Written by Shishi Nouti, taking inspiration from the random generator at the back of the Cyclopedia of Comparative Mythology. Shishi Nouti has been kind enough to release this piece of mythology into the Creative Commons.
Skiftjana, Sleep Mother, Demigoddess of Dreams
Likened to fire, which can warm or burn, she brings dreams good and bad, of love or of hate. (A secondary association stems from fire's importance in keeping warm at night). Also associated with mental illness, particularly of the bipolar or schizoid type, due to her association with the irreality of dreams and their fluctuating nature.
Showing posts with label guest post. Show all posts
Showing posts with label guest post. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Guest Post: A Platform to Stand On.
Today's guest post was written by Shaun Horton. He blogs at Shaun of the Not-so-Dead, where he posts articles on "writing, the horror genre, and the occasional mad rant." He has published several stories, including the novel Class 5, Cenote, and Paths.
Class 5 is available for free through Amazon today and tomorrow, and Cenote will be similarly available on the 21st of December.
These days, it seems like everyone and their eloquent iguana has talked about how to build a platform as an author. It also seems like just as many are quick flash-in-the-pans that disappear in six months. So, what makes this blog post any different? Well, for starters, I've been working on my platform to varying degrees for going on two years. I've tried several different things, some that have worked, and some that haven't. So what sets this blog post apart is that there is real experience here.
Class 5 is available for free through Amazon today and tomorrow, and Cenote will be similarly available on the 21st of December.
These days, it seems like everyone and their eloquent iguana has talked about how to build a platform as an author. It also seems like just as many are quick flash-in-the-pans that disappear in six months. So, what makes this blog post any different? Well, for starters, I've been working on my platform to varying degrees for going on two years. I've tried several different things, some that have worked, and some that haven't. So what sets this blog post apart is that there is real experience here.
Friday, August 15, 2014
Guest Post: Writing Saved My Life
Today's guest post was written by Jeff Martin. He blogs at The Oak Wheel, where he posts fiction, reviews, and other neat stuff. He's also always interested in guest authors, if you'd like to set your pen to paper. In fact, my writing/creativity column "Things That I Like" started as just such an arrangement.
It’s a lofty title, one that I doubt my prose will live up to. Nevertheless, it is a truth, a simple pillar that constitutes the backbone of my existence.
I have always been a storyteller. Ever since I called the fire department when my grandmother was napping as a kindergartner to tell them that someone had broken into the house, I have been weaving tales in one way or another. Sometimes I have been admonished for telling them, as I was by the slightly amused but mostly annoyed firefighter that found me hiding behind my grandfather’s rocking chair. For the most part, though, I receive indifference; occasionally, I am given encouragement.
It has recently dawned upon me that praise or a lack thereof has nothing to do with why I tell stories. I tell stories because, if I do not tell them, I become consumed by them. This fact did not become clear to me until months after I suffered a seizure in April of this year.
From what I remember, it was a beautiful day. My wife, son and I had just got back from a trip to the coastal enclave of Fort Bragg in northern California where we visited my mother for the weekend. It was as relaxing as a vacation can be for a (then) practicing alcoholic. The bed and breakfast we stayed in was quaint although the bed was a bit small for the three of us; the restaurants we visited served top-shelf whiskey and knew what I meant when I ordered a shot ‘neat’. We got back to our home in Sonoma County and decided to have lunch at a small Mexican restaurant in our hometown. Life was good.
It is probably more accurate to say that my perception of my life was good. My life was actually not good at all. After months on the wagon, I had fallen off in typical fashion and started drinking as soon as I could get away with it in the morning. It was a compulsion that I, at that juncture, just simply did not understand. My relationship with my wife had stagnated as the years of living with a barely functioning alcoholic had begun to wear her soul thin. My son, who is afflicted with a congenital heart defect, was, unbeknownst to him, about to have his third open heart surgery. Stress poured out my pores in viscous effusions.
Stress is a word we often use but seldom understand. I certainly didn’t understand it until, after waking up frantically in the back of an ambulance on my way to an emergency room, I was told by a doctor that I had suffered a stress induced seizure.
I was absolutely baffled. How could this happen? I thought everything was going smoothly even though my life and its surroundings were in shambles. My wife came to the emergency room and found me bawling like our toddler, covering the cheap thin hospital gown with a steady deluge of tears. I was a mess, confused and out of touch with reality.
