I was born in 1983 and for more than half my life, reading books has meant paper. The first ebook reader I ever saw was in Waterstones book shop. It was one of the old Sony Reader ones, which means it can’t have been earlier than 2006 when they were released. Probably more like 2007. This was the first time I had seen an e-ink screen, and I was immediately interested. Unfortunately, I was a student at the time and the £500 that it would have cost to buy put it well outside of my price range.
The first ebook reader I owned was the Kindle Keyboard, which was the third-generation device, and the first at a price I could justify. Amazon released it in 2010, which means I would have been 27 years old when I started buying eBooks.
In the 13 years since I bought my first digital book, I have never not owned an eBook reader. Most of the time, that has been a Kindle, but I have also owned a Kobo and an Onyx Boox. They have always been e-ink devices.
I have bought paper books as well during that time, but reading that way no longer feels right. Although I love the aesthetics of a paper book, and I enjoy seeing them on my shelves, nothing can really beat the ease and convenience of reading an eBook.
Regardless of how many pages the book is, when it’s the eBook edition, it is comfortable to hold and read. I can carry around an epic fantasy novel with the same ease of a novella.
When I have tried going back to paper books (from time to time I get nostalgic for them) I have found I read much less. It’s difficult to hold a paper book open in one hand while stroking a cat. Paper books close themselves when putting them on the table to read while eating.
With a digital book, I can also read on my phone if I have forgotten to bring my eBook reader with me, or if I have been delayed unexpectedly somewhere. If I want to, I can buy the audiobook version as well and split my reading between audio and visual.
I have never been one to take notes in actual books. Something about writing in a book has always felt wrong to me. But I can do that with a digital book and not feel any sense of guilt. When I sync those notes and highlights up with a digital service like Obsidian, I can carry my book notes around wherever I am. As well as back them up, so I don’t have to worry about losing the book.
Last year I started wearing glasses for reading. With a digital book reader, I can adjust the size of the text so that I can still read myself to sleep without needing to wear them. That’s a convenience for me, but there are millions of people who need larger text books to read at all. With paper they are reliant on publishers putting out a large print edition, but with a digital reader they can make any book large print.
Digital books are not without their shortcomings. I have bought paper editions that feature illustrations, for example. But advances in color e-ink and increasing screen sizes of digital book readers are likely to eliminate those limitations in the next few years.
I also owe my career to digital books. While it’s now possible for independent creators to publish both paperback and hardback editions, it’s hard to imagine print-on-demand existing without the independent author movement being fueled by digital books.
I have nothing against paper books and expect to continue buying them from time to time. I will certainly continue publishing my own books on paper, because I love having a physical copy of them. But I love digital books most of all, and cannot foresee a time when they won’t be my primary reading method.
I have struggled to get into a reading groove this year but there are still some great books that I would recommend checking out. These are in no particular order.
The period of time between the Roman Empire leaving Britain and the Norman invasion isn’t something that is written about a lot. It was a time when Britain had multiple kingdoms and has always fascinated me. I’ve read a few books on the subject, but this is one of the best. Well written and captivating. I ended up buying it for the Kindle, as an audiobook and also as a paper book so I could see the pictures clearly.
I’ll be honest, it took me a while to get into this. I think I started it last year and then put it down for a few months before returning to it in April. I’m glad that I did. Enough has been written about these books that if you’re interested then you’ve probably read them already. But, if like me, you gave up on this one, maybe it’s worth another try? As soon as I finished this I read the next three books in the series.
The book I am currently writing is set in a steampunk world, so I thought it was a good idea to go back and read one of the first to be released. Very glad that I did because not only is it steampunk, but there is some travel to alternative realities, which is something I really enjoy. A very quick read.
I picked this up in a charity shop purely because I liked the cover and have enjoyed some of Leonard’s books in the past. It’s another quick read and an enjoyable change of scenery from the fantasy and sci-fi books that I had been reading up to this point in the year. Although there are some parts of it that are almost as unbelievable as magic swords.
