The Nookpad

In my last post I mentioned how I wrote much of the first draft of the two California Gothic books using the Swype keyboard on my phone. Now I've taken this one step further and bought a Nook eReader.

The Nook is just configured for reading, but with a little judicious hacking it can run as a fully capable tablet on which I can now check my emails, write, tweet and even send texts. Now, it's no longer a Nook but a Nookpad.

Just as the E Ink screens are perfect for reading in all lights and all conditions, it's also perfect for writing. It's lightweight, the battery lasts for months and you can sit in direct sunlight and write. It's better than paper, as you don't have to decipher your handwriting afterwards and, at the first available WiFi connection, it backs up everything you've written to make it immediately available on any other device. It's the equivalent of having a dozen notebooks in my back pocket with the pages searchable.

The Evolution of Writing Tools. Quill - Nib - Ballpoint - Typewriter - Keyboard - Smartphone

In my last post here I talked about how current technology affects the way we can produce, edit and distribute stories. To think a little more on that, I'd like to talk about how the technology we have at our fingertips (literally) shapes how we write. Or, at least, shapes how I write.

Anyone who's ever tried writing will have reached that point where you feel the need to correct what you've done to date rather than continuing writing. This can be the death of the project; if you spend your time trying to get the first x% perfect then you may never get on with finishing it. But I've found the new writing tools available are a perfect means to prevent this.

For years I used to write the first draft of anything by hand, meaning I have a chest full of notebooks and am on around my fifth version of a particular model of Parker pen which they no longer manufacture (the other four having been lost at various times and places). It worked for me because not only is writing by hand a slower process than typing buy you can't easily go back and edit what you've written. This made me think about each line I wrote to make sure I was fairly happy and wouldn't have to rewrite it until I came to typing the whole thing up. The drawback was that my handwriting is atrocious at the best of times, but if I was writing whilst traveling by bus, car, train or plane then it often became illegible.

And then I bought my first touchscreen phone.This was a revelation.

I discovered the Swype keyboard on my phone, where you swipe your finger across the keyboard to spell out words rather than tapping at individual keys; the keyboard looks at the letters your finger passed over and works out what word you're spelling. Once I'd got used to trusting the keyboard to know what word I was trying to spell (which it's surprisingly good at) this was a turning point.

Suddenly I had everything I was in the middle of writing, multiple chapters and stories I was working on, all instantly accessible in my pocket without needing to load up my bag with notebooks. I could write whilst walking. As I could hold and operate the phone with one hand, it meant I could write while I was stood on a train and hold on with the other hand. Anything I wrote my phone was instantly saved to the cloud, so all my writing was immediately backed up and instantly accessible on any device.

The only drawback I found to this method of writing turned out to be a strength. It's not easy to edit things on a touchscreen phone. Jumping through the text, changing words, cutting and pasting are all cumbersome tasks. However, this meant I didn't procrastinate and instead kept on writing. This limitation pushed me forward to finish the first draft, leaving anything that needed to be fixed in subsequent drafts.

I wrote probably half of the first draft of Personal Jesus on my phone and almost the whole of the first draft of The God of Las Vegas. The quality of what I wrote is no different to if I'd written it long hand, it was just a different and more convenient method of getting the words out of my head and into a usable format.

The Great Detective and I

My piece on Sherlock Holmes and what the Great Detective means to me is up today on Bookshelf Bombshells as a part of their celebration of season 2 of Sherlock airing on PBS this weekend. They have a lot of good articles there, so check it out:

http://bookshelfbombshells.com/sherlock-flawed-hero-by-stuart-inskip/

The Freedom of Independence

If you've read this blog before you'll know that I'm given to talking about independent publishing. Because that's what I'm doing; I'm writing a series of books and publishing them independently of a publishing house. I don't want you to think I'm doing this because it's fashionable or because publishing houses are obsolete. None of these are true, certainly not the latter. I'm independently publishing because it give me a freedom to experiment and develop a narrative in a way I wouldn't traditionally have; a more organic method of writing. Let me use for example, as a starting point, Charles Dickens.

Most writers, when writing a book, will finish a first draft and then make multiple revisions of this until they're happy it's the best possible version of the story they can create without outside professional consultation, and that's when their agent and/or editor is brought in. They work through the whole story until they're as happy with it as they can be, then their publisher is officially involved and a final version is crafted to be put in front of the public.

For many of his most famous works, Charles Dickens had nowhere near that luxury.

Dickens, like many of his contemporaries, first published his work episodically in magazines. This means that, while he may have already determined the structure and content of works like Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, the actual process of having his audience reading the books was carried out whilst he was still putting pen to paper for the later chapters. As people eagerly picked up the first installment the final one may have not yet even been written. No doubt that, when the pieces were collected to be published in a single volume, there were minor editorial changes but the book as a whole remained the same.

Until now the closest parallel we have to this in modern publishing is comic books, where a similar thing happens in a different medium. However, the emergence of independent publishing allows writers to do something similar, though not directly comparable.

