Revise, Revise, Revise is going on hiatus

I’m writing a book. But that’s not the reason for pulling out the tarps and wrapping this site in dust sheets for a while. Well, it is, a little bit. The fact is, I want to dedicate a blog to my book (which confusingly I’ve entitled Larry’s Book). The book is about one of Canada’s pioneers of palliative care, Larry Librach. It’s his last dispatches from the border between life and death. The final thoughts on the topic of a man who spent his working lifetime helping others to die well. So on the book’s blog I’m going to focusing on end-of-life care. Which means I’m probably not going to have the time to post anything here for a while. I’ve already redirected my own web address (www.phildwyer.ca) to the new site (which is at http://www.larrysbook.ca). I’m not taking this blog down. I may return to it when the manuscript for Larry’s Book is finished (I’m supposed to deliver it by June 2015). But I’m not planning on updating it soon.

If you’re following this blog I’m going to switch your follows to the new blog. If it’s not a topic you find particularly interesting, feel free to unfollow — I won’t be offended. I’m the one switching things on you after all. If you don’t follow this blog maybe you’ll consider following the End Of Life Blog. How we look after the dying is one of the most important issues facing Canadians at the moment. In the next 20 years the size of our aging population (the over 80s demographic) is going to double. That’s going to put a huge strain on the health care system. We’d better be ready for it.

Thank you for your interest. Please turn out the lights when you leave. Goodnight.

Larry’s Book — Dundurn, Spring 2016

Goodbye My Friend

Readers of this blog may remember something I posted back in February, about a certain homeless guy. That post was based on Danny. Danny haunted the spot outside the LCBO on Front Street, right next to The St. Lawrence Market. He had an unfortunate and often mutually abusive relationship with alcohol, so he wasn’t always exactly sober, and he had a habit, when a little oiled up, of shouting strange and often unintelligible things at the tourists who cluster around the market. He was always especially flustered on Saturday, when the neighbourhood is invaded by weekenders on the hunt for artisanal cheeses and breads, and fancy meats from Spain and Italy.

Danny was on my direct route to Starbuck’s, so I couldn’t avoid him on my daily coffee run. I generally tried to buy a paper from him every week, although sometimes his memory would fail him and he’d give me my money back and tell me I’d already bought one this week, which was never the case (my memory is pretty good about that stuff). On the other hand he often sold me a paper he’d sold me before, because his stock was a little ‘distressed’. Over the last seven years or so we’d struck up an odd kind of friendship. When I asked him his name, so I’d be able to use it, he said there was no point in exchanging names, as he’d never remember mine. He called me ‘lad’, ‘boss’ or ‘chief’ depending on his mood.

Danny died, ten days ago. Since then there has been a constant tribute to him on Danny’s corner. Sometimes this includes full cans of his favourite beer. The other evening, walking home, Natalie and I noticed a packaged apple pie on Danny’s chair. The next morning, Natalie tells me, it was gone.

To most people he was just some random homeless guy, selling the homeless guy rag outside the LCBO. But it’s clear to me, simply from the tributes and the response to his death that it has left a hole. As humble as Danny was, he was an important part of the community around here and he is badly missed by those (and there were a lot of us) who used to stop and chat, buy his paper, pet his many dogs (that was one of his jobs — dog sitting).

He leaves behind Tank, the old black lab that was always at his side. If anyone can give Tank a home you can call Animal Services on 311, as per the sign. Natalie and I would love to have him, but our condo is too small, and my allergies won’t allow it. Cruelly, the animals I love the most (dogs) are the animals I’m most allergic to.

I’m going to miss Danny. He’s an ever-present reminder that we don’t need to be rich, powerful or famous to touch people’s lives. We can even do it by standing rain, snow and shine, on a street corner, selling a homeless guy’s rag.

Larry’s Book: To be published April 2016

Eighteen months ago I set out to tell a story, a story I thought was important and becoming more so with every passing day; a story about palliative care. My idea for this story was to show palliative care physicians at work with their dying patients. I wanted to illustrate, in a piece of long-form journalism, the immense difference palliative care can make in the quality of life of dying patients. Because it’s one thing to be told that palliative care can make a difference, it’s quite another to see it demonstrated for yourself. That’s what I was hoping to do: demonstrate that difference, by showing readers that difference.

