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Inspirational Travels While Anderson may love technology, he still appreciates the great outdoors. He lives in Colorado and often hikes, dictating a current novel into a tape recorder. When he returns to his campsite in the evening, he’ll pull out his PowerBook and use it on the picnic table by lantern-light to edit another book he’s working on. He also takes his PowerBook to the exotic locales he visits. To get himself in the proper mood to write the adventures of Luke Skywalker, Lady Jessica, or X-Files’ Mulder and Scully, he travels to the places that inspire him. “For my X-Files book ‘Ruins,’ which was set in the Yucatan and Mayan ruins in Mexico,” he explains, “I had to get on a Mexican bus and travel two hours each way to get there. Sitting with my PowerBook in my lap, I rapidly typed up details of the jungle and the roadside stuff we were seeing, because Mulder and Scully had to see these things too. “The best part is that when I got home, I just grabbed the file. I didn’t have to re-copy all my notes or re-type them.”
Both Anderson and his wife Rebecca Moesta are writers. (In fact, they’ve collaborated on several books.) Together, they’ve formed a company—Wordfire—to extend their careers. Considering Anderson’s reliance on the Mac, it should come as no surprise that the pair use their Macintosh computers to manage every aspect of their company, too. Catherine uses her Power Mac to maintain and update the pages of their web site, and they use a variety of software to run their business. (See the sidebar for more information.) To keep track of the 500 people in their fan club (as well as the several thousand readers who have sent them fan mail over the years), they use a database they built in Microsoft Excel. This comes in very handy when Anderson travels for book signings. “We go into this database and pull out everyone who lives within 50 miles of where I’m doing the signing,” he says. “We send each person a postcard telling them that I’m doing a book signing and we give them the address and the date and time. We’ve been able to increase attendance at our signings by a very significant percentage just by making sure a specific group of people in that area know I’m going to be in town.” An Indispensable Accessory Like many writers, Anderson is obsessed with his work, so obsessed he says “I don’t want to spend any time relaxing when I could be writing instead.” And with multiple projects always in the works simultaneously, he requires a computer he can take anywhere, one that will accommodate all of his needs. “My PowerBook is indispensable to me, an accessory I take wherever I go,” he says. “The operating system and I have become inseparable. It’s a hands-on computer.” |
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