Electric Parade by Mensah Demary

Drinking my Saturday morning coffee, browsing on my iPad, I make the usual online rounds: email, Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader. As I swipe and tap the glass, cigarette smoke wafting through the living room, I’m energized by guilt and looming deadlines. My mind dips in and out of possible topics to write about, to say nothing of the music review—and the unopened zip file containing the album—sitting on my desktop. I shut off the iPad and lumber over to my glass, L-shaped desk.

A 22″   LCD monitor lords over the setup; speakers and two external hard drives flank the monitor’s left and right sides. Underneath a pewter lamp, my Macbook is closed and wired to the monitor, my external keyboard, the speakers and now, the iPad, syncing and charging in silence. Underneath the monitor, my Motorola Droid displays the time and weather. Further to the right, my printer whimpers for black ink. The cable modem and router radiates the Internet throughout the apartment. Underneath the desk, the PC tower hums next to the speakers’ subwoofer.

I’m at a stage in my writing life where I need to get organized. More than calendars and to-do lists, I require technological balance. There’s always a “gadget utilization”  period for me. I buy it, run it into the ground, learn its strengths and weaknesses for myself, expert reviews notwithstanding, and plug it into my writing ecosystem accordingly.

Since bringing the “magical”  iPad home, my ecosystem has come undone. Left is right, up is down and I realized I didn’t know which tool to use for which task. The iPad’s existence in my world brought to the surface a bit of overlap between my tools and, as the deadline for this article pressed its cold nozzle against my temple, my frustration grew.

Will it be slow-pecking on the smartphone’s keyboard or an on-screen, capacitive touchscreen? I could take the Macbook out of the house, bang out a first draft during my lunch break. Yet, the iPad can do the same, more or less. All the while, my phone would sit idle in my jeans pocket, probably pouring impotence-rendering radiation into my groin.

And what about a simple pen and journal?

It became comical, now that I think about it. So many gadgets to write with, yet it took over a week for me to get my act together, to settle down and—well—write. Color me proactive, because I know this will happen again. So while I find myself smiling, tapping away at the external keyboard, I’ve made some important decisions to repair my ecosystem.

First, my smartphone is my mobile office. Email me, send me a tweet, post a note on my Facebook wall, comment on my blog: it all sends literal shivers down my over-clocked phone’s spine. This is how I communicate with the world, to stay in touch. As an example, the opportunity to do this piece presented itself, by chance, on my phone as I sat in the dentist’s office. By the time I scheduled my (second) root canal, the invitation to pitch the column flashed across my screen.

My Macbook is the undisputed king of long prose production. My Droid’s keyboard is, by design, a disaster, a slab of flat keys that aggravates me to the point of wishing for my old Blackberry Curve—or any Blackberry. The touchscreen keyboard is good for quick notes and dry, sarcastic tweets, but not much else. And I understand my writing process, that I’ve never gotten into a rhythm while working in public. This is where I need to be to get the work done, at my desk, the television on mute behind me.

It actually conjures up a desire for another ecosystem reorganization, to sell my Macbook and replace it with an iMac. Remember, its as much about utilization as its about balance. If I no longer see a need for a laptop, then why bother? Besides, writing at a Starbucks is overrated. Trust me. I end up eavesdropping instead of typing.

I use my journals and pens for “easier”  writing, when speed isn’t a requisite, when I don’t have a deadline chasing me like a rabid dog. Similar to scratch paper to figure out a math problem, I use a journal to work out a plot issue in a story or, if nothing else, to rant about how much I suck at writing, how I’ll never succeed at it and all of that good stuff akin to wanting to be creative. In other words, the journal allows me to slowly unravel a kink in my work or to maniacally rant in the name of catharsis; the latter helps to spare my blog readers from my public mewling.

Which brings me to the iPad. After using it for a month, I conclude that, within my ecosystem, its best purpose resides in the world of synchronization. While some bemoan the iPad’s usefulness, the ye olde “solution in search of a problem” argument, I’m pragmatic enough to know a new breed of technology when I see it. I discovered its niche in my writing world when I first used it to remote access my Macbook, essentially viewing and controlling my laptop from the iPad’s screen, not to mention creating and editing my Macbook files as well.

The iPad is where I can begin to do “serious”  writing, to then move my files through iTunes when I sync. I could move them through the “cloud” via Google Docs, but I’m paranoid about cloud computing. I like to keep my files local, moving from system to system with one little white cord. So call it excellent or poor design, but the iPad, as a writing tool in my life, works best alongside a full-bodied desktop system.

Technology breeds choice, foregoing bulky, utilitarian monoliths for sleek, bezeled super-machines created, and marketed, with multitasking in mind. Of course, writing is a matter of sitting down, the “ass to chair”   theory, and doing the work. The act of writing and technology, naturally, go hand in hand, but I think new challenges are born when writers, once users of utilitarian devices, are introduced to the electric parade of gadgets pumped out of tech companies’ imaginations. It’s too easy to get distracted these days, but the devices themselves, like the apps they run, requires the knowledge to understand what to use, when to use it and why. Then again, we could all use Moleskines and call it a day. But Moleskines don’t have Wi-Fi antennas inside them, so–

Mensah Demary (true identity: Thomas DeMary II) is a full-time worker bee, part-time fiction writer and occasional blogger at mensahdemary.com. From his home in southern New Jersey, dominated by farmlands and flea markets, he melds technology and the written word, sometimes with mixed results. You can read his story, “Saturn Return,“ at Up The Staircase.