New ebook out now: 'Osome'

I have a new old short story out on digital. 'Osome' (2003) was part of a longer work that eventually became my fifth novel, Departure Lounge.

Last year I retrieved the original short story from a hard drive with the intention of publishing it digitally and couldn't resist revising it. After so much time, the changes that I needed to make seemed obvious.

This new version is both similar to the original and completely different. 'Osome' in Japanese can mean 'late' or 'slow' – so the title stayed.

Amazon Kindle Apple Books Rakuten Kobo Barnes & Noble Everand Odilo Smashwords

(FIC022080, FIC024000)

It is not dying

Shirley Halperin: Are you worried about artists making a living in the near future?

Trent Reznor: Absolutely I am.

Jimmy Iovine: We all should be.

Reznor: I've dedicated my whole life to this craft, which, for a variety of reasons, is one that people feel we don't need to pay for anymore. And I went through a period of pointing fingers and being the grumpy, old, get-off-my-lawn guy. But then you realize, let's adapt and figure out how to make this better instead of just complain about it.

-- Eddy Cue, Robert Kondrk, Trent Reznor and Jimmy Iovine interviewed by Shirley Halperin of Billboard magazine, June 14 2016

On the road, 2012

Some other authors have blogged about the Frankfurt Book Fair: Robert Sullivan on the opening ceremony and Catherine Robertson on the whole week. I didn't blog because I was travelling without a laptop, which felt like a holiday. I used my iPhone for email. I carried a PDF of my new novel on FileApp Pro, which allowed me to fret over it anywhere, anytime. Caught without an English language version of Pack of Lies at the Mana-Verlag opening, I downloaded a backup ms from Gmail, and read from the phone at the lecturn. Not an ideal experience, but doable.

The practice of hotels charging and arm and a leg for internet access is alive and well in Frankfurt. (In Berlin, like London there is free wifi in most bars and cafés.) In the hotel lobby where the connection was free New Zealanders gathered in the mornings and evenings like smokers on a windy corner, emailing, texting and tweeting. (I've taken Twitter off my phone. It shortens the battery life and my concentration.) Internet access in the rooms was two Euros a day and limited, but at a few dollars a day for up to 25mg on a prepaid SIM, why bother?

For navigation I relied on a paper map of Frankfurt that I bought in Berlin, and for everything else a reporter's notebook and a pencil. Writing things down is still the best way to work -- you remember something better if you write it out by hand, and a pencil will never explode in your pocket.

On the final weekend when I received my Lufthansa flight confirmation I downloaded the boarding pass onto Passport, the iOS6 app. Normally I print out a paper copy of every travel document, just in case, but this time I passed through luggage check in, customs and flight boarding by showing staff the Passport screen or waving the phone across gate scanners. Lufthansa are one of the first airlines to invest in Apple's system and Frankfurt is a modern airport so this went without a hitch. At least half the people in the queue were checking in using smartphones.

The only technology I really missed on the road was a kettle in the hotel room but I knew not to expect that, especially after travelling in France for Les Belles Etrangeres. If you want tea in a European hotel you have to ask for a glass or thermos of hot water at the bar and carry it up to your room in the elevator. Barbaric. But at least then, you have tea. And so on the Wednesday night I sat up on the end of the bed in my room, drinking black tea while reading an ms off an iPhone and scribbling revision notes on a 79 cent notepad.

Directions

In preparation for the Frankfurt Book Fair I downloaded the German + Travel app, which supplies and speaks useful phrases. The sound files are preloaded so there is no wait to play them, and no network traffic charge. And you can play phrases at random to make up robo-conversations: it's the app Kurt Schwitters would have liked.

Since upgrading to iOS6 I've been using the Apple maps app too -- I thought it was fine. Consumer Report rates the app as not that bad. 'Apple’s problem is that is replaced best-in-class with pretty-good.'

There is a new and best Amazon Kindle out. Gizmodo says the Paperwhite is for 'anyone who wants an ereader with a great screen. Which is basically anyone who wants an ereader.'

You may have Sherlock Holmes' on your e-reader, but you will not find his address on any map. The suspiciously well-named Jimmy Stamp deconstructs and reconstructs the mystery of 221B Baker Street:

As a real manifestation of a fiction, the many 221Bs attest to the power of Arthur Conan Doyle's writing. So strongly do the Holmes stories resonate with our culture that we have manifested his home in our own reality, creating shrines and sites of pilgrimage across the world. But these "replicas" also attest to the power of architecture and interior design, which by their very nature make things real.

