Friends with books out!

I realized this morning that not one, but two of my dear friends have books out and for sale! These are the friends I made before I started writing. It's rare to know one published author just from your circle of acquaintances, but I know two.

First off, Rachel's The Spirit Thief is out and available for purchase at your local bookstore. I snagged my copy directly off the B&N shelf (and then politely informed the folks up at the front counter that she was a local author and deserved a big display up near the front.)

But wait, Crystal Watanabe's Yum Yum Bento Box has been out for quite some time! She writes the blog Adventures in Bento Making. Crystal and I met through the video game FFXI, where she is known as Pikko (and more recently, Bentotto.)

Hopefully, one of these days I can add my own book to that list, and my circle of non-writing friends will have three published authors.

That humbling feeling of losing a bet

Long long ago, during one of the many frantic and fun parties hosted at our old house M.I., my friend Rachel Aaron and I made a bet.

We were both pretty toasted so I'm not sure she even remembers, but it was an agreement of two English majors graduating in the class of '02 to see who would get published first.

We both got distracted by real life - we both got sucked into MMORPGs, we both got married, and she started a family (in my case I have no excuses, just a cat.) It's been almost 8 years since that party back in Maison Ikkoku.

Well, as of September 28th, Rachel will have officially won the bet.

http://www.amazon.com/Spirit-Thief-Legend-Eli-Monpress/dp/0316069051

Her first book, The Spirit Thief, will be available for sale. I've got the first chapter that my friend Laura picked up at Dragon*Con for me, and I can't wait to read the whole thing.

Congrats Rachel! And now... Um. What exactly do I owe you again?

Return of the Room Mates

My husband and I purchased our first house last January. We've lived alone in happy, post-first-house bliss for about six months. We walked around in our underwear without worrying, we did unmentionable things in the living room and the kitchen, and we generally acted like we owned the place. Which we did.

My best friend, who is a vet student at the local university, reached the breaking point at her fraternity and desperately wanted to move out. She is claiming one of our bedrooms. Additionally, a dear friend (and previous room mate of ours) is moving back from a study abroad in Japan. She is claiming the other empty room, and they'll be sharing a bathroom.

It's going to be a shock going from having our own home all the time to having people around again. We've lived with both our room mates before, and love them both dearly like sisters, but this will be their first time sharing a space, and I'm hoping that all goes well.

What does this have to do with writing? Well, not much. I continue to plug along on Book #2 - it's at about 30,000 words now and many plot elements that were hazy have solidified - but now I'm grateful that this "career change" will allow me to stay home most of the day, and act as a sort of mother to my friends. Both will be under very stressful senior years, and they need someone to help take care of them. It's not much harder to cook for 3-4 people than it is for two, once you account for volume.

On the upside, my best friend has a far more extensive collection of books than I do (three tall bookshelves of romance novels alone!) and I'll be pillaging it for the next year for sure. Maybe someday, one of my books will grace her shelves as well.

The iPad

I spent a lovely afternoon with my friend Andrea, who is a Macophile. I'm a PC girl myself; I have been ever since I was a junior volunteer at the National Science Center and learned to navigate Windows 3.X. So it is with a slight bias that I view all of the Mac offerings.

I own an iPod. It is not the favorite MP3 player I have ever owned. That went to a tiny generic $50 player in 2000 that was the size of a big pack of gum and ran off any size SD flash drive. Unfortunately, it was so tiny, it was lost on one of UGA's buses one day. I've mourned its loss ever since, and I consider the iPod and various other MP3 players I've owned to be inadequate substitutes. I'm slowly reconciling myself with iTunes, but I get miffed whenever I want to buy a song and I get told that it's not available for sale in my region. (It's as if they want me to pirate sometimes! Even when I try to be good.)

I have never owned any Mac product bigger than my iPod. My cell phone is an ancient Motorola V276 that I will use until it disintegrates. I'm too poor for Mac laptops and I instead have an Acer Aspire One netbook that cost me $250 last year.

So when I went to visit Andrea, and see her shiny new gadget, of which she is so immensely proud, I was prepared to Not Be Impressed In The Least. Much to my surprise, the iPad has some fairly respectable shinies to it. The most amazing thing is the nonexistent load times for movies from Netflix, and television programs. Beautiful HD resolution shows are beamed into the iPad faster than it takes Firefox to even load the website at Hulu on my PC. No lag, no stuttering.

As wonderful as this is, I can't think of it as justification for me to buy one - I rarely watch television or movies, preferring to consume my entertainment from the written word.

In that regard, the iPad is also quite nice. The eBook format used is clean. I could almost see myself reading a whole book start to finish using it. I still like the weight of an actual volume in my hand, and the smell of decaying wood pulp in the library, but I'm old fashioned.

What killed the iPad for me was the typing. Trying to type on the electrostatic keyboard felt awkward and unnatural. For a touch-typist like me, who is used to writing things into the computer while looking at the place they were originally written down, it was a bit humbling to be slowed down so much and being forced to actually look at the keypad. Andrea pointed out that it is compatible with any wireless Bluetooth keyboard, but if the idea is to replace my netbook, I shouldn't have to carry around a separate keyboard just to type comfortably.

My verdict: If you have a terrible cable company like Comcast or Dish Network, and you wish to ditch them while at the same time you want to watch TV shows and movies any time you like, on demand, in perfect HD resolution, then grab an iPad. Even if you're not usually a Macophile, you will love it to pieces.

But if you're not a visual medium person (like me), and you just want a portable laptop that you can write on (or play FFXI or WoW or Farmville on, since the iPad can't do any of those), then stick with a cheap netbook.