Saturday, July 22, 2023

The Abortion Debate From Both Sides

In my upcoming novel, Just to Starboard of Epcot, two employees of a conservative media studio discuss the abortion issue on the day Roe v. Wade is overturned.



Leith says “When I think about the abortion issue, it seems to me that somebody should be an advocate for the embryo, or the fetus. It can’t speak for itself, so there should be someone who can speak for it.”

Nicole says “Yes. I do acknowledge that point. It’s why it’s such a complex issue. The fetus had no say in its conception, so shouldn’t it have a say in its termination? But shrewd old guys at the state level shouldn’t be the advocates who speak for the fetus. They don’t know enough. They know how to get reelected and how to block bills they don’t like. But what do state legislators know about biology, theology, philosophy, psychology? What qualifies them to make it illegal to perform or to seek an abortion in their state?”

Leith nods as he thinks. “If I’d known you were this passionate about it, I wouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“It just frustrates me. I knew what the Supreme Court’s decision was going to be, but having it confirmed by the breaking-news text on my watch bothered me. More than I thought it would.”

“…But, you must’ve considered at some point that the life of the fetus is an actual human life, and terminating that life qualifies as homicide. There’s some debate about whether life begins at conception or at some later point, like when a heartbeat is detected. But still it’s a life, a person, whether or not there’s a heartbeat or brain activity. It still has to be viewed as murder.”

“You understand justifiable homicide.”

“Yeah but—”

“That line of reasoning would say that justifiable homicide is still murder. Any termination of a human life is homicide, no exceptions. So when a soldier kills an enemy soldier who is trying to kill him, he’s still guilty of murder.”

“But those are situations where the person killed represented a serious threat. Probably most terminated pregnancies don’t represent a threat to the mother or the fetus. Those abortions have to be viewed as for-convenience.”

Nicole considers this and shakes her head a little. “I don’t think convenience is the right word. …If you could find a large sampling of women opting for an abortion who haven’t experienced any harassment from pro-lifers, when you interviewed them you would probably find that almost all of them still find making the decision and going through the procedure very stressful. Even without the harassment, it’s still a difficult experience for most women. Too difficult to be just a convenience.”

“Difficult because they know it’s homicide. And they know that the birth represents no danger to them and would otherwise produce a healthy infant.”

Nicole nods. “Yeah, a complex issue, isn’t it? But that line of reasoning assumes that most abortions for convenience are elected by wanton women who don’t want to face the consequences of their lifestyle. Think about it. If you could read the minds of most pro-life protestors, you’d probably find that that was their primary motivation. ‘These wanton women must be stopped from killing so many fetuses! They’re serial killers!’”

Leith pictures this. “Okay. Probably.”

“But if you studied the actual data, I know you’d find that most women who have an abortion”—scratching the air—“for convenience don’t fit that descrip­tion at all. Generally, most wanton women know how to avoid pregnancies. And it’s misguided and cruel to accuse a typical woman agonizing over the decision, of being wanton. It’s misguided, but it’s what motivates most protests and harassment.”

Leith nods. “Yeah, probably. But aside from the protestors, the woman agonizes over the decision because she knows it’s homicide. If it weren’t, the decision would be like deciding to have her gallbladder removed.”

Nicole naeads a moment. “A woman doesn’t develop maternal feelings for her gallbladder. When a woman finds out she’s pregnant, it’s instinctive for her to begin feeling maternal toward what’s in her womb, even if it’s still just at the embryo stage and isn’t much more than a blob of cells. A maternal attachment naturally begins with the new life that’s been placed in the woman’s care. That’s the reason for her agonizing over the decision. Except in cases of rape, where the woman wants to get the ugly thing out of her body because she loathes the rapist who put it there, except in those cases, a woman will notice her maternal instincts emerging, to some degree, even if she wasn’t expecting to. It’s the emotional attachment and the feeling of responsibility for the new life in her care that she agonizes over.”

Leith nods, digesting this. “Okay. …But it still fits the definition of homicide. Even if a person loves the person he kills, it’s still homicide if it isn’t in self-defense.”

Nicole nods while she thinks. “You remember Terry Schiavo.”

He scans his memory. “Yeah. The woman in a vegetative state. A lot of legal hoopla over removing her feeding tube. That was a sad story. The parents never giving up hope that she would regain consciousness.”

“Mm-hm. So, whoever it was who finally removed her feeding tube, killed her. She was murdered. Even though seven years of legal battles ended up with the court deciding that her husband had the legal right to say that he knew she wouldn’t want to be kept alive artificially like that, and the legal right to decide to terminate the life-support. She was comatose for fifteen years, eight years before the legal battles started. She represented no threat to anyone. So the termination of the life-support was for convenience, in your line of reasoning.”

