Harry Dayle – Blog

New Book Alert: Locked In

Harry Dayle — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 10:35:43 +0000

Xavier Baxter is back!

Locked In is the second novel in my Augmented Intelligence series (which began with The Devil’s Breath). It sees our hero Xavier truly start to get to grips with the immense power that has been made available to him by the boffins from the secretive MI16 service.

Meanwhile, the other members of the team are being kept busy. Anton is trying to figure out why mysterious radiation readings are popping up across the South East of England. Xavier soon gets involved, and discovers that there is reason for concern.

His training becomes very much of the ‘on the job’ variety as he combines his established detective skills with his exciting new abilities. Working alongside a new partner, the race is on to prevent a potential catastrophe.

Find out more, and get links to the book here.

An Update From Harry

Harry Dayle — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 10:40:18 +0000

It's been a funny old year. I've had no new books published in 2019, which was definitely not expected. Sometimes life gets in the way of plans, and there's no point fighting it. Roll with the punches, as they say.

No new publications does not mean no new writing though. There is are books in the works, in various stages of completion.

The second book in the AI: Augmented Intelligence series is written and going through the laborious editing stage. Xavier is finding his feet in the Attic, and more to the point is finding out what he can do with his unusual abilities.

I'm also working on the fourth Dark Webb novel. It will be the last in that series, which was always planned as a tetralogy (I prefer quadrilogy, or even quartet, but tetralogy is I think more correct, and quartet makes me think of musicians — something I most certainly am not). I won't reveal the title of that final chapter just yet, but given what's gone before, it's probably an easy guess!

Finally, and I hesitate to say this because realistically it's a long way out, I'm not entirely done with the world of Noah's Ark. There are plans, and it has gone no further than that, which is why I probably shouldn't mention it. It's something I get asked about a lot though.

New Book Alert: The Devil’s Breath

Harry Dayle — Tue, 13 Nov 2018 10:25:38 +0000

Not just a new book, but the start of an exciting new series. The Devil’s Breath is the first in my new AI: Augmented Intelligence series. It introduces a new hero, and a new cast of characters in a new setting — London.

This series has been bouncing around in my mind for a long time, eager to claw its way out and onto the page. So even though there’s still another Thaddeus book still to come, I had to get started on AI. The result is something a little different to what I’ve written before.

That’s because The Devil’s Breath is a bit more speculative in nature. I mean, obviously Noah’s Ark is speculative fiction given the event that kicks of the series. The Devil’s Breath is different though because it takes existing technology and stretches it just a tiny bit. I hesitate to call it sci-fi, because the book takes place very much in our world. And it’s not really about the technology, it’s about the people (aren’t all books?)

Anyway, rather than me blather on, why not head over and read the blurb, and then even better, read the book!

New Book Alert: Worldwide Webb

Harry Dayle — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 10:13:31 +0000

Thaddeus Webb might have escaped the country, but can he ever escape his past? At least for now, things are on the up. He’s travelling Europe with his new girlfriend. His biggest complaint is it’s too hot, so things can’t be too bad.

But Thad attracts trouble, and before he know it he’s plunged deep into a new mystery.

Worldwide Webb is the grittiest Thad book yet. It sees Thad hopping between countries, forging new alliances, and finding old ones coming to an end.

Worldwide Webb is out now, at all good bookshops (and possibly even some bad ones!)

Find out more here.

Hello iPad

Harry Dayle — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 16:12:45 +0000

Hello iPad, will you please

Stop asking me if I'll appease

You with another software patch?

I've not really time to snatch

Five minutes to download, reboot.

Really I don't give a hoot

About a minor point update

That's only going to make me late

So please quit asking all the time,

'Cause version ten's already fine.

Vandals

Harry Dayle — Sun, 09 Oct 2016 08:00:00 +0000

Scummy vandals on the farm,

Bunch of school kids, causing harm.

Time has come to call a cop.

Catch the buggers, make them stop.

Took some photos, evidence.

Showed the copper, he'll dispense

A warning to the little gits,

And their parents, tell them it's

Not on, to mess with what's not yours,

Not on to break through padlocked doors.

