As I mentioned in my earlier blog – Do iPad or Do I Kindle? – the iPad delivers something very specific for authors that ereaders don’t…

- quite simply, it’s the ability to write.

Will I be getting one? You bet!

Will I wait a while? Yes too as I specifically want it do act as my mobile writing toolbox and want 3G.

Also the apps, I need aren’t quite yet available in iPad format.

So apart from the obvious ability to write, here’s what I plan to use it for and my app shopping list for developers to step up to the plate with …

… some of which I know are ‘appening

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Killer app #001 : Mind Mapping

The iPad will be brilliant for being able to brainstorm and plan. If I currently Mind Map with clients I use pen and paper as a laptop creates an uncomfortable barrier. Having an iPad will sort that once & for all.

For authors, Mind Mapping is brilliant for not only coming up with initial concepts but also project management of the whole book production process.

Apps on my shopping list:

• iMindmap
• iThoughts
• Mind Manager

Killer app #002 : Audio recording

I encourage many of my clients (especially those that have dyslexic tendencies) to use audio recording as a means of “writing” their books. Transcription to text can either be semi-automatic or done cheaply through a number of human-based services.

Apps on my shopping list:

• Griffin iTalk
• Voxie ProRecorder
• Dragon Dictation

Killer app #003 : Research

It might sound obvious but a real bonus is being able to search without opening up a laptop and on a bigger screen than your iPhone.

Apps on my shopping list:

• Taptu
• QuickFind
• Early Edition RSS Reader

Killer app #004 : e-Publishing

Having Pages on your iPad will allow you to write and edit your book. Imagine though an app that allowed you to publish directly into the iBookstore or on the Kindle or Sony Reader. Well I will make a prediction that either Apple will make ePub an output format for Pages and/or a third party app will come out soon to do exactly that.

Apps on my shopping list:

• Pages (with Save as … ePub)
• Calibre (not available but soon please)

Killer app #005 : Producing your own apps

ePublication into the iBookstore will become as easy as submitting an MP3 file to iTunes within a few months. Publishing of read-only titles will become trivial and publishing will be in the hands of authors.

At the same time, great opportunities will open up to create interactive titles that make full use of the iPad environment.

Take my latest book Blocks which comes with six guided audio visualisations and several Mind Mapping exercises. Imagine listening to the audio at the appropriate point in the book and then opening the Mind Map app up to complete the exercise.

I am currently writing the sequel to Blocks with the iPad in mind as a target platform (as well as print).

Here’s a few more ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

• Embedding live web components
• Embedding tests and surveys
• Tasking and reminders
• Geo-coded based content
• Interaction and chat with the author
• Upselling of products and services

This decade is going to be an amazing time to be an author, a publisher and a reader…

…. Happy Scribing & do add your killer apps below

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Incidentally, if you want to know more about all of this, I will be covering all aspects of ePublishing (and more) on my 3 day Author’s Retreat

Details and booking here …

I am thrilled to be sponsoring this year’s Guildford Book Festival Short Story award.

The prize is fabulous and, as far as we know, a first for any literary competition anywhere in the world.

The winning entry will be converted into an iPhone app that can be either read or listened to – we call these Commutabooks.

The entry will be judged on its ability to engage the reader (or listener) such that, if you were commuting, you might even miss your stop – or even stop commuting forever !!!

Entries only have to be 7000 words or length in any genre including inspiring non-fiction or even poetry.

The winner will be announced during the Festival in October this year.

The winning entry and iPhone app will have a narration recorded by a professional voice over artist (or the author themselves) and an embedded video interview with the author.

The winner will also get an e-publishing contract and receive royalties from sales. With 10’s of millions of iPhones and over 1 million iPads and counting, the exposure alone is worth entering the competition for.

So if there is a story inside you waiting to get out, visit the Guildford Book Festival site for details on how to enter.

How to Enter

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If you have an iPhone, an iPad or an iPod touch and want some inspiration, download these apps for free and read them on your next commute …

100 Years of Ermintrude – narrated poetry with soothing background musical

Soulwave – an example 7000 word short story

Note that Soulwave is also available free on the Google Nexus phone …

There are two really common reasons why authors get writer’s block.