In other posts here I've talked about how writing a single book, Stripped, grew into a larger series called the California Gothic. Once I'd sketched out this series I realized Stripped was no longer a proper fit in the narrative; some of the terminology as well as the tone had changed. If Stripped had been published traditionally then I would most likely have had to either keep the tone of the series consistent with the first book or scrap the idea altogether. Publishing independently, however, gave me a third option. To rework Stripped so that it fitted the series and then republish it as the newly titled Personal Jesus.

The freedom to edit and modify work after publication gives independent authors a great deal of creative freedom; since a majority of the readership consume our work digitally then these changes can be pushed to them. Of course, these changes must be limited so you don't irritate the hell out of your audience; they don't want the book squirming beneath them as they read or find the ending they now have to be completely at odds with the beginning they started with.

You have to find the balance between putting your work before the public while it's still in draft form and improving on it once it's released. Walt Whitman did this throughout the many published versions of Leaves of Grass. He refined the poems it contained, changed their order, dropped some and including others. For Whitman the published work was a living organism that could grow and change in accordance with the author, the audience and the world which it both existed in and commented on.

It is this Whitman-esque spirit that I feel independent publishing can move us back towards. Painters often produce multiple versions of the same work as they develop the underlying ideas and techniques through which they're expressed, and digital publishing offers writers the same flexibility.

And surely it can only be a matter of time before the flexibility of the medium is incorporated into the narrative. Perhaps a work in short story format (to more easily allow for re-reading) that is periodically republished by the author to include new passages or variations on existing ones that offer new meaning to the prose. A truly organic book where the narrative and messages grow as its characters respond to the changes they experience.

Launching the California Gothic

It feels an age since I started this series. In fact it was only around March 2010, when I was in conversation with my wife and Dame Dismember (the art of the latter now gracing the covers of my books) about urban fantasy. It was suggested that zombies could never be as popular as vampires as, being decaying flesh on an animated corpse, zombies could never be the sexually potent creatures that vampires have been since Bram Stoker's reinvention of them. I felt the need to leap to the defense of zombies and argued that they could be sexy. To this day I don't know why.

Of course I had no idea how they could be sexy, so I let the idea percolate for a little while to see what I could come up with. It took a little while for me to develop the concept of Stripped, which took zombies back to their source in Haitian Voodoo. They were no longer re-animated, Romero-esque corpses but but living people who had been enslaved to a bokor. These zombies were devoted to their bokor. They worshiped them, passionately. It was lust combined with a religious zeal.. That was the premise for Stripped, and as I was finishing it I realized I was thinking ahead to how things continued after the book ended, so pretty soon I was writing a sequel, The God of Las Vegas.

Only it turned out that The God of Las Vegas wasn't a sequel, as I'd thought. It was the second book in a series. More than that, I felt it was a book that was bigger than it's predecessor. My editor agreed, to the point of instructing me to pull Stripped and rewrite it so that the tone and mythology were more in keeping with Las Vegas. Perhaps 'instructed' is too strong a word, let's say my editor advised and I'm far too smart to ignore the advice of someone who knows more about these things than I. And it takes a lot to make a writer pull a book they'd considered finished and pick back up their pen (or keyboard, more accurately).

So now I have the first two books in the California Gothic series. I'm also midway through writing a third, The Goddess of Los Angeles, being interrupted by the various tasks of editing and publishing which are both a critical part and total hindrance to the act of writing. And this is all thanks to my editor; as children we listened to our parents and we grew up to be decent people in spite of this, but as adults we must listen to our editors or we are adrift.

Reworked into the California Gothic, Stripped became Personal Jesus and is available for the Nook and Kindle, with the paperback version to follow. Should you read it, I hope you'll enjoy it. If you'd read previously read Stripped and feel a little peeved that it's undergone such a transformation, by all means let me know and I'll send you a new copy. In either case, I hope you enjoy it enough to also read The God of Las Vegas and the subsequent books in the series.

Personal Jesus on the Nook:
http://bit.ly/CaGoth1

Personal Jesus on the Kindle:
http://amzn.to/CalGoth1

Book Cover. Beautiful Art. Two.

Following on from my last post, here is the cover for book 2 in the California Gothic series, The God of Las Vegas. Again, the cover art is taken from the fantastic work of Dame Dismember.

Book Cover. Beautiful Art.

For the past few months it feels like I've done nothing but editing with barely any time for writing The Goddess of Los Angeles. However, it looks like I'm finally coming to the light at the end of this tunnel, and as well as getting down to a final draft both my editor and I are happy with, I'm also excited (a 7-year-old-on-Christmas-morning excited) to have the covers for both Personal Jesus and The God of Las Vegas. The cover art is from the work of the fantastic, and fantastically talented, Dame Dismember, to whom I am deeply grateful.

Below is the cover for Personal Jesus, with the cover for The God of Las Vegas and the books of both to follow shortly.