Life, as it often does, had other plans for me, and other plans for my story.

Charity begins… well perhaps it doesn’t

There’s this one guy, drunk old rummy, sells the homeless rag outside the LCBO. He’s a local character. Shouts at most everyone walking by. Shouted at me too, until I stopped one day and bought one of his papers. Now he simply nods and smiles, shares a joke: “Some days you get the elevator, some you just get the shaft.”

Giving something back – one person at a time

We change the world one person at a time. And, to my mind there’s no better way to change one person than to give them the gift of literacy. It is, after all, the mark of civilization. It’s one of the first things archeologists ask themselves when studying a culture: did they have writing?

Back in April, Natalie (my wife) and I were visiting the tiny Caribbean island of Bequia. (In case you’re wondering, it’s about nine miles south of St. Vincent, and about 90 miles due west of Barbados). On our third day we visited The Fig Tree for dinner, because its Friday Fish Fry is legendary on the island, we were told. Our server, Tiny, asked us if it was our first time on Bequia. When I said yes, it is, she dropped her pad on the table and threw her arms around me, saying “Welcome to Bequia”. I don’t think I’ve ever been hugged by a server before. Natalie received her hug, gracefully if a little reluctantly (she’s not normally a hugger).

It had been a long day. A lot of walking. A few beers. Natalie popped to the loo. While she was gone I wondered why there was a bookcase on the restaurant’s back wall, full of books. Mostly, from what I could see at a distance, YA and children’s books. When she got back to the table she said: “I wonder who Ms. Johnson is?”

“Why,” I asked.

“Because the bathroom walls are papered with notes from children, thanking her for helping them with their reading.”

“Ask Tiny,” I said. We did. It turns out Ms. Johnson is the restaurant’s owner, and she runs a Saturday reading club on the terrace. She roped us in to help, which we were glad to do.

We already knew there was a problem with literacy on Bequia, because before we arrived we’d contacted a couple of ex-pat Americans who had just set up an after-school teaching facility (Bequia Learning Centre) in Port Elizabeth (Bequia’s capital) to help kids graduate, so they could go to High School in St. Vincent. We’d spent a few hours one afternoon with the kids there chatting and handing over some supplies we’d bought with us from Canada. The kids were shy, the way kids everywhere once were around adults, but keen to learn. And grateful, so grateful, for the few simple boxes of pens, pencils and packets of stickers we’d brought with us.

Which got us thinking. We were planning to set up a writer’s retreat on Bequia, a plan which has since come to fruition. In our preliminary research we’d noticed that these retreats typically offer yoga, along with writing. Why not, we asked ourselves, offer something a little different? Why not give something back to the community we were visiting? And, if we had assembled a room full of writers, why not make it about literacy? Because if we could manage to touch these children’s lives with a few boxes of coloured pens and some bags of stickers, imagine what we might do with stories. Imagine what we might do if we helped them tell their own stories. How amazing would that be?

Ten alternative New Year’s resolutions

I’ve never been big on New Year’s resolutions. To my mind, the best time to fix something that isn’t working in your life is when you realize it isn’t working. If you decide you’re overweight in April, why not work on it then? Why wait to the randomly determined January 1st (when gyms will be packed in any case). But then I saw a stat.  that said more people who make resolutions in January carry through with them. So this year I’ve decided to break with old habits and attitudes, take a look at myself, and determine what needs to change. This, then, is my top ten list of things I will work on in the new year, in no particular order.

