iPhone Challenge update & Review of the WriteRoom app


I’ve been trying to focus on writing lately so I’ve been neglecting the blog, so i thought I’d just give everyone a quick update on how the iPhone challenge is going and talk about the WriteRoom iOS app I’ve been using.

First of all, the iPhone challenge. I am loving this. Wherever I go I can work on my NaNo, whether I’m walking down the street, on the subway, at the office, having dinner, or out at the bar. Whenever I get an idea I can get it down and do some writing (ideas seem to be hard to come by lately, so if I get one it’s great that I can write it down before I forget). Continue reading “iPhone Challenge update & Review of the WriteRoom app”

iPhone Challenge: Review of the WordPress App


Editor’s Note: Ian calls me ‘benevolent’ a total of three times in this article. I have no idea why.

As promised, I’m going to talk a bit about one of the apps I’ve been using for my iPhone Challenge. In order to make posts on the blog during NaNoWriMo, I have to use the WordPress iOS app. Before I get into it though I’ll say this….I’m at Disgraceland DJing right now. Elizabeth Kurz is beside me writing her NaNo in her notebook, and will probably be typing it up and blogging about it later when she’s at her computer… and I’m blogging about mine right now FROM MY FUCKING PHONE. My point is, I love this app. It is amazing. The iPhone Challenge would be impossible without it.

Having said that, there are a few flaws with it that I should point out, not to be critical of the good volunteers who made the app, but to be helpful to others who may be using it. Continue reading “iPhone Challenge: Review of the WordPress App”

Injury Crisis!

I’ll keep this quick because I don’t want to hamper my recovery. Friday night my iPhone Challenge was thrown into peril after i fell off my bike and sprained my hand. I can type on my phone still but certainly not to the extent that NaNo requires. Hopefully between now and Monday It will heal, if not the iPhone Challenge will be over before it started.

Our benevolent editor is using his considerable influence and clout to summon the finest hand and wrist doctors in the world from UCLA and the University of Washington Medical School (yes, I’ve researched this) to assess the situation. (Editor’s Note: I only told Ian this to make him stop crying.)

Will I recover in time? Is the iPhone Challenge over before it started? Will I become the Kirk Gibson of NaNoWriMo?

NaNo Schedule: One Sentence a Week?

"Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure." - Albert Camus
I’ve decided that in order to reach the 50,000 word goal I should make a schedule and strictly abide to it. Anyone who has tried NaNo before surely knows that in order to reach 50,000 you have to average 1666.66 words a day.

That kind of schedule is fine enough if you want to be the next poor starving slobbish author whose work will never see the light of day, but what if you want to write a brilliant literary classic that will make you rich and be read and adored for decades to come? What if you want to be next great author like James Joyce, Herman Melville, Kurt Vonnegut, F Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, or Vladimir Nabokov? That’s easy. What’s the one thing all these great authors had in common?…. They knew how to write a brilliant first and last sentence.

We all remember such legendary opening lines as:

Continue reading “NaNo Schedule: One Sentence a Week?”

New NaNo Challenge: iPhoning it in

Hello there blogosphere,

After writing my first post about the prospect of writing a lot of my NaNo on my iPhone, I got to thinking….why not write the whole thing on my iPhone?

I conferred with our benevolent editor and we decided, yes, this is too exiting of an idea to pass up. I test drove the WriteRoom app, and after working out a few kinks with the new WordPress app (which I am using to make this post) everything seems to be in order.

The prospect of writing 50,000 words is a daunting enough task on its own, so we’ll how much more of a challenge it will be on a 9cm touch-screen.

Continue reading “New NaNo Challenge: iPhoning it in”

Second try at NaNo

Hey everyone, I’m Ian.

I’m also gonna have a go at the NaNoWriMo this year. I tried it last year but didn’t get very far. To be fair though I don’t think I heard about it ’til about a week into November, and I couldn’t think of what to write about for another week after that. This year I’m getting my act together, and I have some themes that I really want to play around with. I’ll get into those later though.

I’m expecting to do a lot of writing on my phone this year. There are a number of reasons for this. Yes, the first is obvious—I’m a pretentious fuck and I’m obsessed with my iPhone. The more redeeming reason being that I actually do my best thinking and get most of my ideas while I’m out walking. Last year I was having to stop and pull out my notebook to take things down all the time so this will actually be a lot more convenient. All the writing I’ve done lately has been on my phone while I was out too, so we’ll see how much many words I actually write while I’m out and about.

…I’m downloading the WriteRoom app on my iPhone as we speak.

If you’re participating too, check out Ian’s NaNoWriMo profile: ianianianianian