Writing

I've done a small amount of writing over the years.  I've come up with a number of picture books, worked on a novel, and have written on this blog (sporadically).  But I had never really done much with them.  One time I tried sending a few of my picture book manuscripts to a publisher, but nothing came of the attempts.

In September, I decided to try something different.  I had come up with an idea for a story about a goldfish who would like to try different things but is ultimately constrained by living in a bowl and being a goldfish.  I created some basic illustrations, put the thing together, and published it on Amazon as a Kindle ebook.  A Goldfish Wish wasn't perfect -- the illustrations were simple and the layout could have been adapted for ebook a better, but I finally had one of my books available to the public!

Once I finished my MLIS classes for the semester a few weeks ago, I took another look at other things I had written.  Two years ago, I wrote a branching story for a library program.  I used it for that program, then set the story aside.  Well, I recently talked to my boss and received permission to use my creations beyond the scope of the library, and published that ebook through Amazon as well.  Alien Abduction from the Library is a fun branching story that works very well as an ebook (though it works better in the Kindle app than on the eReaders themselves).

I don't know if I'll get anything else ready before my classes resume in January, but for now, two of my books are for sale, and it's very, very neat to be able to say that!

Proportions Blown out of Proportion?

(blog post updated a few hours later)
 
I've been reading a lot of the iPad Mini reviews since Apple's new tablet was announced a few weeks ago.  I understand reviewers comparing the iPad Mini to various 7" Android tablets like Google's Nexus 7 and Amazon's Kindle Fire HD.  I understand discussing the difference in app quality and availability, pixel density, and price.

What I don't understand is people complaining that the iPad Mini has a 4:3 screen ratio.  Nearly every review of the iPad Mini notes that not having a 16:9 display is an annoyance because widescreen movies will appear letterboxed.

I don't understand why this is such a big deal to some reviewers.  Yes, a 16:9 ratio screen will work better for watching movies.  If you're buying a tablet simply to watch movies on, you'd probably want a 16:9 tablet.

But if you're browsing the web with a 16:9 tablet, I assume you'd either have to scroll the page horizontally all the time (if holding the tablet vertically), or only see a small portion of the wepage at a time (if holding the table horizontally).

Typing would seem to be more awkward on a 16:9 tablet to me, too.  Either the keyboard would be very compressed in portrait orientation or the keyboard would cover so much of the screen that you couldn't see much of what you'd written in landscape mode.

It just seems to me like letterboxing widescreen movies is less of an inconvenience to me than dealing with an overly wide (or tall) screen for everything else.

(portion below added at 2:41am)

It occurred to me just before drifting off to sleep that I had made an error in the above post.  Many 7" Android tablets, including the Nexus 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire HD have a screen resolution of 1280x800, which is not quite a 16:9 display.  However, I believe most of the above points to still have some merit.