Another book that has been highly influential. The Time Traveller’s Guide books are excellent and I have enjoyed the whole series. This one is going to be particularly interesting if you have enjoyed Bridgerton. There are some really interesting insights into that world.
Not the first time I have read this, but somehow I enjoyed it a lot more this time. Possibly because I came to it off the back of watching the excellent Starship Troopers film, so I was more primed to see the satire of the story. I am currently reading my way through the other books in the series and enjoying them.
So there you go, six books that won’t be a waste of your time if you decide to check them out. Let me know what you think if you do read them, or if there are others that you would recommend I read.
Cara works in the wealthy Wiley City but she grew up in the wasteland beyond the city walls. Her job is travelling to different worlds where other versions of her have been killed, because no one can survive in a world where their counterpart is still alive.
Review
The premise caught my attention. I’m a sucker for alternative reality stories. There is something different about this one though. Although there are likely an infinite number of alternative realities, people are only able to travel to those within a range of similarity to the base reality, which in this case is 380. So the realities they visit aren’t very different to the original.
The differences are more about the people, which means the main character is able to learn more about the people on Earth-Zero (the base reality) by talking to their counterparts. Which is a much more subtle thing than I’m used to seeing in this type of story.
Earth-Zero, by the way, isn’t our Earth. It is metaphorically similar in the differences between the wealthy and the poor, but is not the same.
The characters are interesting and feel fully-realised. The differences between them and their counterparts are situational. Something different happened to them in their history, but in most cases they are essentially the same person.
The story itself takes a little while to get going, but that time allows the reader to learn more about the characters and start caring about them. Which, given how complex Cara is, probably couldn’t be done any quicker. At first she isn’t an easy person to like, but by the end I really wanted her to succeed.
Along the way there are a lot of twists and turns. More than one chapter ends with a revelation that changes how you view the characters.
Overall I really enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anyone who wants a story with alternative realities, but isn’t really about alternate realities.
As of last night I officially own the domain name JRVPress.com
This is the name for the company that I will be using to publish my books going forward.
The name stands for Jude Robert Victor. This is the name of my oldest son.
Jude was born on 12th July 2013 and he died suddenly and unexpectedly on 1st June 2021.
I haven’t written about Jude’s death here yet and now does not feel like the time to do so. What I will say is that Jude loved books. He devoured them, both metaphorically and literally. We have dozens (hundreds?) of books that still have his tooth marks in them.
It seems like a suitable name for a publishing company. I think he would have appreciated it.
There is a lot of money in distraction. A lot of time and effort goes in to ways to make us spend more time on social media, browsing websites, checking our messages. There is a lot of money on the table for the companies that can convince us to spend the most time on their products and services.
I struggle a lot with distraction.
Last week when I was sick, I spent a lot of time online. Enough to make me sick of checking the same websites repeatedly. Enough that I felt as if I’d read everything worth reading (and plenty of things that weren’t) on Reddit. I didn’t have the energy to do much more. I was distracting myself because I felt unwell.
On Monday, I went out for lunch with my mum. We were talking about reading and she told me she used to read two or three books a week but now can’t concentrate for long enough to read books at all. I told her it was because she had Facebook on her phone. She then told me she’d read they were going to charge for Facebook, which I explained would never happen, but I realized she was waiting for something like that to save her from the distraction.
When the Reddit blackout was happening to protest the API changes, I saw a few posts of a similar nature. People saying it was a good thing because if they couldn’t use their favorite app, they wouldn’t want to use the service at all. There seems to be a similar sentiment regarding the destruction of Twitter / X that is currently happening.
We recognize that these services, and the way we are using them, are problematic, but we are also waiting for someone else to come along and save us from them. Whether that be the hoax of Facebook charging users for the service, or a service becoming less appealing. I don’t see many people taking a stand and making changes because they know it is beneficial for them.
Like I said at the start, there’s a lot of money at stake for these companies. Even if the current ones became unusable, there will be others to take their place. Distraction is big business, and it’s going to be even bigger once companies convince us to walk around with headsets strapped to us all day long. I just don’t see a world in which someone else comes along and saves us from these distractions.