So get a life kids, don't return;

I hope this lesson you will learn.

Learn it good and learn it well,

Or else you'll end up in a cell.

It’s Time

Harry Dayle — Sat, 08 Oct 2016 08:00:00 +0000

Bye bye old friend. We’ve had some fun.

But now your life is over. Done.

Eleven years we’ve been together,

Come rain or shine, or other weather.

We’ve travelled far in boats and planes,

In cars, on foot, and on some trains.

You’ve always kept me warm and snug

With your embrace, your warming hug.

But time has done its worst to you;

Your colour’s faded. Your warmth has too.

You’re a shadow of your former self,

It’s fair to say you’re in poor health.

So finally that day is nigh,

The one I feared. It makes me cry

To think that you’ll soon be departed,

And I’ll be left here, broken hearted,

But warm, protected by another

Overcoat. Perhaps your brother?

Well Done Kylie

Harry Dayle — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 12:26:34 +0000

So Kylie’s due to become wed

to a young guy who looks like Fred

(the boss of that first dates café),

The wedding’s off, I hear you say?

Our Kylie she’s taken a stand

against the laws of her great land

Or more precisely one which says

that if you’re gay or if you’re les-

bian, then you are out of luck.

(You can’t get married, but you can still f***.)

Well done Kylie, you’ve got the cause

lots of attention and applause.

And while we wait for satisfaction,

your record sales should see more action.

Trump Folly

Harry Dayle — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 13:00:00 +0000

Trump’s a fool, and Clinton’s weak,

according to the VP speak,

in a debate ’tween running mates,

thirty-four days before the gates

to polling stations are thrown open

and Donald loses (that’s what we’re hopin’).

It’s not that we’re particularly

overly fond of Hillary.

It’s more that Trump’s a massive wally,

So vote for Clinton, and end this folly.

Goodbye Europe

Harry Dayle — Tue, 04 Oct 2016 13:00:00 +0000

Goodbye Europe, it’s been a blast,

but UKIP told us you’re the past.

Now we’re buggering off out of here,

because of a campaign of fear

and lies and bogus facts and shit

like ‘only straight bananas fit

in European shops and bellies’,

and ‘the EU wants to take your tellies’.

We fell for that, so now we’re going,

And that’s the end of this crap (poem).

Announcing Tangled Webb

Harry Dayle — Mon, 26 Sep 2016 09:48:37 +0000

Incredibly, it’s been almost six months since Dark Webb was published. Time flies, and now book two in the series is here.

Thaddeus Webb is back in Tangled Webb, and unfortunately for him, life isn’t about to get any easier.

Thad thinks he’s escaped from the world, but the world has other ideas and is intruding on his peaceful retreat. A seemingly minor incident kicks off a series of events which lead our hero into all sorts of trouble. I don’t want to give too much away, so let’s just say that nothing is as it seems, and before he knows it, Thad’s caught up in a race to avert an atrocity.

Tangled Webb is out now in ebook edition, and the paperback will follow. It’s available from Amazon, as well as all the other major retailers.

Aside from working hard on the Dark Webb series, I’ve been very busy getting another project off the ground. I’m sworn to secrecy for the time being, but I can’t wait to tell you more in due course — stay tuned!

In the meantime, I really hope you enjoy Tangled Webb.

Dark Webb Is Out Everywhere

Harry Dayle — Sun, 03 Jul 2016 09:38:00 +0000

My most recent novel, Dark Webb, is now in general distribution. After a short period of exclusivity with Amazon, the ebook edition is available from all the major ebook platforms from today. The print edition continues to be available from all good book stores as well.

On the subject of the Dark Webb series, I recently finished writing the second book. There’s a lot of work to be done before it will be ready for publication, but we are tentatively looking at September for that one to hit the stores. So if you haven’t read Dark Webb yet, this summer is the perfect opportunity to catch up!

Mind Over Matter

Harry Dayle — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 17:09:50 +0000

In my last post I discussed why I’m learning the COLEMAK alternative keyboard layout. Now I wanted to talk a bit about how I’m going about it.

