Here’s a direct challenge to those who say, “I just can’t find the time to read fiction anymore.” If you can’t handle this once every few weeks, you’d better renegotiate grade school.

One Story, in the words of its publisher, Marybeth Batcha, is on a mission “to save the short story by publishing in a friendly format that allows readers to experience each story as a stand-alone work of art and a simple form of entertainment. One Story is designed to fit into your purse or pocket, and into your life.

One Story is designed to fit into your purse or pocket, and into your life.

Each issue is artfully designed, lightweight, “easy to carry, and ready to entertain on buses, in bed, in subways, in cars, in the park, in the bath, in the waiting rooms of doctors, on the couch in the afternoon or on line at the supermarket.”

And don’t look for the online version: One Story, slim as it is, is a real magazine, and available only by subscription.

So, okay, slackers, no more excuses. There is always time to read one story.

Interesting how quickly things change. On first look at the iPad I posted my opinion that it was not for serious fictionwriters. Why? Because, the the kind of pounding fictionwriters do, its virtual keyboard was not a serious contender for the toolbox. Well, that’s all over now. FADE OUT/FADE IN: Apple, about to unveil the iPad, is already offering a bluetooth keyboard that just might do close the discussion. Check it out.

If you’re writing your novel on a Mac wouldn’t you’d love to be able to slip off to some dark, quiet coffeehouse, plug some music into your ears ,and write like crazy in a place so anonymous it surrounds you with invisible support?

But who wants to lug even a Macbook around all the time. And so far, the iPhone offers no keyboard alternative. E-e-hh, so you stay home.

It’s true there’s a hole in the Apple repertoire where a netbook should be–-and the iPad doesn’t really fill it. But footloose authors rejoice! Restless minds have figured out ways of getting OS X (specifically Snow Leopard, maybe earlier, I don’t know) onto various Windows-native netbooks. The one it works best with seems to be the Dell Mini 10V (street price under $300), so without further ado, here are a couple of articles that’ll tell you what you need to know, step by step:: How to Hackintosh a Dell Mini 10V into the Ultimate Snow Leopard Netbook and Netbook Compatibility Chart (Just get a Dell Mini 10V

See you in the coffeehouse. (I’ll be the unapproachable guy behind the impenetrable shades.)

Piles of Typed Manuscripts

PDF to MS Word – the OCR Dilemma
Here’s where it gets tricky. PDF is technically an image format, so turning it into editable text (a doc or docx file) is like cramming the square peg into a round hole. Because software for OCR (optical character recognition) costs a lot of money.

But happily shareware developers are coming up with cheaper solutions. In Windows, there are a variety of options. But for your MacBook Pro, running OS X, the pickin’s are slimmer. There’s an application called PDF OCR. I haven’t used it, but at $29.95 it’s certainly worth a try. Also: a web based service called PDF Converter with have various membership levels. Try out their $9/mo. level–you can cancel at any time.

For the Rich
I’ll mention, for the record, a couple of “Cadillac” OCR mentions. One is Adobe Acrobat (not Adobe Reader, mind you). It’ll cost you $449 (ouch!). The other is Final Draft.

For Playwrights
Final Draft can take over and do an excellent draft of giving you a formatted Final Draft file (.fdr) that you can “Save As” a Word doc or docx–keeping the original FD formatting. That’s pretty slick, and almost effortless–assuming you already own Final Draft or have $249 to drop.

The Winner
Probably the best solution of all, if you don’t mind learning how to use it, is OmniPage Pro X, even pricier, for the Mac, at $499. For Windows, Omnipage comes in the usual array of cheaper versions–from $49 to $149 and up–but even with the Windows limitation, Omnipage gets my vote for the software of choice. You’ll either have to own a Windows computer, know someone who does, or have Windows installed on a partition of your Mac’s hard drive, but compared to coughing up $449, the extra trouble may be worth it.

