How to turn your book into an app for iPad, Kindle Fire and other tablets.

I've been away with my parents and a broken hard drive, but now I'm home, it's spring, and everything's revving into life. I hardly know what to tell you about first: I'll write several blogs in the next day or two (where's that rat? I'll just have to start without him).

First you need to know about a fantastic opportunity from Dorothee Kocks / Beware the Timid Life: learning how to make your own book app. Packaging your own work for Kindle or the iPad might be the digital-era equivalent for writers of tidying up a manuscript and sending it to a publisher.

Dorothee's running an introductory, how-to webinar course for creating content for the iPad, Kindle Fire, or other tablets, especially intended for:

Children’s book authors Historical novelists and historians Nature writers/photographers Comic book or graphic novel writers Poets who want to read aloud or include visual content Artists Museum people and educators Or … accountants with alter-egos of any of the above

Read all about it here and sign up if you will. I'd like to sit in on the classes, starting on Saturday the 13th October (very early Sunday here in NZ, but Dorothee says we can listen to the recording later).

Dorothee knows what she's talking about. She's recently created an app that got Mamazon (now, that's an apt slip of the finger — make that Amazon) hot and bothered — they wanted to censor it. And that'll be the subject of a forthcoming blog.

Bryan Walpert, touching on love

Another week, another clutch of writers to meet. Up bright and early is Bryan Walpert whose short story collection, named as a Best Book of 2010, has the enticing title, Ephraim's Eyes.

When I was an undergraduate, a roommate and I split the cost of a couple of comic book subscriptions. The idea was to reduce anxiety during exams. I’ve always loved comics, and to see them just pop periodically through the mail slot (I’d always picked them up at a store) was miraculous. So I loved writing about a comic book reader who thinks himself  a superhero.

 But my story is not really about comics. It’s about love, or at least about what a broken heart drives us to. (And I’ve realized that’s what underlies most of the stories in  Ephraim’s Eyes, the collection that this  story is taken from—and, in fact, a number of the pieces in my first poetry collection Etymology and many in the forthcoming A History of Glass are love poems). I don’t remember what exactly sparked the idea for my slightly peculiar love story, and I certainly didn’t know it would be about love when it started. I do know that it took awhile to take  shape.  It stalled out, felt all wrong, until I realized it had to do with the story’s voice. I’d written in originally in the first person. When I started from scratch in the third person, it seemed to come together.

The problem, really, was distance, and that has a lot to do with the challenge of writing love stories—or love poems. The challenge is to find the right distance, one that does not keep a reader too far from the heart, but does not allow the story to stray into sentimentality. And it seems to me that kind of distance is increasingly important in this (seemingly jaded) age where any love story, to be powerful, might need to be 'slightly peculiar'. We often need to be surprised by feelings because, if we see them coming, there is a tendency, at least for some readers, to put up the kind of defences reserved for telemarketers. Distance helps to forestall the emotional duck and cover, and as a reader I’m always grateful for that sort of peculiar surprise.

Bryan’s links: 

http://bryanwalpert.com/

http://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/learning/departments/school-english-media-studies/staff/en/bryan-walpert.cfm