He thinks Why do I get myself into these discussions? “Well there’s nothing that says the judge made the right decision, he just had the legal authority to make that decision.”

“Since it was for convenience, the nurse or technician who removed the tube, as well as the husband, should’ve been tried for first-degree murder. The jury might’ve acquitted them, but that would just make them accessories to murder.”

Leith chuckles. “You are persuasive. I think the difference here is that Terry had been an adult before she became comatose and probably discussed the topic with her husband. It could’ve come up just in casual conversation, but it would still be a valid indication of her thoughts. A fetus doesn’t have that option, to express what it would prefer.”

“Oh you think a fetus would always choose to be born, if given the choice? Born into whatever circumstances it would find?” She chuckles. “The last time I checked, we still believe in Heaven. Don’t we? A fetus given a choice between immediately going to live with God and living in his glory, or being born here on Earth in its fallen state, the fetus would always insist on being born?”

Leith smiles. “Yeah, there is that.”

“But, seriously… In your line of reasoning, even with knowing Terry’s thinking on life-support, you would say that removing the feeding tube still has to be defined as homicide.”

Leith shrugs. “Her parents were evidently willing to continue the life-support indefinitely, until she died naturally. Although she might’ve outlived them, and then the question would come up again. But there wasn’t a compelling need to terminate life-support at that point.”

“Yeah, that was a difficult one. It could’ve gone either way. And actually it would’ve been a right decision either way.”

You’re saying that? So you’re admitting the possibility that the other decision would’ve been right?”

She looks at him a moment as if she’s wondering if he’s paying attention. “I’m admitting the possibility that the other decision was also right. You could call it superposed states, until they’re collapsed into one or the other. With a fetus… the wrong decision is for the mother to be forced to give birth to a child she doesn’t want, or that she doesn’t want only because she’s at the wrong stage in her life. The child is not going to have a very happy life not being wanted right from the start.”

Why do her arguments have to sound so logical? “That’s something to consider, yeah. But we can’t know the future. We can’t terminate a life for a tenuous reason like it may be an unhappy life. Any life has the possibility to turn out happy.”

“Where’d you learn that? Deepak Chopra?” Leith chuckles. “I actually agree. But the decision to terminate or not has to be the mother’s own decision. It can’t be left up to legislators or rabid activists. What do they know about the mother’s life? And she can’t be labeled wanton if she makes the decision to terminate her pregnancy. How do they know she’s wanton? If terminating a pregnancy is murder, then so is removing life-support from a dying patient, which occurs much more frequently than abortions occur.”



Sunday, June 19, 2022

Prodding an Innovative Company to Innovate

Dear Mr. Bezos:

Subject: A request that Kindle Direct Publishing allow video and audio tags in Enhanced Typesetting

Imagine if the Harry Potter ebook series included multimedia eNovels, with video, audio, music cues, and JavaScript to animate graphics. What Harry Potter fan wouldn’t love an ebook that merged the novels with the computer games, clips from the movies, and additional footage created just for the book, and even accessed Alexa to turn on appliances or trigger phone calls or texts at certain points in the story?

The multimedia eNovel would open new avenues for creativity, without affecting at all the current state of the traditional text-only novel. The two forms of fiction would exist side-by-side, with the multimedia eNovel presented as a new medium—the mNovel, or something similar.

The ability to enhance the eNovel with media is available now because the epub3 format already supports a long list of features. That part of the technology has already been created, and I can imagine that the W3C Advisory Board and the DAISY Consortium would encourage KDP to expand its support to include all of the features. Currently there is a long list of features that aren’t supported by the Kindle.

Because a typical multimedia eNovel would be somewhere around 90% unformatted text, the fixed-layout format isn’t practical. Too much of the book would be displayed as fixed text on a fixed page. What is needed is a form of reflowable text that allows carefully formatted media to flow along with it.

I used the HTML-editor apps Sigil and Calibre to create my own multimedia eNovel, and all of the features worked correctly in the apps’ preview panels. When testing my ebook on Kindle, I compiled lists of what features work and which don’t when viewing an ebook. I submitted the lists and other information to KDP Customer Support, and after a lengthy exchange of emails, I received the final reply “As per our technical team, the audio/video tags aren’t supported in reflowable format currently. However, I will take your concern as feedback and pass it on to my business team for consideration in the future.” Everyone with whom I corresponded was very helpful, and the most recent case number is #13853778 in case you’re interested. But I had received the same type of reply on 5 November 2021. I suspect that the topic was discussed by the business team, and the decision was made to maintain the current status.