1. Dare to fail
   I read the following quote from Michael Jordan back in October: “I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occassions I have been trusted to take the game winning shot and I missed. I have failed over and over again in my life… that is how I have succeeded.”
   Fear of failure is paralyzing. It will prevent us from participating at all. Yes, rejection hurts. Yes, it dents our fragile egos. And it’s a lot easier to remain within our cozy den, away from all that hurt and rejection. But I won’t get better until I participate. That’s what Jordan was saying: you can’t make the shot until you miss it a couple of times (or a hundred, or a thousand) first. Every rejection contributes to success.
2. Give up
   Yes, I know this seems at odds with the previous resolution. But I don’t mean stop trying. I mean stop pressing forward in the face of inevitable failure. Sometimes a story just isn’t working, and no amount of tinkering is going to make it work. Sometimes it’s better just to abandon it and move on. I learned this lesson in business twenty some years ago. I was running the newsletter division of a magazine publisher in London. My boss, an accountant by profession, taught me that it’s OK to give up on a title that just isn’t working. Shut it down and move on to something that’s easier and more successful. There are always new opportunities somewhere. Why waste your efforts pushing against a closed and locked door?
   Also (on this same general theme) sometimes the book you’re reading is just awful, and won’t get any better. I’ve wasted too many hours with books I hated just because of my obsessive compulsive need to finish every book I start. It’s time for that to stop. Enough. From now on I’ll give a book fifty pages to capture my attention. If I’m not engaged at that point, I’m putting it aside and picking up another one.
3. Embrace my inner slob
   There’s one in all of us. The person who would rather hang around in the house all day in our PJs, playing solitaire on the computer, and reading trashy novels. Anything, rather than write. Wikipedia is a tremendous resource for procrastinating writers. You can waste hours on it, and chalk it down to research. The Internet in general, and email in particular are tremendous time sinks. Whole days just disappear down their gullets. Why would I embrace such behaviour? Arent’ we supposed to fight it? Confront it, and stare it down, until it turns and stalks away, its tail between its legs? Well, that’s what we’re told. But not all procrastination is bad. If you’re hesitating to get back to the writing, there’s probably a reason for it. You might be stuck, not knowing where the story goes next. You might be scared to ruin the great start you’ve made. We’ve all had stories unravel on us: fall apart under our fingertips. You might actually (imagine this) be tapped out and tired, your imagination exhausted by a crazy schedule. So I’m giving myself the permission to slack off every now and again, if that’s what my brain tells me it needs. Sometimes all it needs is the time and space to work out its next move, and bothering it with your need for the next sentence is not going to help. So get out of the way and let it think.
4. Stop working so hard
   This is one my mother-in-law is convinced I’ve already embraced. Largely because she doesn’t see writing as work (especially as nobody pays me to do it). The fact is, writing IS work. It’s hard, challenging work, that drains you, both emotionally and (surprisingly) physically. That’s the way I generally write. But it doesn’t have to be. Not always. Sometimes it can be pure fun. Human beings, I’m told, learn best through play. So I’m going to devote a bit more of my time this year to playful writing. Writing that I do for the fun of it.
5. Abandon my goals
   This is related to resolution four. One of the things that makes writing work and not play is those pernicious goals: there’s a contest we’re entering, a journal we want to get our work into. Nothing wrong with that, of course. If we don’t have goals in life we’ll never achieve anything. But if I’m to write playfully, I’ve got to stop focusing on these goals — something somebody else determines is a measure of success, and focus instead on the rewards of the writing itself. The fun that can be had in exploring different styles, voices, genres.
6. Break the rules
   I’ve spent the last several years working hard on my craft. I’m now at the point of diminishing returns: each book on I read on the craft of writing teaches me less and less, and reinforces old lessons more and more. Nothing wrong with that. It’s good to remind ourselves of what we already think we know, because it’s pretty easy to get slack and lazy, let’s face it. But the more literary journals I read, the more obvious it becomes that there are herds of writers out there, accomplished craftspeople, who work entirely within ‘the rules’. They colour within the lines. Their work is consistently good, but rarely really interesting. So I think I’m ready (now that I know them) to break the rules now and again. Not badly (at least not at first). Just for the hell of it, and to see what emerges.
7. Savour rejection
   This is somewhat related to resolution one, but it’s subtly different. Someone (I forget who) once said that the writers who are truly blessed are those who haven’t been published yet. Because they’re free. Free of expectations, critical shackles, the need to match their former achievements. They can write what they want. They can enjoy total and unshackled liberty. True, that’s because nobody’s heard of them, or still less, cares about what they write. But it’s still liberating to think that, with every rejection, that freedom is extended a little while longer. Just as long as it doesn’t last forever.
8. Stop deferring pleasures
   This year I’m actually going to do  with the things I’ve long wanted to, but haven’t because “I’ve got to get the book finished/the story collection done/a few pieces in journals” first. Forget that. If I want to walk the length of Yonge Street (1178 miles) to raise money for Toronto Rehab (who got me back on my feet after my heart attack) and blog about it, I’m going ahead and doing it.
9. Laugh more
   This is self-explanatory, and health-promoting. Particularly, I want to laugh more at what I write: I’m hoping I’ll be laughing because it’s genuinely funny, but I’m prepared to poke fun at it too, if it’s that bad.
10. Relax
    It’s better for my blood pressure. So much is out of our control in this world. It’s pointless contorting ourselves about outcomes we can have no influence or control over. I’m going to focus on the things I can change, and let the rest go.

