The rise of the machines!

I like seeing people reading books in public. Whether it’s on the bus, in the park, or people chilling in a café on their lunch break – it's good to see.

I think most people read to escape reality for a brief moment, at least I know I do. A good book, fiction or non-fiction, can temporarily remove you from the present, and transport you somewhere new. 

For example, I recently ploughed through Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open. It’s well written, and really takes you to the places it wants to – for better and for worse. When Andre is standing in front of hundreds of spectators, all cheering him after a grand slam victory, you can feel the excitement and electricity in the arena. Equally, when he is depressed and injured, you experience his melancholy.

However, with the rise of mobile technology, I wonder whether people can also find this escape in their tablets and smart-phones just as easily (facebook, twitter, tinder etc). I love my tablet (Nexus 7). It’s great for music, games, movies, reading etc. But are tablets and smartphones slowly eradicating the pastime of reading?

 

Nowadays, I usually do my reading whilst commuting to and from work, but as a kid, I couldn’t go to sleep without reading before bedtime. I’d read several chapters of The Hobbit, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, or some Hardy Boys stories, and then I’d drift into sleep and dream about them. If I had been exposed to our current standard of technology when I was younger, I’m not sure if I would have still been such an avid reader.

I'm still fairly new to e-books, only buying my first one last year, Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the end of the Lane, but I'm getting used to them, and buying more. But sometimes I get the urge to buy a paperback, like Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 - which I bought last month, and am still trying to figure out what it's about.

I have the Kindle app downloaded on my Android phone, and tablet, and find it easy to use. If I’m reading on my tablet one night, and then the next day I’m waiting for a train and don’t have my tablet on me – I can use my phone to continue my e-book from where I last bookmarked it.

I’m all for any advancement in technology, and hope that as we use our phones and tablets even more, the concept of reading e-books on our phones and tablets becomes more commonplace.

P.S. If you haven’t already got the Kindle app, download it here for free:

Android

Apple

The importance of dreaming

The ability to dream is a gift. 

Every night we all have a chance to experience the fantastic, bizarre and unreal from a first person perspective. Sometimes these dreams can reveal more to us than we would have probably liked, other times they can inspire us to do great things.

Here are a few examples of famous dreams:

 

• Paul McCartney dreamed the melody to the Beatles hit “Yesterday”.

• Google co-founder Larry Page dreamed about “downloading the entire web onto computers” at the age of 23. When he awoke he got to work straight away on concepts and ideas.

• Author, Mary Shelley, dreamt of the concept for her novel, Frankenstein.

• Whilst broke and very sick, director James Cameron dreamt about being chased by a metallic being with glowing red eyes. This dream led him to write and direct The Terminator. He also dreamt about the concept for his most successful film yet, Avatar.

We are also capable of dreaming during our waking hours, and it could be said that these dreams are just as, if not more, powerful than their nocturnal counterparts.

From these dreams humankind has been able to achieve feats which verge upon the borders of possibility. We have flown, we have split the atom, we have explored uncharted lands, we have cured disease, and we have landed on the moon.

However, our dreams need not be to create blockbuster movies, best-selling novels or to be responsible for technological breakthroughs. Some of us may dream to adopt a child, to get a university degree, to save a certain amount of money, or to learn how to scuba-dive!

Whatever the dreams may be, we must all strive to have them. It is crucial. Without dreams and ambitions, there is little purpose to life. Dreams are the gateway through which conceptions are executed – from raw nothingness, something is created.

Whether your dreams are big or small; please continue to dream them, and take action to bring them to life.

Building your personal brand

The other day I showed a colleague of mine this photo of my desk:

She found it amusing that I had my logo on my own computer’s wallpaper, and I suppose I can understand why. But if my logo is on my desktop’s wallpaper it’s for a reason. It’s to remind me of my brand, of why I write and what I want to achieve. If I don’t truly believe in my own brand, I can’t expect anyone else to.

But it got me thinking; what is a brand?

You don’t need to be a business (profit or non-profit), or have a commercial venture of any kind to need branding. We all need a brand. And by “brand” I mean something intrinsic yet intangible which represents us as wholly as possible. It goes beyond a simple logo, slogan or marketing gimmick.

