If you've been around the site awhile you probably remember when I talked about my usual method for organizing a book in progress; the three 3-ring binders, longhand first drafts, etc?

It's true, I have used that with great success for many years.  It has a huge drawback though; it isn't very mobile.  And to really write quality new material you need at least two of those three notebooks; your current draft in progress, and your notes and supplemental materials (maps, etc).  So I've always been on the lookout for something better, and a couple of years ago I stumbled onto it.  I've had several people on various lists (and through the website) ask about it, so here's what I do now.

You've doubtlessly seen the little tablet-style PDA's that have become so popular.  To me, they have some drawbacks; they are expensive, and you can't type on them unless you buy an add-on keyboard, and most of those aren't big enough to touch-type on.  Maybe you remember a few years ago, when the clamshell style "handheld PC" was all the rage.  A couple of years ago the company I work for gave me one, one they had used at one point but no longer needed.  By this point it was missing the AC adapter, and sync cable, but hey, it was free. 

If you've never seen a clamshell handheld before, you can check out eBay listings for the NEC MobilePro's--the 770, 780 are both that style.  The one I had was a MobilePro 750C.  It's a little older than those.  You can get smaller machines by Hewlett Packard, and others, but to me the MobilePro is the best there is because the keyboard is big enough to actually touch-type on.  Cool!  It's something like 90% the size of a regular keyboard.  And the whole unit is small enough I could carry it around in my purse--granted, I like large purses.  But with a compact flash card, I could carry all the material that would usually take all those notebooks, and have it right there in my purse when I found myself in a waiting room with 15 minutes to kill.

And the best thing about these machines is that sync cable I mentioned earlier.  It stays plugged into my desktop machine.  When I get home with my handheld, I just plug in the cable, and voila! my changes are synchronized into the desktop versions of those same documents.

There are drawbacks.  These small machines have no hard drive.  Everything is stored in RAM, except the software that comes on them, which is in ROM.  What this means is that if you let your main battery and your backup battery die, you will lose EVERYTHING on that machine except Windows CE and the apps that came with it, like Pocket Word.  Pocket Word itself is a scaled down Word, one of the drawbacks I noticed is that if you use emdashes in your desktop version, when it is ported to the handheld those will translate to single dashes.  Ouch!  The best thing to do is turn off the emdash in Word, and just key in two dashes.  Then when you are all finished and you are dusting off your final draft to print out and send out the door--then you do one final find and replace, changing all your double dashes to emdashes.  Smart quotes can present a similar problem--except of course these days I do everything in Dark Courier and it doesn't really lend itself to smart quotes, straight ones look fine.

But nowadays I carry an even bigger purse, to accomodate my new favorite--the Sharp Mobilon TriPad PV6000.  It's slightly newer than the MobilePro, but still old enough to be reasonable in price on the secondary market.  It's got this super-huge screen that folds down to a complete tablet configuration--it's really more like a small laptop.  And the keyboard is just as big as the one on the MobilePro, touch-type away. 

So I have to admit it, my notebook method is all but extinct.  I still have the notebooks I compiled while working on The Music Mage, but they haven't been used in quite a few years now.  Longhand writing is just too time-consuming and too difficult to carry with me. 

But hey, that's progress.