15 days in and its already like the holiday season never happened! Following an iPad upgrade I’ve been thinning out the apps, trying to only load what is essential. This includes Flipboard, Dropbox  and Manuscript.

Also a great new app called Mixel which instantly brings out your inner collager! You can see an example I made below. The addiction to Hipstamatic photography continues – so many great chance photos come out of this little app.

A few essentials remain on the periphery – Google Reader to drop all useful blog URLs into so they get picked up by Flipboard; and Evernote for notes, ideas and sometimes whole chunks of words. Google Reader is one of the more dangerous tools though as it becomes very easy to get sucked into research and feeding it URLs. When it comes to such diversions and procrastinations, the usual answer is to bite off the biggest problem first, or as I learned from Brian Tracy, Eat that Frog!

Another thing I learned in the last few days is that this digital age makes it very difficult to be a reclusive genius. Only someone, as the story goes, with the fortitude to turn down royalties from Warner Brothers could be capable of that. The excellent Alan More: Storyteller by Gary Spencer Millidge is a great guide to the true breadth of his work as a writer, artist and magickian. I suspect however that he’s not really being  a recluse, just very dedicated to the main task at hand.

It reminded me of the time I met William Gibson, who turned out the fantastic novel Neuromancer, on an old typewriter without any recourse to computers! The Godfather of Cyberpunk with no twitter, no blog, no youtube channel! Post-script … shortly after writing this post,  lo and behold a new WSJ interview with Mr Gibson shows he has an iPad now! Hurrah!

And the cause of all this fervent time-suk? A curveball from AOL for the iPad called Editions. Now you might be wondering what I would be doing with that when Flipboard is installed … but this daily generated magazine goes well with coffee and toast!

More to the point, In the very second issue I received appeared this article about self-published turned Pan Macmilan author Amanda Hocking.

If you’ve ever nurtured a novel inside you then go read that link and be inspired – and try and keep away from the blogs!