So that’s it. My list for 2013. What are you going to change this year, and why?

The Next Big Thing: A blog chain of works in progress

Some weeks ago, my friend and writing circle buddy Laure Baudot invited me to be a part of The Next Big Thing blog chain. (Take a look at her posting here).

The idea’s pretty simple: talk about your work-in-progress by answering ten questions on it, and then link to the blogs of five other writers with their own works in progress. Kind of a sneak peek at what people are working on, and what may emerge in the next few years from our fertile, warped and often crazed imaginations. I agreed to take part. Then life intervened. My mother died (more on this below). I had to drop everything and travel to the UK for her funeral. Tim, my son and his beautiful wife Bea, came to stay for five weeks. Writeous Interruptus (Or is that blogeous interruptus?).

So I’m finally getting to it, some weeks late (apologies to all Laure’s followers who landed on my blog and were dead-ended). I’m breaking all the rules (of course) because two of the writers I’m linking to here are already linking to me (what is that, some kind of internet incest?), but who cares? I don’t think anyone is policing this. Also, I’m linking to one writer, Deepam Wadds, who I didn’t invite, but who has a Next Big Thing posting up. The more the merrier I say. So my five is actually six, but two of them don’t really count, because they’re really in someone else’s circle.

So here we go. These are the ten questions I’m supposed to answer:

1. What is the working title of your book?

Mother Of All Lies

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

I didn’t have an idea for a book. I had time, a passion to do it, and (to some extent) desperation. It was 2001 and the Internet boom had bust. I was working in Amsterdam at the European headquarters of a US Internet company, when the entire staff was laid off. That was in August. Under the Dutch employment laws I knew I’d have a few months on full pay while I looked for work. I’d always talked about writing a novel, but, apart from a really, really bad novel I wrote when I was 17, I’d never even made a start. This was the first time in my working life where I actually had time to write. What emerged was a hodgepodge of a first draft that was a total mess. I liken the process of discovering the novel hidden inside that draft to the work of the John Harmon character in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. He made his fortune sifting through giant piles of dust and rubbish for treasure. That’s what it’s been like.

 3. What genre does your book fall under?

I have a healthy distrust of genre labels. They’re useful for the marketing people at publishing houses, but I’m not sure they do writers much good. They tend to ghettoize what we do. If I had to pin a label on it, it might be literary fiction. I’d like it to be literary. That’s what I aspire to, and mostly what I read, but that doesn’t mean it’s posh or snobby necessarily. In fact, it’s pretty strongly rooted in working class culture. There are no soirees in my book, and there is plenty of snot and tears.

 4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? 

The antagonist is a strong female character whose gambling addiction fractures and damages her children’s lives. Though she’s in her late 60s when the book opens, there are flashbacks to her in her 30s, 40s and 50s. If I had a time machine, I’d put Maggie Smith in it and get her to play the part at every age. She’d be perfect. She could switch between the Downton Abbey character and the woman she plays in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (I forget her name). The antagonist is pretty much a blend of the wit and attitude of those two women.

The protagonist is harder, because he is four, ten, twenty-two, and in his mid-thirties in different scenes. Someone earnest and intense. Like a young Ralph Finnes. Or possibly (in any world in which a literary novel were made into a full length cartoon) Charlie Brown.

 5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A working mother’s gambling habit spirals out of control, wreaking chaos in the lives of her young family.

 6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I really want to find an agent. I’m a firm believer in the traditional model of publishing, for reasons I’ve discussed elsewhere. I would only self-publish it if I ran out of options. I suspect the same is probably true of many self-published authors (though certainly not all).