The months that followed were rocky and I will spare you the gory details. Suffice to say, I attempted to get sober and, without the constant numbing agent that is alcohol anesthetizing my brain, I began to think that I was going bat shit crazy. Fully insane, straight jacket status. A One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets Silver Linings Playbook type of crazy. My presumed insanity only led to an alcoholic relapse of epic proportions. Things got so bad that I sought help from a group of Stanford psychiatrists while my son was recovering from his open heart surgery and they diagnosed me with full-blown bipolar disorder, a diagnosis that has since been ruled inaccurate (it’s apparently very hard to diagnose an alcoholic in the throes of their disease with a mental disorder).
When I had a name for my crazy, I got scared, the kind of scared you get when you’re alone in the woods at night with no one for miles around and your flashlight battery dies. I started looking up the mood stabilizers that the doctors were recommending that I start taking online, things like lithium and valproic acid. The side effects scared me even more than the disorder I had been diagnosed with. As my son was discharged from the hospital, the three of us returned to our home, leaving one set of worries behind at the Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, California, and dragging a new set of them with us.
After meeting with new doctors in my home county, I committed to actually once and for all getting sober. My physician agreed to monitor me in case I started having bad physical withdrawal symptoms, a necessity after the seizure I endured. The first day was hellish; I paced about the house aimlessly, picking up a book for a few moments only to cast it aside in frustration when I couldn’t concentrate. After the fourth or fifth time of throwing down a book, I had an epiphany: I used to write.
Not only did I used to write, but I used to love it. In my youth, I would scribble juvenile stories down into the ubiquitous black and white Mead notebook about cowboys and spurned lovers. As I grew and technology advanced, I would tap my fingers gaily across the keyboard to spin harrowing tales of knights and dragons. These memories came back to me in a rush, a rush very similar to the feeling of that first drink coolly caressing the lips and then warming the belly whilst calming the head.
That was it. I scrambled for my computer and haven’t looked back since.
If I had known what kind of transformation was about to take place, I would have traded the bottle for the pen years ago. At least, I like to tell myself that. In all likelihood, I quit drinking at the exact moment that I was ready to. What I do know for certain is that writing saved my life. You can’t get cirrhosis from too much writing; you don’t wake up in the middle of the night shaking and running to the refrigerator hoping to god that the ghost of Nicholas Cage left you a bottle of orange juice and vodka a la Leaving Las Vegas; writing doesn’t take your relationships and spit them out into tiny degraded pieces. No, writing was and is, for me, the ultimate release. Writing every day and carving stories into the screen with a keyboard has been the reason that I not only no longer drink but also the reason that I do not crave a drink at any moment.
Anyone that has dealt with addiction knows exactly what I’m talking about when I say ‘crave’. There is an insatiable need that takes over the brain, an irrational compulsion to consume whatever it is you’re addicted to regardless of the risks. The trick, in my current experience, is to trade the addiction with something healthy. For me, it has been writing.
I have pondered in the dark reaches of the night why writing has so easily replaced drinking for me. The only conclusion that I have come to is that, as I mentioned previously, I was being consumed by stories. I’ve always had a vibrant inner dialogue but as I left my adolescence for the drunken dens of young adulthood, I got used to having zero inner dialogue. The voices that I once had harnessed and channeled into beautiful tales were drowned in whiskey and beer. Whenever I would put down the bottle, those stories (voices) came rushing back to me, scaring me so much that I ran back to liquor without a second glance. Now I see my mind for what it is: a vessel teeming with stories, a few of them told but most of them waiting in the wings.
Previously, I felt my life was an endless darkness that I groped through without care or concern; today, I still feel the darkness but I have been given an enduring light that I can shine whenever fear overtakes me.
Who knows what tomorrow will bring.
It’s a lofty title, one that I doubt my prose will live up to. Nevertheless, it is a truth, a simple pillar that constitutes the backbone of my existence.
I have always been a storyteller. Ever since I called the fire department when my grandmother was napping as a kindergartner to tell them that someone had broken into the house, I have been weaving tales in one way or another. Sometimes I have been admonished for telling them, as I was by the slightly amused but mostly annoyed firefighter that found me hiding behind my grandfather’s rocking chair. For the most part, though, I receive indifference; occasionally, I am given encouragement.
It has recently dawned upon me that praise or a lack thereof has nothing to do with why I tell stories. I tell stories because, if I do not tell them, I become consumed by them. This fact did not become clear to me until months after I suffered a seizure in April of this year.