A minute to learn, a lifetime to master, goes the tagline for the popular board game Othello (or Reversi if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic). The same principle applies to learning a new keyboard layout. Okay, it takes a bit more than a minute to learn where the keys are, but if we’re being pedantic it takes a little bit more than a minute to learn how to play Reversi, too.

Memorising the locations of 26 letters on the COLEMAK layout, only 17 of which are in different positions to a QWERTY keyboard, is a trivial exercise. The hard work is making your fingers hit them. After thirty years of ‘standard’ layout, every keypress is a battle of mind over matter as my brain tries to direct each finger to where it should go rather than where it naturally wants to go.

Except of course, there is nothing natural about typing; it’s a learned behaviour, and what has been learned can be un-learned.

Learning a new layout then, is about re-training muscle memory. The only effective way of doing that is practice. There are a number of ways that practice can be done.

Go ‘cold turkey’. Many people will claim this is the only true way to learn. Out with the old, in with the new. Chuck away QWERTY, never to be touched again. A clean break. Advantages: Forces you to learn; imposes practice because everything you type is effectively practice. Disadvantages: Typing speed will be painfully slow initially, and error rate horribly high, so production levels will suffer enormously; temptation to give up is high.
Use an intermediate layout. This might not be possible with the more popular DVORAK keyboard, but with COLEMAK there are a set of halfway-house transitional layouts called TARMAK, which progressively change four, then seven, then ten, then fourteen keys, allowing you adjust to from QWERTY to COLEMAK slowly over time. Advantages: Gain the enforced practice of going cold-turkey without taking such a big productivity hit. Disadvantages: The transitional layouts are not natively supported by any major operating system, so additional software is required; the overall time to learn can be longer because you are stretching the process.
Learn the new layout outside of working hours. In this scenario, the classic keyboard is used for the day job, and the new one is practiced away from work. Advantages: Relatively little hit to productivity (I say ‘relatively’ because there can definitely be a hit when switching back and forth between two keyboard layouts — it confuses the brain). Disadvantages: Requires extra time outside normal working hours; time to learn can be longer as the old muscle memory is still getting used and reinforced.

That last point was the reason why, as I embarked on my mission to learn COLEMAK, I decided to go cold-turkey as quickly as possible. If I write for say, four hours a day using the classic layout, then spend an hour or two practicing the new one, my muscle memory is obviously getting more of a workout in the layout I’m trying to move away from than the one I’m trying to learn. Definitely sub-optimal.

On the other hand, going cold turkey and facing a roughly tenfold drop in typing speed is also far from optimal.

Which is why I started with option 3 for the learning phase, and only switched to option 1 when I had a reasonable grasp of the layout.

My tool of choice for the learning phase was a website called keybr.com. It has some nice features which made it stand out in a competitive space:

It’s browser based (and not Flash), so accessible from whatever computer happens to be handy at the time, including my beloved iPad.
It supports a wide selection of keyboard layouts, including of course, COLEMAK.
Layouts can be simulated on the site, so you can practise one without changing the layout on your computer. It sounds like a trivial thing, but it makes it so easy to pop into the browser, bash through a few exercises, and jump out again without having to worry about messing around with system settings. It also means all your shortcut keys work as normal because only the text you’re typing into the exercises is deemed to be in the alternative layout.
Automatically generated exercises direct your practise where you need it.

It’s those automatic exercises that make keybr.com so splendid. You start off learning just a few letters, all on the home row. You’re given a line of text to type using only those letters. The words are all made up, which is odd at first, but you quickly get used to it. Because the system creates these nonsense words, it can generate sequences with an unusually high proportion of common letter combinations, so you get used to hitting those sequences of keys in quick succession.

Sidenote: COLEMAK is very good at making common combinations and digraphs easy to type. The layout encourages inward finger rolls, which are a natural and fast movement. Examples of inward-rolling digraphs include: ie, st, oi, ar, ul, and at.