Gavin Polone at New York Magazine talks about why TV is better than movies. If you're interested in popular culture you should print out this article and nail it to the wall. Almost a coda to Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, it does well to explain the most significant shift in mainstream entertainment since the rise of the movie blockbuster in the 1970s.

I would bet that you have noticed that your friends are more excited for new episodes of a favorite show than they are for the release of a super-hyped studio tentpole movie...  [A] malaise has taken hold of the movie audience, which is illustrated by the oft-heard phrase, "There is nothing out worth seeing.".

But why? Polone:

There are too many networks now competing for attention and they don't have the luxury of spending the huge sums movie studios can to cut through the marketing clutter and get the consideration of the potential viewer. So, they have no choice but to make shows that stand out from everything else based on their quality and distinctiveness. That is why, in recent years, you've gotten to watch not only Breaking Bad, but also The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and Homeland. None had pricey CGI, huge stars, or a flashy, unavoidable ad campaign; all they had was terrific writing, acting, and originality that made people want to recommend these shows to their friends.

On the 25th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Graeme McMillan at Time discusses how the series changed pop culture forever:

These days, of course, we're used to the idea of rebooting series and franchises and getting new takes on what had come before, keeping the best bits and discarding what doesn't fit for something that everyone hopes is better. That wasn't the case back in 1987. Back then, translations between media tried their best to faithfully replicate previous iterations, and even oddities like the Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks Dragnet movie that predated The Next Generation by a matter of months tried their hardest to offer affectionate homage to their predecessors, even as they pretended to parody them. Star Trek: The Next Generation may not be a reboot in the common usage of the term today: It takes place in the same continuity as the earlier series, and doesn't seek to replace it or undo anything that came before, but for all intents and purposes it was a reboot for the concept and a chance for Roddenberry and staff to correct whatever mistakes or bad decisions had been forced on the original.

In Hollywood, pitching is everything. TV writer Bill Barol remembers being with Al Franken for the worst meeting in the history of show business:

After a few moments the telephone rang at the host's station, Franken picked up the phone. Here's what I heard him say:

"Hi, honey... No, still having meetings. What? CNN? No, why?" He listened for a long moment, and then I saw all the color drain from his face. And I heard him say: "He's DEAD?"

However a study published in the Journal of Aging and Health has found that creativity predicts a longer life:

A large body of research links neuroticism with poorer health and conscientiousness with superior health. Now openness, which measures cognitive flexibility and the willingness to entertain novel ideas, has emerged as a lifelong protective factor. The linchpin seems to be the creativity associated with the personality trait—creative thinking reduces stress and keeps the brain healthy.

I can has Pressburger?

Oh, wait. Supercollider did appear somewhere else: The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica (2008) edited by Maxim Jakubowski. And the pointe shoes motif is a play on Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes, did I mention that? Too late, probably. The internet's been slow. If the water stops you can fill a bath and if the power goes down you can work by daylight but if the web slows down, you're helpless. So much for the cloud.

Perfect skin: SUPERCOLLIDER out now on Kindle

Before "Mommy Porn" there was just, well, porn. My short story 'Supercollider' first appeared in String of Pearls (Allen and Unwin, Australia, 1996), an anthology of erotic fiction edited by Tony Ayres which pleased many and shocked a few. It's a tale of amour fou: objectification, fetishism, emotional displacement -- a sort of happy bookend to the more anguished 'Archie and Veronica' from The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself (1995). The story has not appeared anywhere else since then, so I've released it as a Kindle single for US 99 cents.

The cover art is by New York-based artist Victoria Munro. You can buy 'Supercollider' in all its weird offensive adult glory here.

Tales of madness

Chris Bell has a new collection of short stories out, The Concentrated Essence of Any Number of Ravens. You can read about it here and buy it here. The fifty-odd stories (some of them, very odd) are short and varied and fun. Disclosure: I wrote the foreword, because I like his stories. His other books include The Bumper Book of Lies and Liquidambar.

Authors have been a-Twitter about RJ Ellory using online pseudonyms to praise himself and criticise his 'rivals'. (In a post on his Facebook page, Mark Billingham called it 'the tip of the iceberg.') The scandal reminded me of James Frey being caught out for fabricating his autobiographical A Million Little Pieces. Writing fiction is personal and private and, above all, slow, but the online world advances publicly, 365/24/7, 140 characters at a time. If you're going to turn fiction into a competition, don't be surprised if authors start doping to keep up.

Many of the actors in the trailer for the new movie version of The Sweeney appear to be palsied: slurred speech, facial paralysis, wrecked physiques. The contrast between the actors' stasis while speaking and the action extras is extreme to the point of comedy, like a Steven Seagal flick. The Sweeney is one of a number of recent UK movies that have been produced almost exclusively for local consumption (St Georges Day is another): the sort of drama that no longer finds a natural home on British television.