The first is a lack of inner confidence about their writing ability.

The second is a belief that they simply don’t have the time to write.

These first types of blocks caused by lack of confidence can be caused by an innocent criticism of something written earlier – like an essay that got a black mark at school perhaps.

The solution is to identify the old gestalts and replace them with new patterns that are much more useful. Note though that this doesn’t mean deleting bad memories though as these are useful source material for a writer.

To deal with the second type of block, perceived lack of time, there are many excellent books on how to improve your time management. One I specifically recommend for authors is Time Management for Dummies by Clare (no relation) Evans.

Books like this are brilliant at pointing out where you can claw back time by better managing your day. Additionally, I would like to propose a more lateral and fundamental approach to time management – and that’s to change the perceived speed of time itself.

Now this might seem far fetched, or in the realms of Doctor Who or Back to the Future, but scientists are coming to the conclusion that our reality – our space and time – are linked to our consciousness. In fact, it’s more accurate to say that it’s our very consciousness that actually creates our reality. So all you need to do to change time is to make a change in your consciousness.

I am sure you have heard about athletes who have been “in the zone” – a sort of timeless place – or perhaps you have had a light bulb moment where in less than a second, you get a flash of inspiration – a whole picture for a new idea. If you were able to MRI scan your brain at this moment, you would see both the right and left hemispheres light up in synchronism. For that split second you were Whole Brain (or even Whole Mind) Thinking. A brain scan would show that your brain was generating alpha and probably even theta waves.

Now you can access this state while meditating. When I mention this to authors, their first reaction is that they don’t have time to meditate. I know it sounds counter-intuitive but I can testify that 20-30 minutes meditation before a writing session will deliver not only the time back by a factor of 3 or 4 but also much better quality writing.

“But I can’t make my mind go quiet,” is normally the next protest swiftly followed by, “I’d like to meditate but I don’t have time to learn how.”

Well, if you hear yourself saying this, help is now at hand. You don’t need necessarily to enter an ashram for two months. Although, if you did, it might well be time well spent …

Meditation machines are now available that help get you into both alpha and theta states. I have been using a for over a year now and even though I am reasonably adept at meditation, I can testify that they really do work.

I’ve written a free companion guide for users of meditation machines to specifically help authors through writer’s block and to tap into their creative muse …

… you can access it online here

After a few weeks of use, you will even find it easier to enter the meditative state without a machine and while you are in what is normally thought of as the waking state.

For a writer, this become significant as time seems to stretch out so that in a single hour you write what would normally take a whole morning or afternoon.

The benefits to your productivity are therefore immense and you will be amazed at your output in all areas of your life. People who have used machines even get comments of how well they look.

So, if you’d like to take the time to try a meditation machine, they are available from Meditations UK on a 30 day money back guarantee …

http://www.meditations-uk.com/main/choose_meditation_machine.html

Addendum 1:

I’ve just finished reading Steven Taylor’s excellent book called Making Time – it explains in great detail on how this all works and how you can start to control time to your advantage.

More details here …

Addendum 2:

These two types of blocks are something I deal with in my new book Blocks and my Blockbusting workshop.

Writing is like any exercise, the more you do it, the better you seem to get at it.

I came across a brilliant site recently that is ideal for exercising your Creative Muse.

It’s called Six Sentences and takes submissions, posting the best, of short pieces written, well, in Six Sentences.

They also have an excellent Ning community site.

In the Blue Peter tradition, here’s one I submitted earlier – The Power of Six

If you want a real challenge and a whoe bit of fun, take the Word of the Day from Dictionary.com and use it as a seed to generate your Six Sentences

Apocryphally Salvador Dali used to put a spoon under his elbow around siesta time. We he nodded off and it clattered to the floor, he’d awaken and paint what was on ‘his mind’.

Nowadays artists, writers and musicians can use modern technology in the form of Meditation Machines to achieve the same result in a much more controlled manner.

Tom Evans is using meditation machines to teach authors how to get their conscious minds out of the way so that they can tap into their unconscious mind and the collective consciousness.