The site monitors your progress, keeping track of speed and accuracy for every key. As you get faster and more accurate, your ‘confidence score’ for each key increases. Make too many mistakes or go too slowly and it drops. When your score for all the letters you are learning is high enough, the system throws in a new letter. It’s like unlocking an achievement in a video game.

The letters are introduced in roughly the order in which they most commonly occur in the English language, with preference given to the home row (and in COLEMAK, the home row itself prioritises the most commonly used letters).

It’s a great way to learn, never overwhelming you with too much at once. Each exercise makes you practise your weakest key at the given moment. The system literally forces you to address your weaknesses. In my case, I spent an awful lot of time on r and s because it’s really hard to tell your finger that the s key has moved one place to the right of where you’ve been hitting it for the last thirty-years!

If I was a patient person, I would have worked my way through the alphabet on keybr.com and only moved on to the cold-turkey phase once I had an acceptable score for every key.

I am not a patient person.

Which is why, after just shy of eleven hours of practice spread over a bit more than a week, and after two thousand exercises typed, I went to the next phase.

I had done fifteen letters-worth of exercises. Not bad, not great. Here’s the thing though: of the eleven letters still to learn, six of them are in the same place as on a QWERTY keyboard. So I was ‘only’ adding five new letters, and they were all in the lesser used half of the alphabet.

Decision made, I switched over to COLEMAK on both my Macs, my iPad, and my phone. No going back.

Trying to type on a new keyboard layout is like having a broken brain. The nearest thing I can relate it to is going to work in a country where the language is one you don’t speak. You might have learnt a few words and phrases before leaving home, but once in the thick of it, surrounded by people you can’t understand and can’t communicate with, the enormity of the task ahead sinks in. You make an effort, stumbling along laughably slowly, and the second your mind wanders you find yourself nattering away in your native tongue. It’s hard.

Really hard.

To start with.

At first I felt like those two thousand exercises had been a total waste of time. Every word took as long to type as a sentence used to take. Forcing myself to not look at the keys (which would only be more confusing anyway, because the legends on the physical keycaps no longer relate to the letters they type), I struggled along, deliberately forcing each finger onto the required letter.

At the end of the first day I was mentally exhausted. My typing speed averaged 17 WPM, whereas in the exercises I was achieving well over twice that. It was frustrating, and worse, it was affecting my writing because 100% of my focus was on hitting the correct keys, leaving no mental capacity for the writing part of writing.

Temptation to throw in the towel was high. But I wasn’t about to throw away the time investment.

Day two was a little less tough. I found that the best way to type was with my eyes closed. Cutting down on one input to the brain made it easier to concentrate. After a while I was able to type some words without conscious effort. Although that sounds like progress, it introduces a new problem. When my fingers can make words appear on the screen apparently without input from my brain, my brain instantly disengages from the task and goes back to thinking about what those words should be. And the next thing I know, freed of mental oversight, my fingers revert to QWERTY and I’ve suddenly typed a line of gibberish. Frustration levels increase approximately five-fold!

I might have given up then, were it not for a secret weapon. I use a goal-tracking app on my phone, one of these things where each day you achieve something you set out to do, you check it off in the app and it makes a nice visual chain showing your streak of success. It’s basically a kid’s star-chart for adults. The theory is simple and sound; the longer your chain of achievement, the greater the pressure to not break it. It’s gamification of goals, and it works.

Now each morning my phone greets me with annoying red badges reminding me that I have unfinished business. If I slip up, if I give in and switch back to QWERTY, I cannot tick off the day’s achievement, the badge stays red, and the nice chain is broken.

It’s a slog, but I’m making progress. My chain is intact, and my typing speed is increasing noticeably. Every now and then I do a few practise tests on TypeRacer.com (another handy site) to check that this progress is real and not imagined (it is).

I have no idea if this is the optimal way to learn a new layout, but it’s definitely working for me.

Why I’m Learning To Type, Again

Harry Dayle — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 08:59:56 +0000

I’m a writer, therefore I type. I know a few writers who are old school pen and paper types, but I can’t read my own handwriting, so that would never work for me. Besides, if I try and handwrite more than a greeting inside a birthday card, my wrist starts to cramp. It’s not used to that kind of work, and I’ve no desire to change that state of affairs.

