The past couple of weeks have been a challenge on the creativity front, owing to a few different factors, one of which has been the bad behaviour of my netbook computer — which is the machine I’ve been taking to cafes. Basically the battery has more or less died, giving me little more than 1.5 hours, two if I’m lucky.
Since the only way I’m able to get any fiction writing done at the moment is to carve out a couple of hours and abscond to a cafe, this hasn’t been an ideal scenario. Nonetheless, I have pushed ahead and completed those new opening scenes I mentioned, and commenced a first-pass edit of the first sequence of the novel. Huzzah!
I have also bought a new computer this weekend. Double huzzah!
After much agonising and overwhelming encouragement I have taken the plunge and switched from a PC to a 13-inch MacBook Air, which will do me for both cafe writing and work endeavours — once I figure out how to use it properly. For the time being I’ve purchased and installed the Mac version of Scrivener, confirmed the WIP (created on the PC version) will still work, and am all ready to go…
Bring on my next cafe writing session, when I will put this thing through its paces!
This is the first blog post (in fact, the first anything beyond facebooking) written on the new toy, and I’m liking the keyboard, although am having to get used to no “delete” key in the PC sense of the word (deleting the letter after the cursor, rather than before it, which the PC world calls “backspace”). There are bunch of other small things to get used to as well. I guess I will get there in time.
But so far, so good.
I need to set myself some milestones and deadlines for this novel revision or it’ll take forever. The goal for April is therefore to complete the first pass revision (involves structural and plot changes) of the opening sequence, which was originally about 13K words. Perhaps the lure of a new computer will help.
Anyone else made the switch from PC to Mac recently? How’d you cope? (Maybe just tell me you love it!)
E V Gregory 
Welcome to the dark side! You’ll love it, once you get used to those keyboard quirks. (Hold down the function (fn) key while you hit delete and you’ll get the delete functionality you’re missing.)
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Ta – you can expect many questions as I get used to it. 😉
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I think you will become “bilingual” with Mac and PC. Enjoy the new toy!
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I hope so, Suzanne! I guess will do a phased switchover…
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I’ve been using a Mac for writing since late 2009, and while I still like PCs, I’ve been very happy with it. The MacBook Air has superb industrial design and the latest ones have amazing battery life, so I think you’ll be pleased 🙂
If I had to nitpick, I’d say the Air is overdue for a higher resolution screen. But the current screens certainly do the job, and a higher resolution would probably impact the battery life, so the tradeoff might be worth it.
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Screen resolution seems fine to me – it’s not a focal point for me, I admit. I’m not in the least worried about using it as a writing computer though. It’s transitioning all “work” functionality to it that I’m apprehensive about. As with any big change, it’ll take a little while to feel perfectly comfortable. (And I still contend the transition to Windows 8 and all the latest Outlook software would have been as big a transition.)
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I tried Mac once. Thankfully it wasn’t terminal and was able to make a full recovery back to the world of normalcy!
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Guess everything needs to be tried once. 😉
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I switched to Mac last summer, so I recently changed. I also bought a Mac Air 13″ and I do enjoy it a lot.
It takes a little time to getting used to the new places for setting, at least it did for me. Otherwise I thought it was quite self-explanatory, beside the many google searches I’ve done for key-combinations. I love the swipe technology, I have all my programs in fullscreen (almost) all the time.
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That’s good to hear you’re still liking it. Thanks, Felicia.
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Welcome to the MacBook family! Love mine. I have a PC at work, but don’t like it nearly as much as my trusty Mac. I lug it everywhere and the only complaint I have (a minor one at that) is how heavy it becomes after a while when carrying it. I’d like to get an iPad at some point for traveling… When I win the lottery, that is. 🙂
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Yay! The Air is quite light. Seems lighter than the netbook… And it’s so thin that yesterday I actually couldn’t see it in my bag and almost panicked. Heh. It’s lovely for lugging around my neighbourhood. I might think twice about it for travelling though… Mainly because it cost a lot more than the netbook and will have everything on it. I think I see an iPad mini in my future…
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