If businesses are going to put in so much money and effort into keeping us distracted, it seems reasonable that we might need to do the same to avoid or escape from them. That’s where I have ended up. It has meant getting over the nagging voice in my mind that says things like ‘just stop using it’ and ‘that’s overkill for avoiding looking at your phone too much’. It has meant accepting that I have to invest a fraction of the time and effort being used to distract me, to escape.
I am typing this blog post (at least the first draft) on an e-ink screen. The first draft fiction that I wrote this morning way typed on the same screen. It is not as quick as a computer monitor, and everything is in black and white, but it doesn’t distract me. There is no part of me that thinks I could do a quick command-tab over to check Reddit, or whatever. My phone (an iPhone, for now) has nothing much on it. If I am at home and want to listen to music, I will use my record player. If I am out and about, then I have an old MP3 player.
There are other things as well, but I think you get the point.
I do not think this is a one and done situation. Technology keeps changing, more money keeps being invested and new systems for distraction keep coming. There will be temptations ahead, and it may cost me more money, and more convenience, to fight back against it. I do not think there is anyone else coming to save me from these distractions, so I am going to have to keep saving myself.
It’s no fun being sick. It’s even less fun not feeling sick but not being able to do anything because you might still be infectious.
I woke up yesterday feeling a lot better but when I took a Covid test it quickly showed that I am still positive and that meant back to my chamber of isolation. It came up so quickly and the line was so strong that I think I have a lot of the virus still in my system.
So here I am, sitting in my office while Tamzin and Oscar are out doing something fun in town and I can’t join them.
I don’t think I’m totally recovered yet. Still have that virus feeling of hot skin and I don’t have a lot of energy, but I’m sick of being on my own. Yesterday I watched a couple more films and lots of The Simpsons and Family Guy episodes.
It’s the last full week of Oscar’s summer holiday and I haven’t been able to enjoy it with him.
On the bright side though, neither he nor Tamzin seem to have gotten Covid. That’s good. Also no reports from the people who I saw at the weekend coming down with it. I guess I have taken this one for the team. But it’s still frustrating.
It’s pretty common for movies to be re-released as ‘remastered editions’ or ‘directors cuts’. It’s less common for it to happen with books. And I’m not sure why that’s the case.
I started publishing about ten years ago, and I have learned a lot during that time. I have gotten better at writing and publishing and I want my work to reflect that.
A lot of the stories that I have published haven’t sold particularly well, despite getting some reasonable reviews. Part of the reason for that is that I have done no promotion. One reason I haven’t done is because I don’t feel confident in the books themselves. I wouldn’t say there is anything wrong with them, although I suspect they read amateurishly and don’t represent the best I can produce.
Which is where these remastered editions come in. I am going through all my backlist titles and re-editing them and making them as good as I can today. Once I have done that, I think I’m going to feel a lot happier promoting them to people.
Avoiding the Star Wars Problem
I was born in 1983, just before Return of the Jedi came out. There were no new films produced until I was almost an adult. Star Wars was something I was always aware of and when the original films were re-released, I saw them at the cinema. Star Wars was cultural background, so I heard all about the problems with the new editions.
Although my backlist is not Star Wars, I am keen to avoid changing things that change the stories. I don’t want to have a Greedo shooting first moment. So I am limiting the changes I can make.
These remasters are a spit and polish. They are an attempt to improve what is already there and make it as good as they should have been in the first place. That’s why I’m looking at grammar and spelling and making things clearer where they aren’t already clear.
This is also a question of time. I believe that the best thing I can do to get more readers is to write new stories, and that is what I am using most of my time for. But if those readers want to delve into what I have written previously, I want them to enjoy the experience, not give up and say that my past work is terrible.
The First Remaster
I have gone back and forth on what the first release should be. If I was further ahead, then I would go with the zombie books, which are by far the most popular titles. I have, in fact, already remastered the first book in the trilogy and started work on the second. But then we have Halloween coming up and I thought it would be good to have something ready for that.
The first remaster that I will release is Abomination. It’s a haunted house story. It’s a standalone title. My plan is to have it ready and published in October so that I can promote it for the spooky season.