From what I remember, it was a beautiful day. My wife, son and I had just got back from a trip to the coastal enclave of Fort Bragg in northern California where we visited my mother for the weekend. It was as relaxing as a vacation can be for a (then) practicing alcoholic. The bed and breakfast we stayed in was quaint although the bed was a bit small for the three of us; the restaurants we visited served top-shelf whiskey and knew what I meant when I ordered a shot ‘neat’. We got back to our home in Sonoma County and decided to have lunch at a small Mexican restaurant in our hometown. Life was good.
It is probably more accurate to say that my perception of my life was good. My life was actually not good at all. After months on the wagon, I had fallen off in typical fashion and started drinking as soon as I could get away with it in the morning. It was a compulsion that I, at that juncture, just simply did not understand. My relationship with my wife had stagnated as the years of living with a barely functioning alcoholic had begun to wear her soul thin. My son, who is afflicted with a congenital heart defect, was, unbeknownst to him, about to have his third open heart surgery. Stress poured out my pores in viscous effusions.
Stress is a word we often use but seldom understand. I certainly didn’t understand it until, after waking up frantically in the back of an ambulance on my way to an emergency room, I was told by a doctor that I had suffered a stress induced seizure.
I was absolutely baffled. How could this happen? I thought everything was going smoothly even though my life and its surroundings were in shambles. My wife came to the emergency room and found me bawling like our toddler, covering the cheap thin hospital gown with a steady deluge of tears. I was a mess, confused and out of touch with reality.
The months that followed were rocky and I will spare you the gory details. Suffice to say, I attempted to get sober and, without the constant numbing agent that is alcohol anesthetizing my brain, I began to think that I was going bat shit crazy. Fully insane, straight jacket status. A One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets Silver Linings Playbook type of crazy. My presumed insanity only led to an alcoholic relapse of epic proportions. Things got so bad that I sought help from a group of Stanford psychiatrists while my son was recovering from his open heart surgery and they diagnosed me with full-blown bipolar disorder, a diagnosis that has since been ruled inaccurate (it’s apparently very hard to diagnose an alcoholic in the throes of their disease with a mental disorder).
When I had a name for my crazy, I got scared, the kind of scared you get when you’re alone in the woods at night with no one for miles around and your flashlight battery dies. I started looking up the mood stabilizers that the doctors were recommending that I start taking online, things like lithium and valproic acid. The side effects scared me even more than the disorder I had been diagnosed with. As my son was discharged from the hospital, the three of us returned to our home, leaving one set of worries behind at the Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, California, and dragging a new set of them with us.
After meeting with new doctors in my home county, I committed to actually once and for all getting sober. My physician agreed to monitor me in case I started having bad physical withdrawal symptoms, a necessity after the seizure I endured. The first day was hellish; I paced about the house aimlessly, picking up a book for a few moments only to cast it aside in frustration when I couldn’t concentrate. After the fourth or fifth time of throwing down a book, I had an epiphany: I used to write.
Not only did I used to write, but I used to love it. In my youth, I would scribble juvenile stories down into the ubiquitous black and white Mead notebook about cowboys and spurned lovers. As I grew and technology advanced, I would tap my fingers gaily across the keyboard to spin harrowing tales of knights and dragons. These memories came back to me in a rush, a rush very similar to the feeling of that first drink coolly caressing the lips and then warming the belly whilst calming the head.
That was it. I scrambled for my computer and haven’t looked back since.
If I had known what kind of transformation was about to take place, I would have traded the bottle for the pen years ago. At least, I like to tell myself that. In all likelihood, I quit drinking at the exact moment that I was ready to. What I do know for certain is that writing saved my life. You can’t get cirrhosis from too much writing; you don’t wake up in the middle of the night shaking and running to the refrigerator hoping to god that the ghost of Nicholas Cage left you a bottle of orange juice and vodka a la Leaving Las Vegas; writing doesn’t take your relationships and spit them out into tiny degraded pieces. No, writing was and is, for me, the ultimate release. Writing every day and carving stories into the screen with a keyboard has been the reason that I not only no longer drink but also the reason that I do not crave a drink at any moment.
