Every time I walk through our dining room into the kitchen, my eye is drawn to the Aura Frame, strategically placed on the countertop between the two rooms—our son Ian gave it to me as a Father’s Day present. Most of the images that scroll through the screen are family shots—my sister’s birthday, me and my brothers getting together for the first time in years, a deer caught munching our garden flowers.
The screen and the online cloud it’s connected to are becoming a repository of photo-memories—images that remind me and others on our family network how lucky we are and the wonderful lives we lead. But it didn’t take long for me to perceive literary possibilities for the technology, and the more I consider its potential, the more excited I become about digital frames for creating and promoting my books.
Before I get into that, though, I need to give you a thumbnail of my status as an author. I’ve had a couple of books published by Thistldown Press—since gone out of print—and remain an unknown outside a small circle of readers and fellow writers. I’ve based my creative and promotional strategies on that reality, which means: I’ll continue to submit some manuscripts to established publishers; at the same time, I will self-publish most of my books; my promotional strategy in either case will rely heavily on direct, face-to-face sales to readers, as well as producing, promoing, and selling my work on Amazonthrough Kindle Direct Publishing.
How does a digital frame fit into that picture?
I’ll zoom in on a scenario that clicks for me. Imagine yourself at a book fair. You’re engaged in conversation about your recently released thriller with one person, but others are scanning your selection of titles. What if you had a digital screen set up at one end of the table, cycling through images of your books, including back-cover descriptions of the stories and testimonials? What if those browsing readers could tap the frame and launch a video reading from a book they’re interested in?
Does frame-tech have a creative slant? I think so. A book I am planning, under the working title Realta Road, will be set in a Rialta RV, whose owner—a bereaved husband—is driving across Canada. He and his wife had planned the trip for years as a retirement gift to themselves, but she succumbs to a sudden cancer just before they are scheduled to leave. The structure of the story will be the husband’s ‘journal letters’ to his wife, describing in increasingly fraught detail the misadventures he’s getting himself into between Chemainus, on Vancouver Island, and St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Next summer, or the summer after, my wife and I will embark on our own cross-Canada journey—the second time we’ve done it. I’ll be taking pictures and videoing as we go, collecting images that will help me describe Realta Road settings and characters. Would a scrolling frame on my desk populated with those images help keep me on track once we’re back home and I’m immersed in writing?
If you’re interested in digital frames as a promotional and creative tool and would like to join in an exploratory workshop, let me know.
Creative writing takes us places we have never been, invents new worlds, converts ideas and memories into things experienced in the mind’s eye. That’s the first half of the creative cycle; reading is the second. It’s the intent of authors and poets to incite creativity in the minds and hearts of readers.
Creative interaction has always been a driving passion for writers, and—fortunately—we live in an era when that fundamental, almost instinctive urge can be channelled into new formats, reaching new ‘audiences’. We can engage our readers (and listeners) before, during, and after the writing and publication of our ‘books’.
Let me share a couple of examples.
I’m rewriting a story titled Entrapments, which I rediscovered after it had sat on my MS shelf for some years. Right now, I’m getting to know the characters. In the mix: an aging prostitute, a journalist, an art critic, an artist, a petty crook… and so on. I’ll be reaching out online for ‘enactors’—people who have lived those personas or are very familiar with them. I want these contacts to feel engaged in the creative process and to enjoy the experience.
My most recently released novel, The Mural Gazer, was the second I have posted online as a work in progress, inviting readers to join me page by page as the story unfolded. My first online novel, The Boy From Under, is also available online. Both can be purchased in print via my Amazon.com author’s page.
Again, the purpose of creating literature online is to engage readers and writers as early as possible and to invite questions and commentary as the story emerges. Other possibilities and benefits?
Links can be inserted into an online story as supplementary information and graphics.
An audio edition of the story can be made available in the same space as the print edition.
Feedback from readers can be welcomed and responded to.
Literature can be shared instantly, at a lower price, and with reduced environmental costs.
Other books on an author’s shelf can be linked seamlessly…
The potential for writers to meet readers via new digital technologies excites me. It’s daunting, too. But in an era when young people in particular are being drawn more and more into the online universe, authors have to establish a niche—let’s call it ImagiNation!