I have Covid again. It’s my second time. Not sure how I got it. I had a great weekend and felt fine, but on Monday I woke up at 4:30 in the morning feeling terrible and the thought popped into my head that it was Covid. I went back to sleep, but when I woke up, I took a test and here I am on Wednesday.
Luckily Tamzin and Oscar don’t have it. Although that means that I am in isolation, stuck in a bedroom, feeling sorry for myself.
It’s not as bad as the first time I got it, which was about a year ago.
Still not sure how I could have got it. When we went to London a week ago, we were the only ones on the underground wearing masks. It seems like that was too long ago to be the time. It also seems like too little time between seeing people on Friday and getting it on Monday. The line on my test was really strong, so I guess I’d had it for a few days before showing any symptoms.
I am still doing some things. I got a bit of writing done yesterday, although I didn’t feel like I could write a blog post afterwards, which is my usual way of doing things.
As well as reading, I have watched some films and TV. Yesterday I watched a few episodes of For All Mankind, the new episode of Futurama and Ready Player One. I started watching The Man of Steel in the evening but fell asleep halfway through.
Today I am writing this blog post first. Later on, I will do some more writing. At the moment, I am only aiming for 1,000 words a day to keep my head in the story. It’s slow progress this way, but things will pick up when I feel better and Oscar goes back to school.
This is all to explain why there hasn’t been a new blog post from me for a few days.
I wrote a post a few weeks ago during the whole thing with Reddit changing the API rules. I never posted it and it’s not relevant anymore, but it made me think about the digital tools I use.
It’s not as if anyone ever thought that Reddit was a not-for-profit, but the sudden change of rules still caught everyone off guard. In the weeks since things have settled down and if you go on Reddit now, it’s like nothing ever happened. I don’t know if you can say the same about Twitter / X because I haven’t been back since I deleted my account.
The thing is, these places are social media platforms and there is an unspoken agreement that we give them content in exchange for a mechanism which allows other people to view that content. I’m kind of uncomfortable with that agreement for several reasons, but it is what it is. We accept they are going to make money from our content, so the fact that Reddit and X have done so, in a way that has upset a bunch of people, is annoying but understandable.
What about places that aren’t social media platforms?
This is the one that really gets me because there are a lot of places online where we put important things on the assumption that it is going to remain there. Or that we are going to be able to continue accessing it. I used to do it and sometimes I still do. But it makes me uncomfortable because they can change the rules at any moment.
It’s not entirely clear to me what the answer is to any of this. I try to do as much of my writing as I can in plain text and use local storage. I started this blog back up again. I am still looking at ways I can manage the content I create and keep ownership of it. If the changes at Reddit have shown us anything, it is that building a business on someone else’s platform is precarious.
It’s commonly accepted that the first draft of every story is going to be rough. There will be spelling mistakes, grammar errors and, even if you are a planner like me, there will be plot-holes you hadn’t considered. It’s something you know going in, but you know you will get a chance to work on it later to fix those things.
If you thought you had one chance to write the story, only a single pass to make it perfect, that would be scary. Aiming for that level of perfection would make it hard to even start.
So why do I let it stop me with other things? Why have I waited until now to start blogging again? Because I wanted everything to be perfect before I started. I didn’t consider the fact I would learn much faster by writing and publishing these blog posts than I would by just thinking about it.
The same was true of publishing. I haven’t done much recently for reasons that I will write about one day, but ten years ago I just started putting things out, trying different platforms and methods and I learned a lot in the process. But I never felt like I could do the same with the other aspects of publishing and marketing and all that fun business stuff.
I think that for me, part of it was worrying that people wouldn’t forget. That I would make one mistake and never get a second chance. Which is pretty crazy. I’m a normal person, I’m not going to do anything that would upset people. Realistically it’s far more likely that no one would notice what I’m doing.
Which is why I’m trying this new thing. Considering everything a draft that I can work on and improve and get better at. It’s going to be better for me to try stuff and fail than to never try because I don’t think it’s going to be perfect.
