I figure I can take a few moments away from making sweet, sweet machine love to my iPhone to talk about my experiences, thus far.

Seems best to frame it from the perspective of, “Hey, I’m a writer. How has the iPhone in just a handful of days helped me as a writer?” Because it has. The iPhone is a beautiful creature. It’s handheld angel. It’s the Jesus Device. Literally, I can call Jesus on my iPhone. I can be like, “Hey, Jesus. This phone? Well done, man. That loaves and fishes kerfuffle doesn’t hold a candle to this pretty little lady. You’ve made magic. Hey, you up for some Coldstone Creamery? High-five. Let’s tweet about it first.”

But you don’t really want to hear about my personal relationship with iPhone Jesus. That is some proselytzation for another day. You want to hear about the cool apps I’m using to cover up my inadequacies as a writer!

I Want To Know Shit: Bunch of good reference-related apps for the iPhone. Wikipanion will get you a taste of the tricky Wiki. Then you have your Dictionary.com app to heighten your word-fu. Finally, you get the Google search app, which seems silly given that you can access Google through the web browser… that is, until you try the app. This was perhaps the first app that showed me how, in some ways, the iPhone is actually more robust than my own computer. In 30 seconds, I had downloaded a little piece of software that lets me speak my own voice into the phone and search for the words that just tumbled out of my mouth. It works. It works pretty flawlessly. It can’t understand when I speak my own name, of course, but then again the United States Postal Service can’t handle that onerous task either, and they have actual people working there, not Google Robots. But, if I tell my Google app to search for “monkey sperm,” goddamnit if it doesn’t do the job with a salute and a smile. Cost on all those apps? Free.

I Need To Say “Donkey Woman” In Lithuanian: Languages are fun. Sometimes, you need to know what a character might say in another language, or maybe you’re just looking for some weird fantasy name that ironically means something profane in Finnish. Codesign’s Free Translator app, which is free (duh), does the trick just fine. It has a ton of unexpected languages. Once more, it outdoes what  I can easily find on the web. (The answer is Magaraca zena, by the way.)

Because I Am A Font Whore: Fonts are cool. Typography makes me hot. It didn’t used to, but it does now, so get used to it. This app lets you snap a picture of a font (cover of a book, poster, tattooed above somebody’s ass crack) and it’ll send it back to its servers and in 30 seconds tell you what the font is, or provide you the closest approximations. Thank you, What The Font, from MyFonts. I am now an effective font whore. No more sloppy typographical prostitution from me. Free app.

I Have A Brain Like A Sieve: I started to use Evernote on my PC a week or so before actually getting an iPhone, so it was nice to already have a couple notes built up for me to access on the device. I’ll admit I haven’t yet cracked into the Full Potential of this piece of software; I keep floating around the edges, catching the occasional whiff of its robust aroma, but I can’t quite get my nose around how best to put it into play. You can smell its secret power: it lets you take voice notes, type notes, attach photos to notes, geotag your notes, and all of this stuff will sync to your PC so you can view the notes there (and vice versa, from PC back to the phone). Most best awesome-est of all? Free app!

Because Sometimes I Need To Loosen The Dirt: Brain gets gummed up. Story isn’t quite moving like you want it. You need to kick the earth, loosen the dirt, crumble the clay. Cleanse the colon. I dunno. It’s early, and I’m not done the first cuppa coffee. Anyway, point is, you have two options here. One is dumb. One is less dumb. Dumb is iStop Writer’s Block. I won’t lie, I didn’t download this. It’s only a buck, but the examples of plots and characters it generates are super-generic. If you’re incapable of generating these barebones notions for yourself, you should perhaps consider another line of work. Better — and weirder — is the Oblique Strategies deck. I was not familiar with this until one Mister Rob Donoghue pointed me toward it. Basically, it attempts to break a deadlocked situation with a curious statement on the flipped “card.” Made-up examples include: “What would a snow fox do?” or “Have you tried it without pants?” or even, “Excrete the problem.” Out of all seriousness, I was having a little mental block with a scene, so I tried this (free!) app. First two or three card-flips were too bizarre to be useful, but the third (something about converting ambiguities to specifics) actually helped jar loose the scree.

Because I’m No Tree Murderer: A total lie. I’ve killed a number of trees personally. Still, sometimes guilt drives you to do things you never thought you’d do, like read books on a little screen. I’ve got both the Stanza and Kindle e-readers, and both are great because they have a crap-ton of free content available (like Tim Pratt’s Blood Engines and an avalanche of public domain lit). Stanza has the edge in that it’s very customizable: you can change the fonts, the colors, the damn-near-everything. The book prices are higher than with the Kindle, though, so that’s a Kindle bonus. But, the joy is, these are fuh-ree, so you can download both! Last night before bed I read some of Pratt’s book, and I found it easy. But it’s also disconcerting. The lack of a book’s weight is weird. So too is the unfettered feeling — I feel like I’m reading in a dream, like I’ve lost perspective. Physical book products give us subtle clues: page numbers, the heft of the thing, the simple evaluation of how much of the book is left, and so on. So, it’s doable, but I’m not yet sold. Anyway, you’re a writer, so you need to be reading, and these apps will help. Free, free, free.

I Think Flowcharts Are The Future Past: It’s the hot thing. “Mind-maps.” It’s not a new thing, it’s an old thing, and they’re called motherfuckin’ flowcharts. And even then, “flowchart” was probably a made-up name for something that had existed before. I’ll admit that “mind-map” sounds cooler, like I’m scrawling the mad cartography of my thought-fertilized forest maze, but really, it’s a goddamn flowchart. I’d heard that a program called iBlueSky would do the trick, but the damn thing is eight bucks. Feeling cheap, I searched afield for something free, and I found a pretty good one: Simplemind Express. That scene above that I was having problems with? I was able to map it out with this software, and I felt pretty dang good about the outcome. And did I mention free? Free. Free like a pegasus on winds formed of angel farts. (I also mentioned it’s early. Shut up.)

I’m So High Right Now: Okay, this isn’t really a writer-specific app — or is it? Sometimes, a writer needs to trip his brain out and set his mind on a lunatic journey of cackling monsters and trippy beats and echoing grunt-whispers. RJDJ, baby. I dunno how to describe it. You put your earphones in your ears. You open up a “scene.” And then stuff happens in your brain. Many of these scenes play back the ambient noises in your environment in weird pseudo-musical ways. Some require you to touch the screen or tilt the device to gain further effectts. It’s an aural acid trip for those who don’t have any acid. And if you do have acid — well, I guess you’ve just doubled your value. Speaking of value, this puppy is free, free, free.

Thanks To: All the fine-feathered friends who commented on my first iPhone post and suggested some of these apps to me.

Final Notes: First, screw you, WordPress, because you won’t let me use the lowercase ‘i’ in the blog title? Really? Really. Second, if anybody out there has further iPhone recommendations (for writers, or for anybody), I’m listening.