The trailer preceded David Cronenberg's movie of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis which I enjoyed for the spectacle of a director sublimating all his obsessions to serve an author's voice. Claustrophobic and precise, Cosmopolis felt like a coda to the themes he explored in other films: biomechanical worlds (Videodrome), addiction (Naked Lunch), technological fetishism (Crash) and decay (The Fly, Dead Ringers).

I also finally caught up with A Dangerous Method which, like A History of Violence, is a pretty conventional narrative that suddenly pops with violence and sex before healing over again. A friend of mine remarked that you never worry about Sean Connery in a movie because you know he's really James Bond: when the monastery was burning down in Name of the Rose, you knew he had a jet pack under his cassock. Cronenberg suffers from a similar, if inverted, typecasting: sitting down to watch one of the director's movies you find yourself bracing for the very worst. When the three stern, uniformed nurses manhandled the screaming, muddied Sabina (Keira Knightley) into a room to merely bathe her, the audience slumped with relief.

HEAVEN (1994) out now on Kindle

My second novel Heaven is out now on Kindle, in a new and revised edition and with a brand new cover by Jonathan King.

First published in 1994, Heaven was later made into a feature film by Miramax, produced by Sue Rogers and directed by Scott Reynolds. The movie starred Martin Donovan (Trust, Boss), Richard Schiff (The West Wing), Joanna Going and a pre-Star Trek, pre-Judge Dredd Karl Urban. I wonder if you could assemble a cast like that for an independent New Zealand movie now.

You can pick up a used copy of Heaven for US$52: the ebook edition is priced at US$2.99 at Amazon.com.

The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself: new on Kindle

A new edition of my original 1995 short story collection The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself is out now on Amazon Kindle.

The collection features twelve short stories: 'Running Hot and Cold' (deeply offended the publisher. "Breaking her hip? Perhaps if you made it all a dream"), 'Calling Doctor Dollywell' ("A casually menacing story that has something to do with health problems and lesbians" – Steve Braunias),  'The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself', 'Fire in the Hole', 'Archie and Veronica' (S&M on the west coast, and the most popular story, to judge by the many emails I've received over the years), 'No Sun No Rain' (the first appearance of detective Ellerslie Penrose, who went on to helm Shirker), 'Somewhere in the 21st Century' (SF), 'Oilskin' (upset people no end, but some of the students at the Auckland University writing course liked it, and a Waikato student went on to make it as a student film. Kids!), 'John', 'Me and Misspelt' (currently under option as a film),  'From Soup to Nuts' ("Unnecessarily violent" – Graeme Lay, Metro) and 'Another White Gown'.

All here, now, just for you, in the new digital™ format, with brand spanking new cover art by Christchurch artist Ian Dalziel. A snip at US$2.99.

A voice I'm hearing, sweet to my ear

Because lugging around 350 loose pages is hard I saved the Final Draft document as a .rtf, opened it in Calibre, exported it as a .mobi file and dropped it into the Kindle app. Processing the files took less time than it took the phone to sync. And then, hey presto, I was reading my new novel on my iPhone.

It's not perfect. The left hand margin is too wide (Final Draft's default page set-up accommodates punch-holes) and the chapter headings aren't linked, but for proofing purposes, it's ideal.

Every six months formatting ebook has become easier. A lot easier.

Writing -- that's still hard. And publishers, they still have to make money, so tomorrow probably belongs to Mia and her Twitter followers. But remember in BSG when Adam lends President Roslyn his copy of A Murder on Picon? I'm hoping the day after tomorrow will be like that. A little less Dani, a little more Runkle.

He could have married Anne with the blue silk blouse

Charles Q. Choi on the science of déjà vu:

The researchers found déjà vu most often occurred when new scenes were very similar to previously experienced scenes in terms of their spatial layout but not similar enough that people consciously recognized the resemblance.

"One reason for the jarring sense that accompanies déjà vu may be the contrast between the sense of newness and the simultaneous sense of oldness — something unfamiliar should not also feel familiar... A situation that resembles one in memory may be a particularly good candidate for producing that simultaneous recognition of newness alongside a sense of familiarity."

Chris Lee on how David Bowie is not here and yet still is:

"He has consciously dropped out of sight," says Paul Trynka, author of David Bowie: Starman, considered the definitive biography of the singer. "For someone so consistently vain and self-obsessed, the heart attack—the realization of his mortality—came as a massive psychological blow. But he's someone who has always had a real understanding of how to manipulate the media and saw the dramatic potential of a disappearance in a very Hollywood way. It became a kind of Houdini disappearing act. The fact that it's gone unstated makes it even more mysterious."