Anyone that has dealt with addiction knows exactly what I’m talking about when I say ‘crave’. There is an insatiable need that takes over the brain, an irrational compulsion to consume whatever it is you’re addicted to regardless of the risks. The trick, in my current experience, is to trade the addiction with something healthy. For me, it has been writing.
I have pondered in the dark reaches of the night why writing has so easily replaced drinking for me. The only conclusion that I have come to is that, as I mentioned previously, I was being consumed by stories. I’ve always had a vibrant inner dialogue but as I left my adolescence for the drunken dens of young adulthood, I got used to having zero inner dialogue. The voices that I once had harnessed and channeled into beautiful tales were drowned in whiskey and beer. Whenever I would put down the bottle, those stories (voices) came rushing back to me, scaring me so much that I ran back to liquor without a second glance. Now I see my mind for what it is: a vessel teeming with stories, a few of them told but most of them waiting in the wings.
Previously, I felt my life was an endless darkness that I groped through without care or concern; today, I still feel the darkness but I have been given an enduring light that I can shine whenever fear overtakes me.
Who knows what tomorrow will bring.
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Creating a Monster: The Hungry (from Shaun of the Not-so-Dead)
Reposted with permission. Read the original article here.
So, I'm lying in bed, waiting to go to sleep, when I get this idea. It's not a story idea specifically, but an idea for a monster. And as I'm lying there, it's almost like I'm just watching the pieces come together, like a puzzle, or one of those mix-and-match playset thingies. It was really fascinating watching it come together into something I could recognize as fairly original and I though I would share it with you all. It may give you some ideas of your own for monsters, demons, and/or degenerates.
So, I'm lying in bed, waiting to go to sleep, when I get this idea. It's not a story idea specifically, but an idea for a monster. And as I'm lying there, it's almost like I'm just watching the pieces come together, like a puzzle, or one of those mix-and-match playset thingies. It was really fascinating watching it come together into something I could recognize as fairly original and I though I would share it with you all. It may give you some ideas of your own for monsters, demons, and/or degenerates.
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Guest Post: The Vast And Untapped Potential of Digital Narrative Delivery Is Kinda Stupid
Today's guest post was written by Stefan Gagne, also known as "Twoflower." He's a much better writer than I am, and I'm thrilled that he agreed to write something for the blog.
"eBooks" are, by and large, exactly what it says on the tin. They're electronic versions of books. Paragraph after paragraph, poured out onto a digital device rather than a printed page, but otherwise completely identical. Linear narrative with largely textual content. Traditional. Classic. Boring.
The most popular form of the "book" has been largely unchanged for a hundred years, even with the introduction of the Kindle and all other e-reading devices. While we stand on the precipice of a digital revolution in writing, we're sticking to the standard style that better suits dead tree productions. There's so much MORE we could be doing with eBooks. Multimedia! Nonlinear narrative! Interactive elements! New presentation styles! An entirely unique experience in every book, suited to its tone, amplifying the entire feeling of the text! Why aren't we doing anything more with this? Why aren't we reaching for those limits and exploring them?
Answer: Because it's kinda stupid.
Hello, my name is Stefan Gagne. I've been writing novels and posting them online since the nineties. I'm responsible for Sailor Nothing, Unreal Estate, anachronauts, and City of Angles. I've been linked to in TVTropes dozens of times, my stuff's popped up on Reddit a few times. I'm now self-published with a number of eBooks and print books readily available alongside the free web versions. I also hold a bachelor's degree in Computers and Interactive Media, obtained in 1998, as the digital revolution was fully underway. I say all this so that you know where I come from when I say "super fancy pants eBooks are stupid."
Actually, I made a super fancy pants eBook. It's called Sailor Nothing and it embraces HTML as a delivery mechanism for narrative as far as I could take it back in the nineties. Font changes, depending on narrator and perspective. Color changes. A chapter split four ways, which could be read in any order. And, the crowning achievement, a fully implemented Japanese datesim style chapter with a video game interface. Fun stuff! And I stand behind the actual story I wrote, what lurks behind all those bells and whistles. But the bells and whistles were quite stupid.
In my old age, I'm forced to look at the practical side of things. Thanks to these teenage indulgences, Sailor Nothing cannot be published in any other format thanks to these decisions. Sadly, it's an artifact in time and has little place in the here and now. It's completely impractical to realize as a paper document, because it was intentionally crafted to defy the conventions of paper documents at the time. But it's ALSO completely impractical to make into an actual, honest to goodness portable and modern eBook because it's way too far outside those lines as well.