I do believe Star Wars fans would be excited by the availability of a new kind of product, a multimedia eNovel with clips from the films, music cues, and special effects zinging across the page. On my own I was able to, for example, animate fireworks splashing across a page in my ebook while an orchestral anthem plays, triggered by tapping a play button embedded in the text at a specific point in the story. The effect is fun. It enhances the reading experience. Imagine what Disney, with their resources, could do with an eNovel. But no studio or publisher is currently able to provide that kind of experience with eNovels in the Kindle Store. It's as if KDP is keeping a finger on a vein and saying that the blood shouldn’t flow there. Please consider having KDP expand the number of epub3 features supported by the Kindle.

Thanks very much.



Thursday, November 04, 2021

Continuing to Push KDP In a New Direction

Dear KDP:

I converted my .epub file to the .docx format and was able to open it in Kindle Create. My reaction is as follows.

I would like the cover and some of the images and videos to be able to bleed to the edges of the screen.

It looks like Kindle Create doesn't implement position:absolute, float:left/right; z-index:-1, font-family:sans-serif, @font-face, @keyframes, small caps, audio/video autoplay, JavaScript, border-radius, transform:rotate, filter:drop-shadow, margin, image aspect-ratio, body background-color, text-indent, image alpha-channel, or text-decoration:none.

What it does well is page-break-inside:avoid, font color/size, section re-ordering, small inline images, drop-cap, div background-color, hanging indent, and white-space:nowrap.

When I tried to add paragraph first-line indents, I noticed that it only affected the paragraph where the cursor was positioned. When I tried ctrl-a to select all, nothing was selected. Each paragraph would need modified individually.

You can imagine how reluctant I am to go through the daunting task of making the changes with Kindle Create. The book is around 90k words. I have about 40 original music cues that would need to be inserted individually, and about 20 videos. But without position:absolute and z-index:-1, videos and still images wouldn't be displayed properly.

I understand that probably the vast majority of KDP's submissions need to be guided through the process with Kindle Create so that crazy-quilt books can be published as nice-looking books. Kindle Create perfectly fills that need. Some writer/designers, however, want to push the edges of the standard novel into entirely new areas and create an entity that needs a new name, like the meNovel, for multimedia eNovel, or something like that. It's innovation, creating something that didn't exist before.

I can't believe that one of Jeff Bezos' companies wouldn't be interested in innovation. Jeff Bezos' company? Amazon changed how the world buys things. William Shatner was able to break the record as the oldest astronaut. This is a very small innovation by comparison, to let a writer/designer position a stylish video behind the text to play as the reader continues reading. A book already completed in the ePub3 format. This suggestion, of course, is coming from a very insignificant writer, but imagine if Fifty Shades of Gray had been a multimedia novel. Can you imagine the number of downloads?

I hope KDP will open a new gate for writer/designers like me to try new things. The gate that's available now is too restrictive.

Sunday, October 31, 2021

The Kindle Previewer

My feedback to Kindle Direct Publishing:

I’ve just paged through my multimedia novel with Kindle Previewer and I’m excited that we’re getting closer to the point where a reader can experience a media-heavy eBook as the writer/designer intends. I think of the multimedia novel as an entirely new medium that is situated between standard novels, movies, games and apps and can utilize aspects of all of them. Because a multimedia novel is primarily text, it doesn’t work well as a fixed-format eBook, but the current state of eReaders doesn’t allow for careful formatting to flow along with reflowable text. However, the ePub3 file format does, and it’s just a matter of getting eReader developers to utilize all of the features available in the ePub3 format.

A standard novel is displayed beautifully on most eReaders, and that doesn’t need to change. But the features available in the ePub3 format are just too tempting for a very visual writer to ignore, and in the multimedia novel, the writer/designer asks the reader to relinquish some control over the display of the novel so that the writer/designer can provide a unique experience. Some readers would, of course, react with something like “I don’t think audio or video have any place in a novel,” and they’re right regarding the standard novel. The multimedia novel would exist side-by-side with the standard novel and not influence its design, but the multimedia novel shouldn’t be squeezed into the parameters of the standard novel.

After some research, I’m still not clear on where the KF8 format and the Fire eReader fit in with ePub3. I used Sigil to create my multimedia novel, and the Sigil preview panel displays it with all the features I’ve written into the xhtml except audio autoplay. Sigil doesn’t paginate, and so I don’t know if it observes page-break-inside:avoid. Kindle Previewer displays most of what my xhtml includes, and additions I would like added to it are discussed below.