 7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

That messy, sprawling first draft was written pretty quickly. I think I finished it in early January 2002, when I was back living in London. It sat on my laptop’s hard drive for a further five years before I touched it. I knew it needed to be revised (actually, rewritten), but I moved to Canada in April 2002 and I was busy with a new job in a new country. I just didn’t have the time. I picked it up again in October 2007, after a heart attack. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve re-drafted it since then, but I’m saying it’s now in its 14^th draft.

 8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

That’s a tough question. To be honest, I find comparisons a little invidious. Especially since this is my first novel. I think others can make comparisons, but it feels a little presumptuous for me to do so. A lot of early readers have compared it with memoirs like The Glass Castle and Angela’s Ashes (I see why. Both books feature dysfunctional families, in which the children take on parental roles in order to save the family). But it’s not a memoir. I think my writing style is somewhere in the neighbourhood of Nick Hornby: accessible and not particularly dense and showy. But thematically it’s a million miles from Hornby.

 9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My mother. She was a gambler. An addict. A charming, beautiful liar, with a manipulative intelligence. As a young boy, I adored her. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. As I grew older and began to see her as she really was, I grew to hate her. The story arc of the protagonist, which is that of a love story in reverse, is pretty much the story arc of my relationship with my mother. Having said that, she was a huge influence upon me: she was a big reader, and she never once told any of her six children they couldn’t be exactly what they dreamed of being. Which is a gift I still cherish. She died at the end of October 2012.

Me and my twin sister Sally, age 3, with my mother.

10. What else about your book might pique your reader’s interest?

The editor I’ve been working with to polish the manuscript for submission calls it gritty. A gritty family drama. That’s because many of the scenes contain the kind of drama that happens in certain kinds of family (a teenaged son pulling a knife on his father, for example). There is at least one scene that my wife can no longer read in revision because it makes her cry every time she reads it.

But that makes it sound bleak and a little hopeless, and I hope it’s not that bad. It’s shot through with dark humour (which I find I can’t do without), but it’s a form of gallows humour. I hope it will make you laugh and cry, in somewhat equal measures.

I suspect it may be a woman’s book. I’ve had a few male readers, and by and large I get the impression they didn’t enjoy it as much as the women who’ve read it (in fact, I suspect that at least one of them hated it). I think that’s because it’s more focused on character development, and less driven by plot and big events. One reader complained there’s no sex and no important deaths. Not to give too much away, but there are five deaths. As to the no sex part, it’s a book about a boy’s relationship with his mother, so to my mind that’s probably a good thing.

Now that’s out of the way, here are the five, no six, no four (oh, you figure it out). Here are the writers whose works in progress sound worth exploring to me. I met all of them at The Writers’ Community of Durham Region, which is the most awesome writing organization in the world.

The aforementioned Deepam Wadds: deepam wadds. A dancer, a massage therapist and a fine writer, who won the WCDR’s short story contest last year.

Dale Long: Dale and I worked together for the first time in the Autumn, on a workshop on the rendering of accents, because both our projects have characters who are afflicted by them. He’s funny, and tends to come at things from an unusual direction. His blog is called: Inkstroke’s Blog

Ruth E. Walker: Ruth is a past president of the WCDR, and her fine debut novel, Living Underground, was published in the autumn by Seraphim Editions.

Sue Reynolds: Sue was also a past president of the WCDR. Sue is a writing instructor, and a fabulous writer.

Noelle Bickle: Boundbytheword. Noelle is sassy and funny. I haven’t read her book (yet) but I’ve heard a few excerpts and I can’t wait to get the whole thing in my hands once it’s published.

Mel Cober: Melly Loves Orange. Mel’s just finished her debut novel. What’s it about? Why don’t you click the link and find out?

Traffic Is Vanity

I was looking at this site’s stats the other day, and I re-learnt something I’d known a long time ago, from my days in magazine publishing: numbers are sheer vanity.