We all know people with great branding. People with integrity, kindness and wisdom. The kind of people we go to when we need advice or reassurance. The kind of people who are quite literally...kind.

Likewise, we all know people we want to steer clear of. People we want nothing to do with because they are bad news. For whatever the reason may be these people are negative, bad-minded and/or cruel. Their brand stinks.

Without going into a rant, I think we should all take the time to nurture our personal brands. The majority of us spend countless hours and resources investing in the brands of others, for example – fawning over the mundane lives of celebrities, wearing our favourite labels, pouring many hours into our day jobs, being lifelong supporters of a sports team or player, and spending more time on social media platforms than we do with our loved ones and friends.

If we spent more time focusing on our individual brands I bet we would see vast improvements in all elements of our lives (work, health, relationships, finances etc).

What state is your brand in? Think about it. Congratulate yourself if you think it’s in a good place, and get working on it if it isn’t.

Short Tales Explained: Hallow

Last year I wrote a collection of short stories, mostly as a creative exercise and to get more content on my website. One of the stories I wrote, Hallow,  was based on an idea I had over 5 years ago whilst still living in London. I jotted the idea down on a notepad file on my computer and it sat there for a while, gathering digital dust.

The idea was always focused around a trio of friends at a Halloween party. The party has a rather tragic end, but without giving much away, the three friends find themselves in a dilemma once the party is over. A dilemma which will force them to work together in order to find their way out.

I always told myself I’d never write stories with vampires and werewolves in them, and I write about both in this one (also a few witches too). It just had to be done, and werewolves are badass. My only gripe with vampires and werewolves is that they have been portrayed so many times in media, and recently more than ever. It's hard to do anything original with them, but if they're part of a story, then there's not much I can do about it.

Hallow is actually the most likely short story of mine to be expanded upon and made into something longer. I’d like to eventually build upon the characters and the world around them in more detail, and set the trio off on a rather epic journey together. This wouldn't be a Twilight affair, as I don't know how vampires and werewolves can make it through a story without copious amounts of bloodshed. This is a tale with a fair bit of action in it, and isn't written for twelve year old kids.

At the moment Hallow has three parts to it, and all are on the website, but the final, fourth part is currently being written and should be done within a few weeks.

HP Lovecraft

I recently bought a small book of HP Lovecraft's short stories; it includes Call of Cthulu, Nyolartep, The Hound, Herbert West-Reanimator and a bunch of others.

This is the first time I had read any Lovecraft and after hearing Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Guilermo Del Torro and countless others rave about him, I thought I'd check him out.

The Pros:

He has a great way of cramming a lot of character development and scenery in a very short space. We know who Herbert West is pretty much after a few pages. A slight, blond haired, blue eyed, bespecled genius with a morbid streak. And it goes deeper as we learn Herbert is falling deeper into madness. But the story is told effortlessly and very quickly with great detail.
Lovecraft also has a great way of building tension; and even though the climaxes may not be as visceral or frightening as say Stephen King or Bret Easton Ellis's gore he allows the reader to imagine the horrors that await.

The Cons:

He is a racist.

Every description of members of the black race is abhorrent. "Negros" are ape like creatures from the unknown depths of the Congo; they are savages with arms so long that they almost appear to walk on all fours. And they are also mostly always engaged in some nefarious deed or crime.

His lack of variation of his descriptions of races other that of Anglo Saxons is a massive weakness, and is also unforgiveable. I don't buy the whole "it's ok, he was a product of his time" argument. So was Hitler, and so are the Neo-Nazis of today.

His hatred for blacks is distracting, but it also tells of something deeper: his own fear.

A common theme of Lovecraft's stories is that of immense and maddening fear, or to be more precise, terror; especially of things that cannot truly be described or perceived by the human mind. I believe Lovecraft was afraid, afraid of the African continent and all of its inhabitants. He feared black people, especially the men, and this runs parallel with the fear his own characters feel when seeing the redolent, hideous things from beyond this world.