A small thing, but I would like the book to open with the cover rather than page 1. Most cover designers put a lot of work into designing the cover and would like the reader to see it as more than a thumbnail image.

I would like the option to have no margin imposed on the display of the eBook. Designers of eBooks would like to have option to bleed images to the edge of the page that print designers have.

I don’t know if portal dimensions apart from the physical screen dimensions are used to calculate the layout of a page, but I would like a width of 100% to refer to the edges of the actual glass of the device, or its physical display area, if different from the glass. The aspect ratio of full-bleed images should be retained, of course, and not stretched to fit the screen, but using the physical dimensions would seem to provide consistency with image bleeds on devices with different dimensions.

When I choose text-decoration:none, I would like an underscore not to be imposed on the text. In my table of contents, a light background color indicates the live aspect of the links, and the imposed underscore degrades the page design. When I include a link in the body text of the book, I underscore it in the CSS.

I’m happy that small inline images and large images behind body text are displayed correctly. Thanks! Well done.

I’ve designed a few pages so that video behind text and audio will autoplay on page-turn. Please enable that. As a notice to the human reader, I’ve included a symbol at the end of the previous page that audio will begin on page-turn. I’ve also included a play-pause button at the top of the page with audio/video so the reader can stop the playback if desired. Instead of the default controls, I provide an inline play-pause button whenever audio and video are available. In a context like this, I think the concerns regarding misuse of autoplay are addressed.

When returning to a previous page, the amount of text displayed is sometimes different than it was when the page was initially viewed. It seems that it would be good if the layout of each page were frozen when first displayed. The reflowing of the text going forward is good, but, assuming there have been no changes to the text or layout, having the text reflow on paging back isn’t really necessary and could lead to confusion.

Please allow for the alpha channel of .png files. Currently, the transparent areas display as black.

When an image behind the text appears at the bottom of a page, it can be displayed cropped on the page and then uncropped on the next page. The test for page-break-inside:avoid should probably occur earlier to avoid displaying the cropped image.

Thanks for incorporating @font-face and allowing changing the color of portions of body text. I haven’t encountered that often with other eReaders. Some of my text I’ve reformatted with font-family:sans-serif, but it displays as serif like the surrounding text. I would like it to render as the device’s default sans-serif font.

Please enable transform:rotate(), filter:drop-shadow(), and window.navigator.vibrate().

Please enable changing the background color of the body tag and disabling the selection of background color by the human reader. This change from the norm is probably the one that is the most important in educating the reader that the multimedia novel is a different platform and the reader is asked to relinquish some control over its display. When used judiciously, background color can significantly enhance the reader’s experience.

I positioned a video behind the body text with margin-top:-5em, and the result is that five lines of text overlap the text above it. An odd glitch occurs in the same chapter. The last two paragraphs are displayed about 20 paragraphs early, overlapping part of the text where they appear, and the chapter ends without those paragraphs. In the xhtml, those two paragraphs are preceded by an audio file and a JavaScript script controlling the playback of that audio file. Two other scripts appear earlier in the file and the text renders correctly, except for the first overlapping text. In total, the file includes a background-color change in the body tag, two images behind the text, scripts for two audio files, and a script for a video file behind the text.

Some of the subsequent chapters exhibit similar misplaced paragraphs and incorrectly positioned .jpg images.

In the Conversion Log, the message “Please remove the audio/video tags and ingest the source” appears frequently. I don’t know what is meant by ingesting the source. The audio files are stored in an Audio folder and referenced with ../Audio/someaudiofile.mp3. The video files are referenced in the Video folder similarly.

Including an image within paragraph tags is useful for vertically positioning a floated image, but it inherits the paragraph’s margins. Please support negative margin values with the CSS float property.

I appreciate very much your interest in feedback from users of Kindle Previewer.

Wednesday, March 31, 2021

My Letter to Gideon Levy

Dear Mr. Levy: 

I've just read your article "Gideon Levy Took a DNA Test and Found Out the Truth About His Ancestors' Link to Israel." A fun read. Made me chuckle quite a few times. I learned of you when reading Don't Say We Didn't Know by Amos Gvirtz. He refers to your work very favorably. I've been wondering who to contact of those wishing to expand the public's knowledge of Israel's expansionism. On learning that you're The Most Hated Man In Israel, I thought I'd start at the top and then work my way down. If you would provide a foreword or review of my novel, I would greatly appreciate it. If you have a fee for providing such a service, please let me know. 

