Creative Jailbreak
“Before embarking on his life as an artist, Vincent Van Gogh wrote of his yearning to be creative, which caused him to feel like “the man…whose heart is…imprisoned in something. Because he hasn’t got what he needs to be creative…Such a man often doesn’t know himself what he might do, but he feels instinctively: yet I am good for something, yet I am aware of some reason for existing!…something is alive in me: what can it be!” Quoted in Brewster Ghiselin, ed. The Creative Process, 1952. Van Gogh’s words resonate with me. So often I sit at the keyboard with only an awareness of something there, something imprisoned that needs to…
Blocks and Blues
You can see a punch coming from a long way off. You think you’re tough enough to take it. You brace yourself. It knocks you flat. I knew my Dad was dying before he went into hospice care. I was fighting to get the family to stop torturing him with medical procedures and let him die with some dignity. A couple of weeks ago I got my wish and they stopped all support. Those last few days of him clinging to life were hell. I wanted his suffering over and now it is. So now that he’s at peace, I should think I would have some peace. I don’t. I…
- book design, E-books, ebooks, Immersive Fiction, interactive books, interactive fiction, myebooks, read an e-book week, writer's block, writing
Building Better E-books
Why don’t we have tons of dynamic, interactive, visually stunning e-books? The potential has been there for years. It has been there since project Gutenberg launched its e-text repository. It has grown with the first experiments in hypertext fiction and interactive adventure stories. The development of programming languages and scripts, advances in graphic design using HTML and CSS, all opened the doors to possibilities for building better books. Yet when I downloaded Calibre the other night and finally catalogued all of my 1,016 e-books, I was struck by how little evolution we’ve seen in the book. Most were plain text. A few had pictures. At one time websites were just text…