Also from Scientific American; why paper won't go away either:

"Your iPad will go blank on you," Barrett said. "But 'Huckleberry Finn' will never go blank on you. Even if you store it in a wet basement and it gets really badly molded, you can dry it out and it'll still be there."

(Pic: Lana Del Ray in Cannes; John Sargent's Madame X)

All we'll ever have is now

The French government has moved to seize copyright on books published prior to 2001. From the UK blog Authors Rights:

"The Bibliothèque Nationale de France is to compile a freely accessible online database of all works published in France before 1 January 2001 that are not being commercially distributed by a publisher and are not currently published in print or digital form... Once a book has been listed in the database for more than six months, the right to authorize its reproduction and display in digital form will be transferred to a collective management organisation approved by the Minister of Culture."

The French government has been struggling to control the internet. The Hadopi agency has complained about the workload of tracking pirates (18 million complaints; 10 users charged) and the three-strikes law was suspended in 2011 when the contractor administering the system failed to protect its data.

Four of my novels have been published in France -- Shirker, Electric, Departure Lounge and The Church of John Coltrane -- all after 2001, and all still in print (Coltrane is still French only). It will be interesting to see if the Ministry of Culture initiative reaches a compromise similar to the one made for the Google Library Project.

And Stanza has been crashing on my iPod. Stanza is the e-reader I use when I want to strain my eyes on my very battered iPod touch (iOS 4.3) reading Sherlock Holmes, Aristotle's Poetics, Edgar Allan Poe and other Gutenburg Project favourites. More importantly I used it to teach myself about e-publishing and re-issue some of my early short stories on Kindle.

After Amazon bought Lexcycle in 2009 there was chatter on the boards that they had killed the e-reader, one of the best for iOS. But it seems Stanza has been fixed -- if only for iOS 5. Another incentive to upgrade to an iPad, then. Or to just keep reading them on paper.

(Pictured: Alphaville. Still one of the best movies, ever.)

Preparedness

Cover art by Mr Ian Dalziel.

Honey, we ain't ever goin' home

My third novel Shirker (2000) has been pirated. I came across the torrent link when I was searching for information about one of the German editions (DTV). The novel is one of six German language titles organised alphabetically and compressed as a 53mb RAR file -- about the size of a compressed audio CD -- and so is likely to be one of many published books someone has made available on the internet for free.

Shirker was published internationally and in several non-English editions -- French, German, Italian -- but never as an ebook. The pirated version is a non-flowing-text PDF which would be a chore to convert into MOBI or EPUB format but not impossible. You could also print it out, although the cost of ink and paper would be comparable to the printed book and heavier to carry.

Like the weather, new technology rolls in whether it's welcome or not. A revised edition of my first novel Pack of Lies (1993) has just been published on Kindle (you can find it here); there are plans to put out ebook versions of Heaven and The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself as well. In the meantime someone has left a battered version of Shirker on the digital park bench: anyone can pick it up.

Re-make / Re-model: Pack of Lies (1993) now on Kindle

My first published novel Pack of Lies (1993) has been reissued on Kindle and is out now.

Perhaps appropriately, Pack of Lies has always been hard to find. The courier lost the printer's typescript, the edition appeared late and mainstream booksellers resisted the format. Unity Books stocked it and everyone else got theirs from the library. I often see copies of the first edition floating around on TradeMe for a few dollars; international readers can buy a secondhand copy on Amazon UK for £19.76 + £2.80 delivery, a price that would seem less outrageous if I was getting a cut.

So it's a rare bird, this 35,000 word tale told by the lying and unreliable teenage Catrina. My expectations for the new version are set low. As with the individual stories, the goal of this digitisation is about making the work available to readers, and having a bit of fun. I always thought when the technology came along it would be great to add a soundtrack or something; now digital's here, all I care about are the words. They work by themselves.

The Kindle edition of Pack of Lies has been revised, particularly in the opening chapters. I hadn't planned to touch it but as I was formatting the text some things just nagged. The revision process was instinctive. I was editing in plain text (for HTML) and found myself skimming the prose in the same way I'd read a site or text on my laptop screen. On digital a change is a keystroke away.

Writers write and read off their computers all the time so why then do so many of us cling to the idea of a paper book? Directors edit in a digital suite to create a projected film. Musicians press digital samples to vinyl. When David Hockney exhibited 'A Bigger Splash' he had gallery technicians aim a spotlight directly at the splash to supplement the painted effect. Artists play in the gaps between media.