I’ve been typing for about thirty years, and I’m not too bad at it. On a good day I get around eighty words a minute. Not fast by any means, but considering the average typing speed is circa 40 WPM, not slow either. My typing has always bothered me though. You see, I am very inefficient in my use of a keyboard, because I’ve never learned to touch type.

My father tried teaching me touch typing on his typewriter. Not an electric typewriter, a proper mechanical thing with tiny hammers that smashed ink through a ribbon onto the paper. He stuck labels over the keys so I couldn’t see the letters printed on them, and had me type out pages of text. We had a computer in the house, but it was a Sinclair ZX81 with a flat membrane keyboard. No actual keys, just printed squares that you had to mash your finger into with considerable pressure. Learning to type on that thing was a no-go, hence the typewriter.

The typewriter wasn’t much better though. Those mechanical keys required even more force. Their only saving grace was that they moved, so you got some kind of feedback, unlike from the tiny Sinclair. When you’re about ten years old, learning your Ps and Qs — in a keyboarding sense — is really, really hard work on the littlest of little fingers. So despite the best efforts and intentions of my father, the keyboard lessons didn’t last long. I suppose looking back, those efforts did at least help me to learn the positions of the keys.

Over the years then, I developed my own typing technique. It’s not exactly hunt-and-peck, it’s definitely closer to touch typing than that. I use about five or six fingers, but those fingers rush all over the keyboard and rarely is the same key hit by the same finger twice in a row. I also make a lot of mistakes which means lots of backing up and correcting my work, which has a huge hit on my effective speed.

So while I get a reasonable speed, I know I could do better. I could type faster and more efficiently. My hands don’t need to do the kind of mileage they do, and although I am very fortunate not to suffer any RSI issues, I do tend to hit the keys much harder than necessary (a side effect of moving my hands so much) and my fingers can be quite sore at the end of the day.

I have in the past made efforts to switch to proper touch typing, where each finger is assigned to specific keys and all the fingers are used. When I embark upon such an exercise, my speed drops to about 40 WPM, and — frustrated and on a deadline — before long I slip into my old habits without realising it.

If I want to type better then, I need to make a clean break.

Enter DVORAK.

I won’t go into the myths and legends about how the QWERTY keyboard came about, or whether the alternative DVORAK layout is ‘better’ or faster. It’s different, and for me that’s enough. Learning to type on an entirely different layout is like learning to type all over again. It means it’s not possible to slip back into old habits. It’s almost like learning a new language and being forced to re-learn the rules of grammar. You can’t fall back on your old rules because they no longer apply.

I’ve looked at the DVORAK keyboard layout before. It’s very, very different to QWERTY. I knew that learning it would mean committing a lot of time. Was it worth it? I kept concluding that no, improving my QWERTY technique would be faster.

But I was wrong. Those old habits are too hard to break.

Enter COLEMAK.

Recently I discovered another alternative keyboard layout. In fact there are hundreds of them, and some people make their own, but COLEMAK is different because like DVORAK it’s popular enough that it’s built right into Mac and iOS devices (iOS only supports it in hardware keyboards, but that’s fine, there are third-party software versions.)
COLEMAK, like DVORAK, is a layout that is designed to minimise finger travel while typing. It’s been optimised so the most commonly used letters are all on the ‘home row’ — the middle row of the keyboard. Take a look at your keyboard and you’ll see for example that to the right of the L key you probably have a semi-colon. On COLEMAK, that prime keyboard real-estate is replaced with the letter O. Which do you type more, a semi-colon or the letter O? Right.

So far, so DVORAK-like. Where COLEMAK differs though is that is moves fewer letters around than DVORAK. For example, the Z, X, C, and V keys are all in the same positions as on a QWERTY keyboard. This is important because those keys are used by both Windows and OSX (and now iOS) in combination with the Control or Command keys as shortcuts for Undo, Cut, Copy, and Paste — very common commands. For anyone who’s grown up using computers, those commands are burned into the brain’s neural pathways. Not moving them makes switching to the new layout much easier. (The same goes for the Q and W keys which on the Mac are used to quit applications and close windows.)