Like most bloggers I get regular spam promising me that if I just buy some little doohickey for the site I will explode on the Internet. My site traffic will soar. It will feature more prominently in Google searches. Etc. etc. Here’s why I ignore these messages (and probably always will): I don’t care about traffic — by itself, traffic means nothing.
Of course, it depends what you’re setting out to achieve. If you want to build a huge audience for advertisers, you need eyeballs: an audience. But if you think advertisers don’t care who that audience is, as long as you can show them big enough numbers, think again. Advertisers want to be able to qualify their audiences. That way, they can tailor their messages to their audience, and spend less cash getting their messages to the right consumers.

But I don’t really care about that, because I don’t write this blog to attract advertising (just as well really). So traffic — by which I mean sheer numbers — doesn’t concern me. Of course, I want readers. But not any readers at any cost.

So when I look at my traffic numbers and note that a large number of readers are driven to my site by (for example) searching for ‘ugly Afro’, I shake my head. These are not my peeps. They will take one look at the site and leave for ever, in all probability. And I don’t even care. I’m not interested in traffic for traffic’s sake. If that seems arrogant, it’s not. Far from it.

My major goals for this blog are a) to build a platform for my writing, and b) to achieve some visibility in the publishing world. Now, I realize those are mighty ambitious goals for a humble little blog, but I didn’t (and don’t) expect to achieve them overnight. If I achieve them at all, I will achieve them by slowly building an audience. A loyal readership. It’s a steady-as-she-goes, tortoise-not-hare approach. But it’s the only one that makes any sense, given my goals. To me, a reader who is also a literary agent, or an editor of a magazine is worth a million random page views.

I suspect, if you write a blog, the same is probably true for you too. So focus less on numbers (Seth Godin says he doesn’t even look at his) and more on your goals. If you’re looking to attract a certain type of reader, seek out their blogs and comment on their posts. Engage with them. Swap links. Quote them in your own blog and on your Twitter feed. Not willy-nilly, but in a disciplined way which will gain you a sustainable following.

Now, my other blog, that’s another matter. I started that for a bit of fun. I didn’t really have an aim in mind, I was just riffing for the hell of it. And (while I haven’t posted to it in a while) I’ll continue to add to it because it doesn’t actually take very long, and I have fun doing it. And that’s OK too.

July Book(s) Of The Month: Malarky & Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace

I’ll be honest, I chose this book almost entirely because of the author’s interview in the June issue of Quill & Quire. There were a couple of things in that piece that intrigued me: that the published book is more or less the same text that author Schofield delivered to Dan Wells at Biblioasis, her publisher; and the quote from John Metcalf, fiction editor of Biblioasis: “I read the first two pages and I thought, ‘This is a book we have to do.’ It was very well written, wildly funny, and strange.” I’m pleased to report that I agree with him. The voice of the narrator/hero of the book is delicious and quirky. It’s a delight. It took Schofield ten years to write, but who am I to carp about a glacial pace of productivity in the book-writing department?

I’ve paired Malarky (a novel) with Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace (a biography, of sorts), this month because 1) I’m reading both at the same time at the moment and 2) they are both about women of a certain age who are dabbling with extra-marital affairs. I didn’t arrange it that way, it just happened. I’d seen Mrs. Robinson reviewed on the Publishers Weekly site, and when I was picking up Malarky it just happened to be sitting on the display next to the cash till. I’d like to say I’m enjoying it as much, but I can’t. I’m finding it, truth be told, a little dull. It’s not the lack of prurient detail, it’s that really the only way into Mrs. Robinson’s mind and character is through her diary, and it’s an extremely flawed mediator.

Malarky published by: Biblioasis

Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace published by: Bloomsbury

 

Both books bought at: Nicholas Hoare.

A note on Book of The Month. New Year resolution: Buy one book a month at full price, from a local independent bookstore (for me, local means I can walk there). Let it be fiction, and by an author whose work I’ve never read before. Thanks to Red Sofa Literary for the idea.

Digital Dystopia – A Cautionary Tale

Yesterday, my friend Laure Baudot emailed me to tell me that one of her stories has been published by Found Press. She’s understandably stoked to have one of her stories picked up (I should think she’s also pretty happy that Sarah Selecky gave her work such a ringing endorsement and to be sharing an issue with the likes of Jessica Westhead). FPQ is a digital journal, so if you’d like to read Laure’s story (and a new story from Jessica Westhead) you can buy  it here (the price for the entire issue is $3.75).