For the very first time in I don’t know how many years I don’t feel like writing (and yet, here I am writing!)
I can’t imagine this as a permanent state of mind; I’m thinking of it more as a hiatus… an opportunity to sit here, watching the half moon greet the rising sun, and listening to the chirping of a robin across the way, and feeling the cool, fresh air on my skin, and thinking of myself gliding over Stuart Channel in my kayak.
After a cold and dreary month, it’s nice to pause and simply celebrate our belated spring with all the other creatures on the edge of Wu’laam Wood.
So again, I ask: Why write?
Because, as I have just experienced, writing helps me expand and connect thoughts and feelings in wonderful ways. It’s a peculiarly human perspective on the world and an integral aspect of my being.
Flibber T. Gibbet, An Adventure on the Hermit’s Trail will be published this summer. Readers can crack open the cover online in the preview slideshow above.
Encourage online readers to take your book off the shelf
Imagine your newly released book face out on a bookstore shelf, just waiting for an avid reader to reach for it. What’s the first thing they are going to do?
Now reel back that opening scene and imagine your reader glancing at the cover of your book for the first time online.
How are you going to translate that website experience into something reminiscent of the in-store type of experience your audience is most familiar and comfortable with?
As illustrator and partner Diana Durrand and I ready our soon-to-be-released young readers’ story Flibber T. Gibbet, An Adventure on the Hermit’s Trail for launch, that’s a question that needs answering. What has emerged for me as an author/producer/publisher is a web slider modelled on the in-store experience of deciding whether or not to buy a book.
The first thing visitors to my craigspencewriter.ca/flibber-t-gibbet page will see is the book’s cover, not as a stand alone reproduction, but as the first image in the slider posted at the top of this post. In that frame they get to: meet the main troublemaker of the story, Flibber T. Gibbet; see protagonist Lincoln Cranston, running up the Hermit’s Trail, where the story is set; and gain a sense of the audience the book is written for.
What would they do next? My guess is an interested browser might flip the book over and look at the back cover for a description. The second slider image goes there, offering readers an overview of the book’s highlights. (Please note: If they’ve got this far they’re already readers, even if they aren’t yet buyers.) The back cover foreshadows the adventures they will experience in the tale and gives a flavour of the author’s writing stye.
At that point, I’d want to know a bit more about the author and illustrator. So slide three takes our audience (Note: as an internet era writer I am redefining the nature and habits of potential readers) to a very brief introductory page, describing Diana’s credentials and achievements as an artist and my own as an author.
If I had my marketing hat on straight, I would insert a final slide, linking visitors to options for purchasing copies of Flibber T. Gibbet. But determining a distribution and sales strategy is a work in progress, one that will be the subject of future Books Unbound posts. So for now I’ve inserted a placeholder announcing the anticipated release of the book in print.
Stay tuned by going to my Connect page for options. Thanks for visiting.
I didn’t say it out loud, of course – not right away – and can’t determine to this day if the thought was true – I mean sincere in all its dimensions, down to the place where sole meets concrete reality. But it was the best I could come up with on the spot, and even though I didn’t voice the sentiment right off, she heard me. That’s the trick I believe: Think things before speaking. Sometimes keep them as thoughts forever because you’re bashful, perhaps. Or maybe because the person you’re interested in is perfect and you could only detract from that by wheedle-wording your way into their affections.
I had instinctively done an up and down of the sandals’ occupant – that checkout-scan we males of the species do when attracted by something potentially sexual in our peripheral vision. But it was her footwear – and I must confess, her feet –my roving eyes locked onto.
Her toenails were painted pink!
Not gaudily, in that slapdash way you sometimes see and feel embarrassed about – usually for bubblegum teens. The polish had been applied with artistry. Details like that say something, don’t they? She had a conception of self that was bold and subtle, I figured.
So maybe I was indulging just a little. But it’s okay to try and fathom why someone’s special isn’t it? And at first, we have to draw assumptions from observations as seemingly insignificant as pedicure, don’t we? You’re a liar if you say no. The forensics of love are based upon minute chips of evidence, hinting at theories made up as we go.