When I saw COLEMAK, I knew I had found the layout for me. It’s different enough from QWERTY that it gives me the clean break I need to learn to type all over again, but similar enough that I can use my existing muscle memory for non-typing tasks.

I’ve been learning the layout for about two weeks, and I have to say I really like it a lot. It’s fascinating and slightly freaky to see how little my fingers move. Entire words and sometimes phrases can be typed without once leaving the home row. My little fingers (‘pinkies’, for the US folk) are pressed into service far less often, it’s the strongest fingers that do the lion’s share of the work. And yes, I’m hitting the keys less hard and thus stressing all of my fingers far less than before.

The speed isn’t there yet, but I’m confident that will come. I’m under no illusions that I’ll probably never get back the time I’m losing as I make this transition. Even if I never beat my old QWERTY speed though, the change will be worth it; typing on COLEMAK is just so much more relaxed.

Anyway, typing speed is rarely the limiting factor when writing — that’s thinking speed. If anyone has a ‘life hack’ for improving that, I’d love to know!

Decisions Decisions…

Harry Dayle — Thu, 26 May 2016 10:07:23 +0000

The Two Things I Want From iOS 10

Harry Dayle — Fri, 08 Apr 2016 08:46:26 +0000

We’re just a couple of months away from Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (inexplicably abbreviated to WWDC, not WDC). At the opening keynote speech, Craig Federighi, the Senior Vice President for Software Engineering, will no doubt take to the stage and give the world it’s first glimpse at what’s new in the next major release of iOS — Apple’s mobile device operating system. There are two features I really hope he mentions.

I’m an Apple user and have been for about a decade now. For the longest time I was one of those anti-Apple folks. I used to tell everyone that PC stood for Proper Computer, that Macs were toys, and that real work was done under Windows. This view wasn’t born entirely from ignorance. Older versions of MacOS, the Macintosh’s operating system, were black boxes. If something went wrong, it was nigh on impossible to get inside and see what was happening. Contrast to Windows which you could hack about with to your heart’s content, and you can perhaps see why, at the height of my nerdery, I was a Windows guy.

Then OSX happened, and Mac’s switched to Intel processors. Suddenly these toy computers, once the preserve of luvvie designers, were faster, cheaper, and had a ‘real’ operating system — one based on Unix. Geeks like me could get in there are do stuff beyond the consumer-facing features of the OS.

The irony is, as I got older and less nerdy, I became more of a ‘user’ and less of a techie. As OSX became more capable, I demanded less of it, almost in direct proportion. I lost interest in hacking my way around the OS, and instead found myself looking for simplicity. I bought into the whole ‘it just works’ philosophy.

The next step change was iOS (formerly iPhone OS). Although iOS is underpinned by the same Unix-based technologies at the heart of OSX, all of that stuff is hidden so deeply it might as well not exist to the likes of you or I.

iOS is simplicity taken to the next level. The App Store, application sandboxing, and app review all mean that the platform is locked down in a way the Mac never was, even in its MacOS days. And that suits me fine. I love my iPads because they are so simple and friendly. In fact, 60% of Dark Webb was written on an iPad, and another 20% on an iPhone.

iOS is a great environment for writing. Yes, it’s distraction-free with its full-screen app paradigm, but there’s more to it than that. There’s the instant-availability of a device that’s small enough to carry everywhere, that switches on in a second, that’s always ready to receive my words.

Back in the Windows days, you would switch on the computer and go and make a cup of tea while waiting for it to boot. If it decided it wanted to install some updates, that tea break would turn into brunch. And if a Service Pack was on offer, you could take the rest of the day off. Eventually the machine would be ready, so you’d log in, wait a bit more while the disk churned away, then finally load up your word processor. Best case scenario — several minutes between thinking I’m going to write something, and getting any words down.

Now if I have an idea I want to get down quickly, I take my phone from my pocket, switch it on (an action which, thanks to TouchID, also logs me in securely), 3D-touch the icon for Ulysses, my text editor of choice, and start typing. Total time from idea to words on the screen — about three seconds (I just timed it). The iPad is essentially the same (about a second longer as there’s no 3D-touch).

