Words and Paper

This morning, I came bucketing up the long gravel driveway of my in-law's house in Western Maryland.  The five inches of snow already on the ground had been augmented by an overnight snow, and the flakes were still falling heavily.

Between the new tires on the minivan and a healthy dose of objects-in-motion-tend-to-stay-in-motion, it was only just enough muss and fuss to make it entertaining.

I was on my way back from the morning jaunt that has defined almost every morning since I started coming out here decades ago: The newspaper run.

The paper has always been a necessary part of any lazy flannel-jammie morning.  That newspaper run used to be earlier, years ago.  Back in the 1990s, I had to get out by no later than seven, and even then, there was always the risk that every single newspaper would be gone.

Now?  There are always papers, no matter how late I sleep in.  That form of media is fading.  We've moved away from physical media for our news, and now are increasingly moving away from it for our reading.  Books have also been a major part of any time off, and this year, for the first time, I find myself sitting at the Western Maryland house and reading an eBook.

I've read books online before.  I've read an entire book in a game on my PS3.  I've even published to Kindle.  But I've not made a regular habit of reading books that weren't paper and ink.  With the arrival of the lowest-end no-ad Kindle in my life, that's going to become a much more regular event.   It's lowest-end by design.  I don't want a tablet computer.  I don't want apps, or videos, or games.  I want none of those distracting, pointless bits of popcorn-brain electronic frippery.

I just want to read, to lose myself in a world spun of words.

The first of the books I downloaded was the latest in Ian M. Banks Culture books, a series of thoroughly enjoyable hoo-hah hard-sci-fi space operas.  Others will follow...more hard sci-fi, and likely some Teilhard de Chardin.

It's a different tactile feeling, having that light sliver of plastic in my hand.   But the reading experience is exactly the same.  I'm still immersed in that world, engaged deeply with the reality woven into being by that language.

That's the important thing, eh?

Books

My house is chock full of books.

There are cookbooks in the kitchen.  There's a bookshelf...but no television...in our living room.   Every one of the bedrooms has a shelf or three laden with books.  Our rec-room?

That 56" television gets plenty of use, but it isn't the dominant visual presence in room.  Instead, it's hardbacks and paperbacks, graphic novels and manga, neatly linear, row upon row, against three of the four walls.

My study?  There's an entire wall of commentaries and works of philosophy and history and poetry and theology.

Yet things are shifting.   Though my latest round of reading for my doctoral program arrived in paperback form on my doorstep today, I can feel the era of print waning all about me.

I read my first full book on Kindle recently, cranking my way through George MacDonald's Lilith on my wife's iPad.

It was still the same strangely compelling story it would have been had it been on processed wood pulp.   The words still had power.  It still messed with my dreams in interesting ways, as MacDonald always does.   And yet that tactile presence is not in our home, not now that I'm done.

My older son encountered the spreading death of print this week when he got this month's Shonen Jump, the grand dame of all manga.  They're discontinuing their magazine, and going entirely electronic.  And he's bummed.  Sure, he can now get the instant gratification of the instant download.  But a significant part of the joy of Shonen Jump has been its arrival, thickening the mailbox with bold ink and adolescent emotion.

I wonder...do I want to imagine a house without books, shelves full of books lining the walls with silent knowledge?   Will there come a time when the only time you take a book off of a shelf to read is in some virtual world that reimagines a mythic place when people did such things?

Publishing to Kindle

I have, as of today, finally fulfilled my new year's resolution.   It's a month or two after I'd projected, but hey.  It's still done.  

That resolution was to e-publish a short kid's novel I wrote waaaaay back in my fourth year at the University of Virginia.

For the last month or two, I've finished up the laborious task of retyping it, after OCR scanning proved a bit too unreliable.  

It's edited...well, edited-ish.  I'm hardly the world's most amazingly detail-oriented editor, as my modus readerani is to inhale text for meaning rather than to notice errant apostrophes.  

But it's better than it was when I first pitched the manuscripts to publishers back in 1990 and 1991.  A few nips and tucks and continuity patches, and it was ready to go.

And now, with pretty much no fanfare whatsoever, Wickersnides is available on Kindle, yours for the low low price of three ninety nine.

I was impressed with just how easy it was getting onto Kindle...really no harder than setting up a blog.  Establishing the copyright claim was considerably more challenging, although I'm not entirely sure how necessary it was in retrospect.  Amazon's crack legal review team seems to have missed that my copyright page legal language included prohibitions against not just republication without permission, but also against "excreting" the book and "throwing it at passing aircraft."  

One of the small pleasures of self-publishing, I guess.

Having re-read it during the process of retyping it, I can safely say that it's not the great American novel.  It tends to be a bit talky at times, a bit silly at others, and is pretty darned short by the standards of modern publishing.  

But then again, neither is it mediocre.  It's an entertaining bit of whimsy, one hundred and twenty entirely readable pages.  For a work written in 1990, the core themes of corporate greed, consumerism and the use of interactive media to manipulate the desires of human beings still holds up pretty well, even while masked by a pretty kid-friendly premise.  A spoonful of sugar, as they say.  

So...if you're looking for a quick summer read for yourself or the kids, yours for the price of a grande mocha frappatappalino, well...look no further.