To me the convex surfaces of her nails were intriguing as conch shells turned inside-out. Can you imagine such a thing? My eyes stuck on the tops of her toes for a breath or two then – without my thinking, without conscious intent – zoomed in on her sandals, recording every facet of those elegant slippers.
Even as my eyes went about their rogue’s work, though, part of me realized there was nothing so very remarkable about Gloria’s sandals… aside from the fact that she was in them. I can think of a thousand movie stars and a thousand more princesses who would have turned up their noses, if asked to wriggle their dainty nether digits into such a pair of Walmart flip-flops. But on Gloria’s feet! Oh my!
“Oh my!” as grandmother would cry when occasion warranted. Of course, her delight was usually over events as homey as cherry pie coming out of the oven, or particularly brilliant works of crayon art, not over anything so exotic as the footgear of a complete stranger. For grandmother agape wasn’t so much about miracles as discovering the miraculous in everyday things – about seeing through the veil of ordinary and triggering suspirations as emphatic as a last-gasp.
By the way, mentioning Gloria’s name right now makes everything from here-on-in non-sequitur. I didn’t know her name at this point in the story. True, I was cultivating an intimate relationship with the bone structure and musculature of her feet, the same way Toto might have got to know Dorothy before they ventured into Oz. But that’s not the same as knowing a body’s name, is it? Love works backwards. We fall into it then double back, tracking down the meanings and consequences of ’til death do us part.
I’ve broken sequence because I can’t bear talking about Gloria as ‘her’ or ‘she’. I have to give a name to those theoretical references. So I have christened her even though a name at that point would have been as naively symbolic as graffiti sprayed anonymously on whitewashed stucco, or rote declarations carved into the trunks of trees or the planks of park benches. At that point in our relationship her name would have been a catch-all of fantasies. A concatenation of dark eyes, long black hair… an aura you could best see through eyes half-closed.
In truth, if Gloria had dematerialized before I got a chance to talk to her – whisked out of her sandals by powers unknown into some sci-fi Nirvana beyond the frequencies of daytime TV – nothing would have seemed remarkable about her footwear left on the corner of Quadra and Hillside. Other than the fact the sandals were there – placed carefully on the cracked concrete as if the intersection were a portico into some alternative dimension, and she had been called away suddenly. Barefoot.
The thing about Gloria is she even stands with her shoes neatly placed, and she never just kicks her footgear off. She’s neat that way. Fastidious. It makes me laugh. And because of her, I place my work boots carefully on the mat inside the vestibule door, too – toes pointing toward the wall, heels knocked together. She’s aware of details like that, so it pains me to bring disorder into our lives, especially when it’s so easy to do things right.
There’s meaning to the precise placement feet on a sidewalk; someone needs to see that. Imagine yourself in the presence of a goddess. You’ve been schlepping your way through life down at the pit, a latter-day Sisyphus crunching stones into various grades of gravel, then suddenly she’s there, and you know sheis a goddess, that she already knows everything she needs to. What do you say to her? What’s your conversation starter?
In a way, Gloria was aware of every rhinestone glued to those bargain basement sandals of hers. Not individually, of course, but as elements of a sensory field, if you will. I wondered which tiny mirror I might have been reflected in, standing beside her, my bike held between us like a barrier. What did she think of this guy? Of his long hair and never-quite-matured beard, his knobby tired bike? She hadn’t even glanced my way – a sensible rebuke. But I did want her to appreciate the nobility of my feelings… that if the sun could be positioned just-so behind me, I would glow, too, with my own halo effect.
I glimpsed her profile, then surveyed the intersection for clues. Perhaps there were points of convergence, shards of data that proved we dwelt in overlapping dimensions. Which of the drab architectural features could I point to and say, There, that’s us. The San Remo Market Deli & Café? The Salvation Army Community & Family Centre, across Hillside? The Money Mart (real people fast cash) diagonally opposite? The Sally Ann thrift store on the west side of Quadra? The garbage receptacles, and bike racks at every corner to dispose of stuff we no longer valued and lock up the things we did?
We were none of that, and perhaps – without knowing it – denial was the point of convergence I had in mind.
“Nice sandals!” I said.