Background Note for Info Nerds
OCR, being a form of object recognition, is one of the toughest challenges a computer can face. The slightest typographical irregularity can make a scan spin off into irregularity–old newsprint is an absolute nightmare. This is why you should try to start with a totally clean print job (use a lazer printer, if possible) and a non-Seraph font.

Happily, the folks at Google, who want to digitize every text on the face of the earth, are deeply into research on this as we sleep, so you can expect OCR to improve noticeably over the next few years.

For playwrights using Final Draft, the key is getting a good PDF file. At that point, Final Draft can take over and do an excellent draft of giving you a formatted Final Draft file (.fdr). Once you have that, you can “Save As” a Word doc or docx–and keep the formatting. That’s another ideal solution–assuming you have $249 to drop on Final Draft.

Apple's new iPad

The Apple iPad arrived Wednesday and elicited mostly positive reviews, but many were an interesting combination of dying-to-have-one but loathe-to-show-it.

I haven’t put my hands on one yet–and doubt I’d ever use it as a writing tool–but having read through most of the response online and in the tech press, my feeling is that, though it’s a delicious, innovative delight — and will only get more so as new features are added — the Messiah only comes once.

The collective voice of the industry raised hosannas one time to the advent of the iPod, then again a bit reluctantly to the iPhone, but you just can’t expect them to fall on their knees a third time.

The good news is that time is on the iPad’s side: the price, at around $500 up, is way lower than expected; and best of all, in my opinion, is that you can expect it to be, if not a Kindle killer, a Kindle shamer.

Why should that make me happy? I’ve aired my views on the Kindle here and here. But to reduce them to a phrase, I feel strongly, with Cory Doctorow, that the Kindle is a Big Brother machine (ironically, it was the “disappearing” of innocent Kindle owners’ copies of 1984, and Animal Farm, that so rudely exposed this bit of blithe corporate heedlessness.

Perhaps Amazon is trying to smooth over an ugly glimpse behind its Matrix by inching toward a more democratic approach to other file types, but I see it as only inches when the door should be thrown wide open.

In any case, though you won’t write your next novel on it, the iPad is an almost irresistible new entertainment station, portable, cool looking, lightweight, and omnibus. If asked for a logo phrase, I would say: “Take it anywhere, read, watch, listen to anything.”

If your desktop (physically and digitally) exists in a constant and eternal state of slovenliness, don’t despair, there’s a way out. Several, actually, but I’m going to spotlight the best two: Scrivener (Mac only) and Page Four (Windows only).

Scrivener is the one I’m familiar with (and use) because I do everything on either on old Macbook or newer iMac. But I have no problem suggesting Page Four because it’s wholeheartedly recommended by the Scrivener folks.

In both cases, these virtual writing project organizers have been designed BY writers, FOR writers.

Scrivener is amazing. You can squirrel away almost any type of file in its “Research” area–snippets of text, emails, website URLs, PDF documents, images, etc. See something you want to keep? Just select and drag it in. You’ll always know where it is, because it will always be in the same place–along with everything else in that particular project. And you’ll always be able to open it without leaving Scrivener–even if it’s a website. The files are copies of the originals, or course, so your back is always covered.

Your research is right at your elbow. Want to start a new chapter? You can plot it out with index cards in the cork board view (see above). Or use the outline view. Or switch back and forth.

When you’re ready, start typing your chapter in the “Draft” section–a new file automatically opens for it.

Want to export to Microsoft Word (or whatever word processing program you use)? Not a problem. I could go on, but you’ll learn more by going directly to “Literature and Latte” the home of Scrivener.

And Windows users, if you’re feeling a little left out of this little Scrivener love feast (isn’t that a strange feeling for you!) just click over to Page Four for what I’m sure is the equivalent experience.

Both Scrivener and Page 4 are bargain priced. Scrivener costs $39.95, Page Four, $34.95. Not bad for double or triple your productivity as a fiction writer.