Short Tales Explained: Necroleptic

I wrote Necroleptic during February and March of 2013. It was, and still is, my personal favourite of all my short stories so far, and I’m not quite sure why.

It is a tale of a young girl with very special medical condition; necrolepsy. Instead of falling asleep and waking up like most narcoleptics, young Emily dies momentarily...and quite frequently. I tried not to make her journey into the afterlife too clichéd, and wanted to avoid any real physical resemblance of the afterlife with real life, something I also tried to do in The Spirit Broker. In fact, Necroleptic and When Leaves Fall both contain references to The Spirit Broker in one way or another, and some of these links are quite subtle.  

Necroleptic is a different kind of story to the "New Eden" tales, such as The Jeweller and the Witch, Lady of the Snow, and the Hallow series; there is something a bit more serious in its tone.

I think the main message I take from Necroleptic is that we don’t know what comes after we die, it could be something magnificent, something terrifying, something beyond our comprehension, a mixture of the above, or simply nothing.

The only truth is that we are alive right now. Every person walking the planet today is a descendant of the oldest of our Race. We are all royalty to some extent; princes, princesses, kings and queens of our own line. We have made it thus far, through the brutal storm of time and chance. Therefore, if we are alive, and if our lives are somewhat liveable, we should enjoy the experience to its fullest. Because life doesn’t last forever, whereas death most likely does.

Digital Storm

Over the past week there has been a lot of online “noise” about self-publishing.

It started when acclaimed self-published author, Hugh Howey, launched authorearnings.com around 10^th February 2014. The site is dedicated to analysing Amazon’s “hidden” data in regards to publishing figures (sales, demographics, correlations between different factors – like review scores and pricing etc).

Amazon do not publish these statistics publicly, but Hugh and a friend of his had found a way to use a data-mining tool to siphon it from the website. As soon as it launched, authorearnings.com crashed due to high levels of traffic.

There have been pretty interesting findings in the data such as:

• “… 86% of the top 2,500 genre fiction bestsellers in the overall Amazon store are e-books”.

• 47% of Amazon’s daily revenue for genre bestsellers (mystery, thrillers, Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Romance) are e-book sales.

• Even though the revenue of self-published authors is half that of traditionally published authors (due to lower prices for e-books), self-published authors are making 50% more profit than the trad-published guys.

The list goes on, and it sounds like a sunny day in Self-Publishing Land. But we have to also take into account that there are always flaws in all data, so the figures are open to scrutiny. Also, authorearnings.com as a project, only studies Amazon’s data. This isn’t a bad start, as Amazon is the biggest online book retailer on the planet, but Apple’s iTunes Store, Kobo, SmashWords etc have all been missed out of the survey.

The Guardian newspaper has run a number of articles over the past week on this, and a look at the comments alone will see some divided opinions. But, whatever the data shows, and whatever the reader’s preference over print or e-book the fact is this:

times are changing.

Let’s take a look at some past examples of digitised media:

(VIDEO) Celluloid reel --> VHS & BetaMax --> DVD & BlueRay --> .AVI/.MPG/.MKV files etc

(AUDIO) Vinyl Disks --> Tape Cassettes --> CD’s --> Mini-Discs à MP3

(DATA STORAGE) Floppy Disks --> CD-ROMs --> USB Sticks --> “The Cloud”

With each passing decade we see ourselves stepping away from physical mediums towards the intangible. Even physical currency is being “challenged” by the advent of digital means – such as digital wallets and BitCoins. A recent article by Forbes states that mobile phone payment transactions will top $720bn by 2017, they were $235bn last year. Amazon, PayPal and Google are all scrambling to pioneer digital currency, and it may well be that within 5 years, our mobile phones will be the only device necessary to buy anything from groceries to real property

To wind this rant down, there will always be a place for physical books, which is a good thing. I want people to keep reading physical books (and not just because my mother is a librarian). But the fact is that e-books will eventually outsell physical ones, and that isn’t a bad thing.

All that matters is that readers keep reading, and that writers keep striving to write to the best of their abilities. If both hold up their end of the bargain, I'm sure they will eventually find each other.