907, at the age of 41, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature (the first English language writer to be awarded the prize and still its youngest recipient.) Kipling also declined the honour of becoming the British Poet Laureate and refused a knighthood.

After a writing career which took him around the world, Kipling settled down at Bateman's, a mansion house built in 1634 in the rural English countryside at Burwash, East Sussex. Bateman’s was Kipling's home from 1902 until his death in 1936.  It is now in the care of The National Trust and has been preserved with all its contents. Kipling’s study, with his pens, inkwell, paperweight and pipe are still there, just as he left them.

Kipling’s Writing Habits

Kipling tended to get up fairly late in the morning and would soon retreat to his study. The room was at the heart of the house and was also his library, with two walls lined with an eclectic mix of books from poetry to Pepys, naval history, bee-keeping and angling. He worked at a 17th-century walnut refectory table under the window.

He would write for several hours at a time. He was a heavy smoker and liked a messy environment, referring to his desk as ‘my dunghill’ and often screwing up the paper he was writing on and throwing it into a large Algerian wastepaper basket.

Despite his love of his untidy desk, his maid had the task of ensuring it was always laid out in a special way, with cleaned nibs on the pens and fresh supply of best quality black Indian ink in his inkwell (on which he carefully scratched the names of all his books as they were published.) As he was quite a small man, his chair was raised to the correct height for his desk on little wooden blocks.

His desk is also set out with boxes of pen nibs, rubber bands and clips. 

On his writing table sits a huge Imperial typewriter ‘The Good Companion’, of which he often complained "the beastly thing simply won't spell." Kipling only used it occasionally, asking his secretary to type out his handwritten manuscripts.

Kipling's Inspiration and 'hatching ideas'

When he needed inspiration Kipling would go for long walks in the local Sussex countryside developing ideas in his mind, which he called his ‘hatching.’ He also kept what he called his day-bed In the corner of his study, where he would sit and wait for inspiration. He once explained he was listening for his ‘daemon’ that inspired his writing and had a mantra, which was ‘drift, wait, obey.’ 

When ideas came to him he would leap up and write furiously.Kipling loved the process of writing. He would often prepare four or five drafts and once lost an entire chapter of one of his books in the mess. When he was happy with a draft he would leave it for a while, then go back to it with good black Indian ink on a brush and ‘paint out’ anything he thought wasn’t necessary. He said he always knew when a piece was finished because he heard a ‘click’ in his head.

Other posts about the habits of famous writers:

Agatha Christie’s Writing Habits

Daphne du Maurier’s Writing Habits

Dean Koontz’s Writing Habits

Ernest Hemingway's Writing Habits

George Orwell's Writing Habits

Jane Austen's Writing Habits

John Steinbeck’s Writing Habits

J. R. R. Tolkien’s Writing Habits

Roald Dahl's Writing Habits

Stephen King's Writing Habits 

Thomas Hardy’s Writing Habits

Smart Formatting: How to format and upload your novel to Kindle, Smashwords and CreateSpace by @ShaunaBickley

Ever wondered how to format your manuscript for uploading to Amazon Kindle and Smashwords? This book gives practical advice on the Word settings to use (and those to avoid) and includes step-by-step guidelines to produce a clean manuscript ready for uploading. It also covers the steps required to format your manuscript for a print book using CreateSpace. This handy reference covers: The elements you need ready before uploading your manuscript. MS Word settings to use, how to create and modify styles, indented and block paragraphs, and how to build a Table of Contents using bookmarks and hyperlinks. Formatting for Kindle and Smashwords. Uploading to Kindle and Smashwords. Formatting and uploading a paperback to CreateSpace. This book has instructions for using MS Word on a Windows PC system. It does not have guidelines for using a Mac, and does not cover how to write and edit a book. Click here for your free PDF copy of the MS Word section - containing additional screenshots. Amazon | Amazon UK | Smashwords | Barnes & Noble | Apple Store About the author

Shauna Bickley was born and grew up in Bristol, England, then moved to Cyprus for a couple of years. Since then she has lived and worked in a number of countries before moving to Auckland, New Zealand, close to the beach. Her latest novel, Lies of the Dead, is a mystery/thriller set in Cornwall. Lives Interrupted is a contemporary novel set in London against the backdrop of a bombing, and looks at how the characters react and deal with this unthinkable atrocity. Driftwood is a romantic thriller set in New Zealand and Australia. Shauna has also published a selection of short stories, Footprints, and had short stories published in Bravado (a New Zealand literary magazine), as well as several competition anthologies, and had articles published in The New Writer. Visit her Website: www.shaunabickley.com and folklow Shauna on Twitter: @ShaunaBickley

Practical Editing Tips For Writers

I am taking a break from editing my current novel to think about the process. I have tried most things, from handing over the manuscript to a professional editor to doing it all myself.  Self-editing can spark new ideas, develop your characters and improve your writing style. There is also professional pride in making sure your work is as good as it can be before anyone else reads it.  Here are a few ideas that work for me, which you may like to consider:

Take a break

Just as I am doing now, it can really help to stand back from your work for a few days.  This doesn’t mean stopping writing. Just like playing an instrument, you need to practice every day, so write or re-write your cover blurb.  Write a blog post. Start the outline of your next book. When you return to your manuscript you may be just a little bit more objective.

Print it out

I hardly ever print out my work, so it is a surprise the first time I see it as a paper book. This is a big mistake, of course. Print out a chapter at a time and go through it with a red pen, looking for unconvincing dialogue, repetition, clichés and all the other things you need to sort out.  I also have a CreateSpace Word template that formats the manuscript for proofing before printing as a paperback.

Read it aloud

I would be useless at making an audiobook as I don’t like reading aloud. It is a great way to get a feel for the rhythm and structure of your writing, though.  Try reading some of your dialogue aloud and see how it sounds.

Find a ‘beta reader'

I have seen advice that you should never ask your partner to read your unedited work. I suppose it depends on a lot of factors, such as the spirit they approach it in, how much time they have and even the relationship you have with them. My wife will patiently read and re-read draft chapters, pointing out things I need to look at. We have a rule that I never argue or get defensive about it, as I have to accept if something looks wrong to her, it probably will to others.

Experiment with writing tools

The standard spelling and grammar checker in Word will let you down. Take a look at some of the add-ons that have a little more intelligence. One of my current favourites is ‘Pro Writing Aid’ see http://prowritingaid.com/en/Analysis/Editor  which can challenge even the most confident writer!

I will leave the final word to one of my favourite writers: 

“To write is human, to edit is divine.” ― Stephen King, OnWriting 

What are your top editing tips?  Please feel free to share.