All of which brings me to what’s still missing from iOS. Great though it is, there are a couple of gaps which mean that I still reach for my MacBook Air when I know I’m going to be writing more than a few pages.

The first is keyboard profiles. iOS 9 improved support for external keyboards no end. We got shortcut keys and application-switching, both of which make a big difference to usability. Unfortunately though, iOS does not distinguish between the built-in software keyboard and external keyboards in the Settings app. When using the on-screen keyboard, the built-in shortcuts like double-tapping the space bar to add a full stop and a space, are really useful. As is auto-capitalisation, and even the dreaded auto-correct has its place. But I don’t want any of these things when I use an external keyboard. If I leave them on, my text ends up filled with double spaces and capital letters and all sorts of nonsense. Sometimes I spend so long cleaning it up, I might just as well have typed it more slowly on the on-screen keyboard.

Adding a separate set of settings for external keyboards would fix this. Yes, I can go and switch those settings off each time I connect an external keyboard, but that negates the immediacy benefit of using iOS.

The second feature, and one which is an even more glaring omission, is the ability to run two copies of the same app side by side.

Split view is another iOS 9 addition that made a massive difference to working on an iPad, but which doesn’t go quite far enough. Being able to see two apps at the same time is great for research, for example. I can be reading about something in Safari, while taking notes in Ulysses, all without switching back and forth between the two apps. Marvellous. What I can’t do though, is have two separate Ulysses documents open at once.

On my MacBook, when writing, I have two copies of Ulysses open full-screen. One shows whatever scene I am working on, the other has a list of sheets (Ulysses parlance for documents) which contain things like character bibles and research notes. When a new character shows up in the text, or when I need to check a detail about an existing character, a four-finger swipe on the trackpad takes me from my scene in to the character bible, and back again. Flow is maintained, life is good.

On the iPad, this isn’t possible. Instead, I must swipe to bring up the list of sheets, navigate my way to the character bible (which because of the way I organise my work, means moving through a hierarchy of groups), then navigate my way back again. It’s a pain, and it shouldn’t need to happen.

Having the ability to put two Ulysses ‘windows’ side by side would remove all that messing about at a stroke. Even just being able to open two copies full screen and four-finger swipe back and forth would be better than the way things are now. I understand why Apple doesn’t allow that; it could lead to all sorts of confusion for casual users of iOS devices. The split-screen thing though, that makes more sense.

I do have a work-around for this multi-tasking limitation, but it’s the very definition of clunky: I use my iPad and iPhone at the same time. Work-in-progress on the iPad, and character bible or research notes or timeline or whatever, on the phone. It’s funny, because in the most recent episode of Connected, Myke Hurley talks about trying to work in just this way (see also Cortex #26 for more of Myke’s and CGP Grey’s thoughts on this workflow). As a solution, it works, but it’s not how I like to work. There’s something about the smallness and neatness of the iPad that makes it so great for writing. Juggling two devices adds unnecessary cognitive load. As I said, clunky.

Okay, there is a third thing, now I’m on a roll. We really need a better way of managing split-screen apps. Scrolling through an endless list of recently-open apps is a poor experience. I don’t have any suggestions for a solution, but I hope the clever folks at Apple are working on one. There must be a better way.

So that’s it. I’m not asking for the Earth. On the contrary, I think iOS is doing a great job already. Whilst I’m not one of those switchers who has moved to iOS for everything (some stuff is just easier on a Mac), I do think it’s almost the perfect device for writing. External keyboard profiles and split screen views of the same app would mean that my next book would likely be written 100% on iOS devices. Fingers crossed.

Life After Noah

Harry Dayle — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 18:05:34 +0000

A belated happy new year! If anyone knows what happened to January and February, please let me know. How does it always happen that one minute we’re switching on Christmas lights, and the next it’s March?

Unbelievably, it’s already been a few months since I completed the two series of books in the Noah’s Ark universe. I’d like to say a massive thank you for all the lovely reviews and comments. It’s both gratifying and humbling to know so many people enjoyed inhabiting that world with me.