As noted previously my work's not on Smashwords due to a shortage of time and patience. Like I said, Pack of Lies was always hard to find...

New (old) short stories on Kindle

Rusty Blades is a collection of five short stories from 1988-90 now available on Kindle: 'The Man at the Door', 'Two Friends', 'Geisha', 'Girl from Mars' and 'Rusty Blades.' This is part of an ongoing project to make my early and hard-to-find short fiction available in digital formats, as much as an archive as anything. (Special thanks:Rob O'Neill.) I have thoughts about this which I'll post later – I'm working on new stuff – but if you're interested Rusty Blades is available on Amazon here.

It feels good to be able to finally make these stories available again. Looking back over them I wanted to make some changes but resisted the temptation, apart from cleaning up some unintentional repetition here and there and, okay, changing three words. I can see what I got wrong with the stories as well as what I got right. And I feel a lot older now. 1988 – man...

Self-publishing is a chore so I look forward to going back to the other kind. But I do still have the Huxley stories which will come out as little one-off ebooks for 99 cents, like the pulp paperbacks I used to enjoy when I was a kid. (Do magazines and newspapers still do winter / summer fiction? Must ask someone about that.)

I'm still in two minds about ebooks. I'd be more excited if the platform was set up to supplement or alter reading behaviour, rather than replace the reading I already do. Ebooks are ideally suited for shorter fiction (i.e. novellas) and collected short stories, especially stories which are intended to be enjoyed as a series. The idea of readers subscribing to a character or series of narratives which are then pushed to their devices, like podcasts, actually sounds like fun. Tapping through Ulysses with an index finger does not.

Can it be that it was all so simple then

WIP. A page from one of my first published short stories ('Two Friends') Other Voices (Brick Row / Hallard Press, 1988), now scanned and OCR'd. I'm in the process of converting my back-catalogue to digital, particularly the early and hard-to-find short stories. I might also add some new short stories, just for fun.

I can't stand the rain against my window

Thanks to Mr Rob O'Neill I have finally acquired OCR scans of my first published short stories from Other Voices (1988). I've spent a wet Sunday morning correcting the text recognition errors and cleaning up the files to be converted into another ebook mini-collection. Reading the stories back I found I could recall nearly every word, and my life at the time of writing them: the sensation was as vivid as flicking through old photographs. Coding and design advice for my ebooks has come courtesy of Mr Chris Bell. It's not really self-publishing when so many other people help, is it? (One day I will get Russell Crowe to star in this.) Above: some blonde chick. That's one pretty foot.

Binding

Wired's John C Abell says ebooks are not there yet because they can't be used for interior design:

Before you roll your eyes at the shallowness of this gripe, consider this: When in your literate life you did not garnish your environment with books as a means of wordlessly introducing yourself to people in your circle?

It may be all about vanity, but books — how we arrange them, the ones we display in our public rooms, the ones we don't keep — say a lot about what we want the world to think about us. Probably more than any other object in our homes, books are our coats of arms, our ice breakers, our calling cards. Locked in the dungeon of your digital reader, nobody can hear them speak on your behalf.

Abell's comments reminded me of a 2010 study which aimed to gauge the effect of summer reading on students' academic performance. A philanthropist interviewed about the programme mentioned, albeit anecdotally, the importance of building a physical library:

For a study to be published in Reading Psychology, Richard Allington [a reading researcher at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville] and colleagues selected students in 17 high-poverty elementary schools in Florida and, for three consecutive years, gave each child 12 books, from a list the students provided, on the last day of school... Three years later, researchers found that those students who received books had "significantly higher" reading scores, experienced less of a summer slide and read more on their own each summer than the 478 who didn't get books.

Rebecca Constantino, [a researcher and instructor at the University of California-Irvine] who in 1999 founded Access Books, a group that has given away more than 1 million books, says the cause-and-effect is simple: "When kids own books, they get this sense, 'I'm a reader,' " she says. "It's very powerful when you go to a kid's home and ask him, 'Where is your library?'"

The full report of the study is here. (Pic: The Big Sleep. Based on the book.)

It was not a short fight, but it was fast

I have a new short story out on Kindle. 'Huxley' is a detective story about an Auckland ex-cop turned debt collector. The story first appeared in The Mammoth Book of Best International Crime (Constable, 2009). The ebook version has been revised: the opening is different and a number of details have been changed. There are more stories in the Huxley series which I might put out as ebooks later on. You can get it here.

This is part of an ongoing project to digitally convert my back-catalogue, particularly the early and hard-to-find short stories. Special thanks: Messrs Bell & Stratford. (Their new LP coming soon.)