No kidding! I said it out loud. Breathlessly. Disguised as a brash joke, because any second now the light on Quadra would wink green and the little silhouette that says walk would let her get away, and I couldn’t let that happen without at least a memory of me – strange and deformed as it might seem – hankering after her. Things had spiralled into a place where an inkling of madness is the only reasonable state of mind – not stark raving lunacy, but a sort of emotional Pi, never quite defined, always panicked by another incremental digit of yearning.
If only we had it in us to feel that way about every living thing, we would truly be incarnations of our imagined gods.
The light changed. Gloria stepped off the sidewalk into the intersection. I walked beside her, thinking: This is it. It’s finished. She still hadn’t glanced at me. I studied her profile for signs. She wasn’t ready to offer any – and how could I blame her? But I took comfort in the fact that we were walking in the same direction – that the imagined pat of her sandals on the pavement didn’t seem hurried or doubtful. She was willing to abide my company to that extent at least.
Gloria strode on, back straight, black pantaloons fluttering in the breeze, pleated jacket conforming precisely to her slight, angular build. Did I imagine it, the faintest hint of a smile turning up her lips? I’m not sure, but the words rushed out of me anyway when I saw what I took to be a cue, as if I’d waiting to blurt my intentions for just-about-ever. “Maybe you won’t take it wrong if I walk with you a-ways?”
Creep! Is that what she was thinking? She stopped, looked straight at me, her head swivelling round like a security camera on a pole, eyes locking on. This is it, I thought. It’s finished.
Then she smiled and laughed out loud, and… Oh my God!
We plan on having kids someday, but there’s still lots of time to think about how I might answer, if one of the little rascals ever asks, when they’ve attained the age of reason, or at least a mature state of curiosity: “Hey, Dad, how did you and Mom first meet and fall in love?”
Perhaps if I framed it as a joke, I could admit to my temporary state of foot-fetishism at the corner of Hillside and Quadra while I was on my way to the pit and Gloria off to her studio. Or maybe I could fast-forward to our first date, on the evening of that first day, at Caffé Fantastico just a couple of blocks away from our point of departure… I paid; Gloria objected; we laughed at the clumsiness of it all… our perfectly memorable ineptitudes.
To be honest, I was amazed she showed up at all, or that I’d asked her to, when we parted ways that morning, me pedalling down Bay Street, heading for the pit; her, carrying on up Quadra. Gloria walks without making a sound, it’s like she rolls the soles of her feet through each step, feeling the ground beneath her, sensing its contours, its tilt, its flaws and fractures. Silence is what she leaves behind when she walks away from you or out of a room. Don’t get me wrong, she’s not an angel or anything, and I’m not a worshiper. But that silence she leaves in her wake? Your instinct is to fill it with thoughts of her.
The circular patio table we chose on the sidewalk outside Caffé Fantastico had a rippled glass top, so I could still make out Gloria’s feet after we sat down. They became a point of reference – their muscular arch, perfectly articulated toes and meticulously painted nails a sort of permissible zone of psychic gravity, which assured me the rest of her was still there, that she was real in an incomprehensible way… there’s a difference between comprehending someone and figuring them out, I think. Comprehending is like hugging your partner, knowing you’ll always be wondering how amazing she is; figuring her out is like taking her apart so you can adjust the mechanics of her soul – like tuning a bicycle.
A lot of my friends have got round to asking me – in one way or another – why I majored in philosophy at UVic. They don’t come right out and say: “Hey, you could be doing a hell of a lot better than crunching gravel down at the pit, if only you’d go into law or something, or maybe take a few more PSYCH courses, get a master’s? Get into counselling? Or teaching? Heck, why not try for a PhD in something or other; you’ve got the smarts.” And maybe they’re right; maybe I will someday. But all that misses the point – the vanishing point of our existence, you might say. I can’t map things out in a straight line, like I was crow flying from here to there, and happened to land on a lamppost in the epicentre of Nirvana. Life doesn’t move in straight lines or elegant curves that can be described by some sort of derived calculus.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I took philosophy so I could understand the meaning of Gloria’s feet, seen through the rippled glass of a patio table. Intimacy is the sudden awareness that your partner is too beautiful to take in at a glance, that you have to look away, take time to grow-yourself into it, expand your ability to appreciate every facet of her being… now there’s a word that takes me back to the Big Bang of prenatal existence.
