Kay Hudson

The other night I received an email from a reader (hurray for readers!) of my blog, letting me know that one of the links in my article Software for Writers led him to a Japanese porn site. He was interested in the software, so he’d found (and sent me) an active link leading to an innocent software site (if a bit old, referencing Windows XP as the program’s operating system).

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So I clicked on the link in my article and—oh, my goodness! That link did not go there when I set it up several years ago, and I apologize to anyone else who accidentally ended up there. My guess is that someone let their domain name expire and had to set up a new one. Apparently the vacated domain appealed to someone in Japan with an interest in things other than writers’ software.

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I wrote and posted that article nearly six years ago, so after I replaced the bad link with the correct one (Thanks again, Stephen!), I checked all the links, and was pleasantly surprised to see that all the programs I mentioned still have active web sites. I’m no longer using any of them, having switched almost all of my writing to Scrivener in the intervening years (see Introduction to Scrivener for Novelists), but we all process our writing differently, so another program (or combination of programs) may be just what you’re looking for.

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On the theme of keeping up to date, I read and replied to that email on my newest toy, an Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet. I knew I wouldn’t resist long after I had WiFi set up in the house. I’ve been an Amazon Prime member for years, but as much as I buy from the Zon, the free shipping doesn’t add up to the annual fee. So I thought I’d buy an Amazon tablet to use for music and videos. And, of course, because I wanted a new toy. The Fire is inexpensive (less than I paid for my Kindle Voyage) and simple to use. The Quick Start Guide is the size of a business card, mainly showing the location of the on/off button. I plugged mine into the charger and it sprang to life, walking me through the rest of the set up.

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I have barely scratched the surface of the App Store, but I have both my email accounts set up (and setting up my little-used gmail account brought my phone calendar over), along with Goodreads and Facebook. I promptly made the time-sink error of downloading three games (there are thousands available): Solitaire, Sudoku, and Flow Free, a totally addictive logic game.

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The Fire came with a six-month subscription to the Washington Post—that might not be to everyone’s taste, but I’m enjoying it, and I expect I’ll renew when it runs out in September.

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Of course the Fire comes with the Kindle app already installed (along with Amazon Video, Amazon Music, Amazon Shopping, and Alexa), and the e-reader function is very nice, including something called “blue shade,” which you can turn on to cut out the blue light that keeps some people (and I seem to be one of them) from sleeping after reading on a screen at bedtime. One of the joys of having my Kindle Voyage, my phone, and the Fire all on WiFi is the automatic sync—if I forget my Voyage, I can pick up where I left off in a book on my phone. And if I want to read in bed on the Fire, it takes me right to the page where I stopped on the Voyage.

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The Fire only connects to the Internet via WiFi, but once you’ve downloaded a book, a game, or even a video, you don’t need the connection.

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Any day now, I’ll actually sit down and start watching The Man in the High Castle. Maybe that could get me back on the exercise bike I’ve been neglecting.

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Lest you think I have been totally absorbed by the Cloud—I still do the crossword, the jumble, the cryptogram and the sudoku in the Houston Chronicle every evening (I actually read the paper in the morning), and I continue to add to my collection of paper books To Be Read (I have five on pre-order from Amazon even as I type, and there may have been recent trips to bookstores).

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There are not enough hours in the day.