However (and here we get to the cautionary tale part) be aware that you might have to labour a little before you have Laure’s words nestling gently on your hard drive. I did. It’s not Laure’s fault, and I don’t think it’s Found Press’s either. It’s just the current state of play in the digital book world. Found Press offers its stories (you can buy them by the story, for $0.99 each, or by the issue) in two formats – EPUB and MOBI. That’s entirely logical. They are currently the two most common formats for e-publishing, and give you the greatest coverage of devices and computing platforms for the least effort. So far so good.

Most of my digital book-buying has been done on my Kindle, which, for all its faults, does make the whole process quick and painless. Just a click of the buy button and the book is on the device a few seconds later. So I wasn’t prepared for the sink-hole which was about to open up at my feet when I chose the EPUB format and clicked the buy button on Found Press’s site.

I didn’t mind filling in the form which asked for my contact details. FPQ seems like something I’ll buy again in the future, so I was happy to take a minute to fill in my details. I waited for the email giving me access to the product. I recently purchased the second volume of Sarah Selecky’s Little Bird stories (not, you understand, by Sarah Selecky – it’s a competition she runs) by a similar process so at this point I was still sanguine that I’d have the issue any minute.

Sure enough, an email popped into my inbox a few minutes later, giving me a link which would download the file. I clicked it, and sure enough it downloaded almost instantly. So far so good.

Now I don’t think I’m a technological dinosaur. I may be the wrong side of 40 (ahem,,, 50) but my first degree was an electronics degree, and my masters was in digital systems. I’ve designed and built circuitry. I’ve coded in hexadecimal. I’ve worked on operating systems, and developed circuitry on digital simulators. I should have no problem accessing a stoopid little digital text file. Should I?

I imagined, in fact, that I’d probably have some little app already sitting on my Mac that would open the little doohicky up right away, and I could get reading. Notso. TextEdit wanted to have a go when I tried to open the file (I always try the simplest thing first – clicking on the downloaded file seemed like the way to go). I knew it wouldn’t work, of course, so I shut it down and looked around for another likely candidate. Adobe Reader didn’t seem interested, and neither did anything else. Back to the Found Press page. It suggested a couple of options:

EPUB files can be uploaded to and read on most non-Kindle e-readers. They can also be read on PCs and Macs, tablets, smartphones, and iPods, using a variety of free programs and apps such as Adobe Digital Editions, Stanza, Kobo, and iBooks.

My first inclination was to try Stanza. I downloaded it, copied it to my Applications folder and fired it up. Here’s what Stanza told me:

 

So, 20 minutes into the process, and I’m still no closer to getting hold of FPQ5, but I have a tangle of meaningless gobbledygook to untie. Never one to slavishly adhere to the advice of my parents (advice like Don’t Give Up at the First Obstacle and  Persistence Wins The Day) I gave up on Stanza and went in search of Adobe Digital Editions instead.

Now I’m a little steamed, so when it asks me (for the 2nd time in 20 mins) for my contact details, I’m less than impressed. I register, log in and finally (yay!) download yet another file, drag it to Applications and fire it up. Miraculously, it works. I now have FPQ5. At last.

But it was too hard to get it. Way too hard. WAAAAAYYYYY too hard. That’s me shouting. People less persistent than me (or more technologically challenged) would have given up a long time before they actually got their hands on the product. Actually, to be honest, I would have probably given up too, except I’d already paid for it. I felt as if I’d just crawled through razor wire and under a couple of machine gun emplacements to reach an enemy target. It certainly didn’t feel like shopping.

We have to figure this stuff out. People don’t want to be bothered with formats and standards, platforms and performance. They wanna read. That’s all. That’s why physical books are genius. All the fussing and nonsense that gets the book into our hands is hidden in the background, and we don’t have to deal with it. That’s the way it should be in the digital domain too. It should be invisible to the reader. It’s not my friend Laure’s job to figure this out, she just writes the stories. It’s probably beyond Found Press’s power to figure it out too – they are all about finding an audience for the stories. It’s the job of the software developers, the device manufacturers, the platform builders. Currently it’s a mess. Figure it out guys. Quickly. Before a generation of readers gives up and goes off to do something easier, and more fun.