There’s a theory I call bracketed infinity. Choose any points as your arbitrary beginning and end, and the information you would need to decode the significant events between will be infinite. We divvy up experiences as if life had a shutter speed and we can string moments together like the frames in a movie. But that’s not how things really work…
Get it?
Can’t say as I’ve figured it out yet myself, so you’re smarter than me if you have. All I know is, when I wake up beside Gloria, and we smile, my future, past and present areright now.
~ The End ~
Hope you enjoyed Feet First in Love There’s more in The Feel of Gravity collection.
Screen views of The Mural Gazer, a Direct-to-Web novel
What is D2W? The easiest way to answer that question is via a link to my Direct-to-Web novel The Mural Gazer. But before you click let me point out a couple of advantages D2W has already made available to you as reader and me as author:
First, I can share my novel with you in an instant, just about anywhere on the planet you can pull in an internet signal;
Second, you don’t need any dedicated technology to get into the story. Your laptop, mobile or desktop computer are your eReaders.
So back to definitions: A Direct-to-Web book is published as a website.
More specifically, it’s a website formatted as a book that reads like a print edition. If you’ve visited The Mural Gazer, you have seen its landing page, which introduces the story as would the front and back covers of a conventional book.
From there you can follow links to either Pullout, the opening scene, or the Episodes menu item, which takes you to the Mural Gazer’s table of contents. It’s the same type of decision you might make browsing a volume pulled from a bookstore shelf.
If you dive right into the story via the Pullout page, you will see an audio link at the top, which lets you listen to a reading. That’s handy if you happen to be riding on a subway or driving to work.
You can always jump to another page, or get back to where you were when reopening the novel on another device via the Episodes table of contents link.
Beneath the audio bar and at the foot of each page are links to the next episode. Every page links to its following episode, so you can read or listen to the entire novel as if you were turning the pages of a print edition.
That pretty well sums up the Direct-to-Web concept in terms of what you might expect from the design and layout of any book: accessible, convenient, portable and navigable.
There are a few extras, though.
You don’t need a light source to read a D2W thriller! You can be right out there in the dark and stormy night, scrolling through its pages in situ, while glancing over your shoulder for any ghouls that might be in pursuit!
The Mural Gazer can be readily shared via email and social media, so you can invite friends into your reading adventure. At the top of each page are social media and email icons that allow you to instantly send a link from the page you are reading to anyone on your contacts list. Books are meant to stimulate conversations.
Up in the menu bar there’s also a Contact tab, so D2W readers can connect with or follow authors if they want to share some ideas, ask a question or keep up with new releases. This feature is especially important if, like me, you are an author who sometimes chooses to write ‘dynamically’, inviting critique as the story unfolds in real time.
Not showing on this excerpt form the Mural Gazer are internal links. But say in the seventh paragraph of Pullout I wanted to give readers a snapshot view from the Malahat Summit on Vancouver Island, up Finlayson Arm? I could put a link into the text and take them there. Or I could link to a side story from the narrative, or provide supporting description for a word or phrase some readers might not be familiar with.
Of course, because the reader happens to have their internet device in front of them, they can do a quick Google snoop any time they choose to check out a scene or expand on a bit of information.
Finally, if you look at the widget area on both the Pullout and the Episodes table of contents pages, you will see a description of the book and a button that allows readers to ‘Buy-In’ to the story. Readers can get a sense of the story before – at any point – they choose to buy, and authors can choose just how far they want to allow readers to go before buying.
Eventually that space will also allow readers to purchase print and ePub editions of The Mural Gazer. D2W books complement their print editions, giving readers who like to read on screen the option – they don’t replace hard copy editions, which will long remain the preference of most book lovers.
The capabilities we’ve shared will be the subject of future posts in the Books Unbound series. The objective of Direct-to-Web publishing is to make it easier for readers to buy books and authors to share and sell them.
Sustainable Literature is the goal.
We’ll delve more deeply into the features of a D2W publication and how the reach and scope of literature can be broadened through the use of digital and online technologies in future posts. In the meantime, thank you for visiting what is, in fact, a Direct-to-Web book in the making: Books Unbound.