Many people have experienced this mode of thinking as a light bulb moment. The easiest and cheapest way to tap into so-called light bulb moments is to meditate regularly. For many people though the thought of meditating each day though seems like an anathema in their modern day lives. How can you waste 20-30 minutes of an already busy day?

In actual fact regular meditation makes the rest of your day go so well that you can save hours of time and it has been proven to extend life expectancy too. You will get the time invested back in spade fulls.

That said, many people have trouble getting their mind to be quiet and might not know when they are actually in a deep meditative state. This is where using a Meditation Machine comes in.

Using a progressive programme of gentle exercises, the user is taken into deeper and deeper states from waking beta to relaxing alpha and deeper theta induction.

In the latter state, where the brain is in theta, the mind is connected with the collective consciousness and creativity just flows.

“Using these techniques, I have got students to come up with the most amazing titles for their books and to get whole chapters as a complete vision in one session,” says Tom. “The resulting productivity is amazing.”

Writer’s block becomes a thing of the past and associated fears of rejection and unworthiness seem to dissipate like magic too as a bonus. Getting better sleep and other health benefits make it a no-brainer.

While it is common for most meditation to occur with eyes closed, the Mind Spa machine also allows you to enter the meditative state with your eyes open. This equivalent state is one you can enter while out walking – but you can be working at your computer at the time on your best seller.

“The brilliant thing about meditation machines is that you can use them at any time during the day for a quick top up or injection of inspiration,” says Tom, “and they are useful for experienced and non-experienced meditators.”

Get a meditation machine today on a 30 day guaranteed money back trial – & I guarantee you won’t be sending it back - http://www.meditations-uk.com/main/choose_meditation_machine.html

This blog was even written just after a meditation light alpha relaxation session.

Each of us operates in a three dimensional world. Our sense of up and down, backwards and forwards and left and right is embedded deep in our neurology and something we share with most of the animal kingdom … in evolutionary terms.

This sense must have evolved millions of years ago, probably in sea life that had more need for a 3-D map of the world than us land based creatures.

With the appearance of our conscious minds and our self awareness, a sense of time emerged that was not just linked to the diurnal rising of the Sun and Moon or the seasons. It’s probable that this facility is just a million or so years old. The fact that ancient astronomers could make amazing forward predictions like predicting the precession of the equinoxes means that is must have been fairly advanced by the time we came down from the trees. It’s possible that homo sapiens is alone in having this facility but perhaps a sense of the future, and the past, is something we share with elephants and cetaceans. This is a sense of time not to be confused with your dog simply wanting to go for a walk.

We not only have this sense of time but it appears we map it into our spatial dimensions. If you close your eyes and imagine where your past is, you are likely to say either behind or to the left of you. Or somewhere between, perhaps pointing downwards or upwards too or even in a three dimensional cone. Likewise, most people say that their future is to the front or right of them. Note that other strange spiral or reversed timelines also crop up.

Several therapeutic regression techniques make use of this phenomenon. You can take a person back into their past to help clear current emotional issues relating to past experiences. Psychological trauma also occurs while in the womb. If the therapist is so trained, regression also doesn’t even have to be limited solely to this lifetime.

Likewise, you can take a client into the future, get them to anchor the feeling of achieving a goal or success and then bring them back to the present. This seems to somehow entangle the present with the future and help people reach said goal. Amazing transformations can be made by a skilled practitioner using these techniques.

In my writing workshops and mentoring sessions, I make use of the tendency of the brain to encode time into our spatial awareness when constructing any time-based mind maps.

For example, when an author needs to change their schedule to generate time (or is it space?) to write, we find it useful to put the goals and change in behaviour into the position on the map corresponding with their future and past as seen in their personal time line.

Using our visualisation techniques, the resulting map seems to embed itself into not only the memory, as all maps do, but into the neurology actually encouraging the behavioural change necessary to generate quality writing time.

Other map layouts suit other time based activities. For example, if you are project planning a sequence of milestones, where there is no real emotional context, a clock face map seems easy to commit to memory.

Find out more about Mind Maps, how they work and increase your creativity in my new book, Blocks …