Nonlinear chapters? An embedded video game? You can't load this up on an iPad and read it like you would any other eBook in your library; the wackier elements simply won't work. You could load a browser and read it there, eschewing "owning" a copy in your library for reading it from the original cloud service (aka the web), but even then the nineties web technology is holding it back, and some parts simply won't work properly.
Could I make it an app, perhaps? Maybe, but that'd make it into a standalone experience, something which cannot be incorporated alongside your other eBooks. It'd be this weird outlier because it insists on breaking every convention we have for what a "book" is, more of a game than a book. Would it FEEL like reading a book, at that point? But beyond nebulous concepts like feel, would the raw technology even work, moving forward? Say Apple goes down the drain and Android bites the big one. You can't launch the app anymore because it's an unsupported relic, so how could you read your book after that point? You have to take the long view here, and the technology right now is designed for the short view.
So, no. Running hog wild into the vast universe of eBook potential is probably unwise. We learned that lesson in related media; you don't see many of those crazy nineties CD-ROM multimedia experiences around anymore, do you. All of them beautiful and unique snowflakes, art for art's sake, exploring the possibilities. All of them left behind in a wake of standardizing technologies and shifting hardware limitations.
Now. Where does this leave us? What's the way forward?
The path, I see it, is in compromise and standardization. I do believe that eBooks can be more than a pile of paragraphs -- media elements can be a factor, alternative formatting can be a factor. But it has to scale and it has to be implemented in a way that moves forward. Future platforms we can't even imagine yet need to be able to read these eBooks and deliver the intended experience... as well as more limited platforms, downscaling the experience so it's still readable without losing too much. Solidified document standards which include alternative elements but support upscaling and downscaling of content are key.
Right now, eBooks are tied into specific platforms, usually locked by Digital Rights Management. It's very much like the DRM-loaded digital music scene of the early 2000s, back when iTunes was still locking their files. But eventually, everybody standardized on DRM-free MP3, and now many shopfronts sell files that can be played on many devices. eBooks can follow a similar path, using open standards and open platforms, some of which may be able to deliver these extra elements, some of which may not... but all of which can compile together a complete library of all the books you own, side by side, available as a consistent experience.
We're almost there. We can have our cake and eat it too. eBooks can stride the line between the stupid excesses of wildly overdone extra elements, and the traditional but boring presentation of a paper book. They can do it without leaving anything behind, with solid thinking behind the technology. Authors can choose how far they want to take their work into experimental territory without risking becoming an abandoned work. I believe that the future holds all of this.
Myself, I'm taking it step by step. My current books are a mixture of tradition and change. I use the font shifts and images of Sailor Nothing in modern works like City of Angles... but I keep in mind that I want my books to be experienced however the reader wishes, on any device, including dead tree published formats. I've scaled back the excesses but kept the spirit alive through manipulation of the text and the presentation. I sell through Amazon's Kindle store, but I don't include DRM on any of my works, and I have the source files so I can convert them to whatever format may come in the days ahead. In the end, it's a stronger work, and future-proofed.
With clear thinking, solid technology, and the ability to compromise your approach without compromising your artistic integrity... I see eBooks as having vast, untapped potential that we will be able to tap, one day. As long as we're not stupid about it, of course.
"eBooks" are, by and large, exactly what it says on the tin. They're electronic versions of books. Paragraph after paragraph, poured out onto a digital device rather than a printed page, but otherwise completely identical. Linear narrative with largely textual content. Traditional. Classic. Boring.
The most popular form of the "book" has been largely unchanged for a hundred years, even with the introduction of the Kindle and all other e-reading devices. While we stand on the precipice of a digital revolution in writing, we're sticking to the standard style that better suits dead tree productions. There's so much MORE we could be doing with eBooks. Multimedia! Nonlinear narrative! Interactive elements! New presentation styles! An entirely unique experience in every book, suited to its tone, amplifying the entire feeling of the text! Why aren't we doing anything more with this? Why aren't we reaching for those limits and exploring them?
Answer: Because it's kinda stupid.
Hello, my name is Stefan Gagne. I've been writing novels and posting them online since the nineties. I'm responsible for Sailor Nothing, Unreal Estate, anachronauts, and City of Angles. I've been linked to in TVTropes dozens of times, my stuff's popped up on Reddit a few times. I'm now self-published with a number of eBooks and print books readily available alongside the free web versions. I also hold a bachelor's degree in Computers and Interactive Media, obtained in 1998, as the digital revolution was fully underway. I say all this so that you know where I come from when I say "super fancy pants eBooks are stupid."