Lots of people wanted to know if this really is it, or if we might see more of the Noah’s Ark crew in the future. My answer to that question is never say never. I have some ideas about how to tell the story of what happens next, but I’m not ready to leap in yet.

In the meantime, I’ve been busy working on the first in a brand new series. I’ll be able to let on more about it soon. For now, all I can say is there’s no apocalypse in sight! We’re looking at publication around the start of April, and I’ll be in touch before then with more details.

One other piece of news is that my publisher has put together a ‘box set’ of my Dreamshifters series. It contains all three books for a barely more than the price of one, so if you want to give that series a try, there’s never been a better time. All the details about the trilogy can be found here.

Now, back to the keyboard. I’ll post again soon with some sneak-preview stuff about the new book. Until then, good reading!

New Dreamshifters Covers

Harry Dayle — Thu, 06 Aug 2015 14:29:45 +0000

We’ve all heard the old saying about not judging a book by its cover, but the fact is everyone does it. Even if we don’t think we’re influenced by the design of a book, our subconscious mind uses it to make a snap decision about whether to pick it up and read the back, or scroll down and read the description on the website. Covers give us a shortcut, a way to tell at a glance (literally) the genre of the work. That doesn’t necessarily mean that a romance novel has to have a couple gracing its front though, there are plenty of ways to set the tone.

Whilst I think the Noah’s Ark covers do a great job of getting the core message of that series across (it’s the end of the world, and we’re all at sea), my earlier Dreamshifters trilogy has proved more problematic. The first book in the series, Parallel One, went through several iterations of cover design before settling on this, which was its jacket up until today:

Although I like that cover, it’s still doesn’t quite say contemporary fantasy. The other two books in the series strayed even further from the message they needed to portray.

Part of the problem with getting a suitable cover for Dreamshifters has been that the genre of the series is not easy to define. At its heart it is a contemporary fantasy. Set in London, everything is ‘normal’, in as much as there are no dragons, shape-shifters or vampires. The only element that sets it apart from a straight murder mystery is Jessica’s ability to shift between parallel worlds. That might sound like a major bit of fantasy, but most of the worlds Jessica visits look a lot like ours. The real story is her quest to find a killer, and to avoid being killed herself. So in that respect, the novel is almost more murder mystery than fantasy. Add in a small dose of romance, and you can see why it can be hard to categorise.

Today, Parallel One and it’s siblings, Parallel Ties and Parallel Lies, are all relaunching with brand new covers. Thanks to some awesome work from Dane Low at Ebook Launch, the trilogy has been suitably reclothed. Dane has managed to convey all of the key elements — Jessica’s discovery of her power, the contemporary feel, and the murder that drives the narrative — in a beautiful and evocative design. I’m delighted with the result. Here’s the new look:

Book one in the trilogy, Parallel One, is currently free at most retailers (ebook edition; paperback edition price is $11.99)

FFF: How Different

Harry Dayle — Fri, 15 May 2015 13:14:04 +0000

I bring the coffees to the table, settle into the comfy chair. “How was your day?” I ask, and I’m genuinely interested.You tell me about this, that, and nothing in particular. “And yours?”
I smile bravely, and carefully skirt around the question.
While we chat, the clock speeds up. The cafe is closing, we must go our separate ways.
Outside, a kiss on the cheek, a tiny wave. As I watch you run for the bus, I cannot help but wonder. How different things might have been if we’d got on this well while we were still married.

FFF: Speed

Harry Dayle — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 12:24:28 +0000

The nose of the machine approaches a tight left hander. He accelerates. The back slides out, but doesn’t come unstuck.

Ahead is rougher terrain, but he’s ready. He thumbs a button. A cloud bellows out from below, hissing. He presses on, showing no mercy to the bumps and folds, gliding over them on a cushion of vapour.

He slows, turns, a full one eighty.

One last run.

Pushing down hard he races back they way he came, finally coming to rest at the starting point.

He hangers the shirt, and rummages in the basket for the next garment to iron.