Actually, I made a super fancy pants eBook. It's called Sailor Nothing and it embraces HTML as a delivery mechanism for narrative as far as I could take it back in the nineties. Font changes, depending on narrator and perspective. Color changes. A chapter split four ways, which could be read in any order. And, the crowning achievement, a fully implemented Japanese datesim style chapter with a video game interface. Fun stuff! And I stand behind the actual story I wrote, what lurks behind all those bells and whistles. But the bells and whistles were quite stupid.
In my old age, I'm forced to look at the practical side of things. Thanks to these teenage indulgences, Sailor Nothing cannot be published in any other format thanks to these decisions. Sadly, it's an artifact in time and has little place in the here and now. It's completely impractical to realize as a paper document, because it was intentionally crafted to defy the conventions of paper documents at the time. But it's ALSO completely impractical to make into an actual, honest to goodness portable and modern eBook because it's way too far outside those lines as well.
Nonlinear chapters? An embedded video game? You can't load this up on an iPad and read it like you would any other eBook in your library; the wackier elements simply won't work. You could load a browser and read it there, eschewing "owning" a copy in your library for reading it from the original cloud service (aka the web), but even then the nineties web technology is holding it back, and some parts simply won't work properly.
Could I make it an app, perhaps? Maybe, but that'd make it into a standalone experience, something which cannot be incorporated alongside your other eBooks. It'd be this weird outlier because it insists on breaking every convention we have for what a "book" is, more of a game than a book. Would it FEEL like reading a book, at that point? But beyond nebulous concepts like feel, would the raw technology even work, moving forward? Say Apple goes down the drain and Android bites the big one. You can't launch the app anymore because it's an unsupported relic, so how could you read your book after that point? You have to take the long view here, and the technology right now is designed for the short view.
So, no. Running hog wild into the vast universe of eBook potential is probably unwise. We learned that lesson in related media; you don't see many of those crazy nineties CD-ROM multimedia experiences around anymore, do you. All of them beautiful and unique snowflakes, art for art's sake, exploring the possibilities. All of them left behind in a wake of standardizing technologies and shifting hardware limitations.
Now. Where does this leave us? What's the way forward?
The path, I see it, is in compromise and standardization. I do believe that eBooks can be more than a pile of paragraphs -- media elements can be a factor, alternative formatting can be a factor. But it has to scale and it has to be implemented in a way that moves forward. Future platforms we can't even imagine yet need to be able to read these eBooks and deliver the intended experience... as well as more limited platforms, downscaling the experience so it's still readable without losing too much. Solidified document standards which include alternative elements but support upscaling and downscaling of content are key.
Right now, eBooks are tied into specific platforms, usually locked by Digital Rights Management. It's very much like the DRM-loaded digital music scene of the early 2000s, back when iTunes was still locking their files. But eventually, everybody standardized on DRM-free MP3, and now many shopfronts sell files that can be played on many devices. eBooks can follow a similar path, using open standards and open platforms, some of which may be able to deliver these extra elements, some of which may not... but all of which can compile together a complete library of all the books you own, side by side, available as a consistent experience.
We're almost there. We can have our cake and eat it too. eBooks can stride the line between the stupid excesses of wildly overdone extra elements, and the traditional but boring presentation of a paper book. They can do it without leaving anything behind, with solid thinking behind the technology. Authors can choose how far they want to take their work into experimental territory without risking becoming an abandoned work. I believe that the future holds all of this.
Myself, I'm taking it step by step. My current books are a mixture of tradition and change. I use the font shifts and images of Sailor Nothing in modern works like City of Angles... but I keep in mind that I want my books to be experienced however the reader wishes, on any device, including dead tree published formats. I've scaled back the excesses but kept the spirit alive through manipulation of the text and the presentation. I sell through Amazon's Kindle store, but I don't include DRM on any of my works, and I have the source files so I can convert them to whatever format may come in the days ahead. In the end, it's a stronger work, and future-proofed.
With clear thinking, solid technology, and the ability to compromise your approach without compromising your artistic integrity... I see eBooks as having vast, untapped potential that we will be able to tap, one day. As long as we're not stupid about it, of course.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)