 My novel focuses primarily on the conflict between the political ideologies of the left and right in the US. My personal identification is as a progressive, but I chose to tell the story from the viewpoint of a conservative confronting information he hasn't heard before. Because of the right's determined support of Israel, the Herodian Temple and Mt. Moriah found their way into the story. The central character is a theme-park designer and the conservative media studio where he works is building a Disneyland-style theme park. They intend the park to be as secular as the Disney and Universal parks, but they also want to subtly counter Disney's mildly progressive messages, like "It's a small world after all," with more conservative messages, like "In America we speak English." The title of the book is Just to the Right of Disneyland. Tucked into a corner of the park, which is divided into eight very different lands, is the themed area that will recreate the Jerusalem Temple from early in the 1st century. Since a park of this sort could see 10 million guests per year, it arouses the ire of groups which remain unnamed throughout the book, and they blow up a truck on the Temple construction site. (The current Bible-land park in Orlando sees only a small percentage of the guests that Disney parks see, and so its Temple replica isn't as threatening.) A progressive professional woman enters the story and urges the designer to eliminate the Temple attraction rather than building a reinforced structure around it to protect it, as they're planning. In subsequent meetings she proposes adding a replica of the Dome of the Rock and moving the Temple replica to a location just to the south. Her belief that this would remove the threat to the Temple and ensure the safety of guests convinces the reluctant studio and they begin construction. Bombs are subsequently discovered at both construction sites before they detonate, and the future of that part of the park is left uncertain. No one claims responsibility for any of the bombs. It's left up to the reader's political predisposition to decide who is responsible. 

In the meetings, the professional woman, from a family of lawyers, Jewish on her mother's side, Anglican on her father's side, discusses Israel's expansionism. She argues that the joy conservatives will feel when visiting the Temple replica will reinforce an already positive view of Israel and further obfuscate the methods Israel uses in its expansion. I have the central character, and everyone he knows, unaware of any human-rights violations committed in Israel's return to land God had given them centuries ago, because I was unaware of it until a few years ago, and as a conservative Baptist years ago, that was my perspective then—it was Israel's land, the Palestinians were merely housesitters. I have the woman offer the argument that after 18 centuries of non-governance, since the Bar Kokhba revolt, some kind of statute of limitations would apply to Israel's current claim to the land. The land, as I understand it, had been under continuous Muslim control since Saladin regained Jerusalem in 1192. She argues that an unwitnessed verbal agreement between two parties is very hard to defend when there's a dispute with a third party. She also argues that any other nation forcibly retaking land that had been theirs centuries ago would precipitate multilateral resistance, like Iran reclaiming Babylonia, and Indians reclaiming the Americas. 

Does this sound like a project to which you could lend your influence? Its primary market is American readers, of course, but America seems to be the most in need of the information. With the popularity of theme parks around the world, the fun framework of the theme park in the story would broaden the book's appeal to a wider market. 

Thanks very much for reading.

Friday, October 09, 2020

An interview

My interview with blogger-interviewer Alan Wild, author of Hope & Despair: Full Circle:


Wild: Can you tell us more about yourself? Please include your bio.

Garvey: I’m originally from southern New Jersey. My upbringing was conservative evangelical, and my educational background reflects that. In my early 30s, I stepped outside of faith, creating a rift between myself and my family and friends, which is still in place thirty years later. It’s because of this dramatic change in world-view and the unresolved separation from my extended family that I examine the nature of faith and the realm of non-faith in my writing so often. I have a desire to share what I’ve learned and to continue learning about the mystifying realms of particle physics and the cosmos.

What do you like to do when you are not writing?

I like to create computer graphics with programs like Photoshop. I used to spend a lot of time at Zazzle.com creating designs for mugs, T-shirts and products like that, but I’ve gotten away from designing product graphics lately and just let my online store operate on autopilot. (zazzle.com/store/carpecranium) I play word games like Wordament and Wordscapes when I’m between tasks or killing time or getting started in the morning. Over the years I’ve casually explored a few of the big third-person shooters like Assassin’s Creed, GTA5, and now No Man’s Sky. I’m a totally non-competitive person and so I ignore the games’ missions and just wander through the huge, amazingly detailed environments.

What inspired you to start writing?

In 1972, when I was 15, my family visited Disney World for the first time, and I was so overwhelmed by the concept of an environment where every square foot had been designed by an artist, that my career plans shifted toward Disney. I was deeply evangelical then, and the most logical thing to me regarding career choices then was to combine Disney with the Bible and create animated features based on Paradise Lost, Pilgrim’s Progress, and the Passion Week of Christ. It became my mission; I would break new ground. Of course no one knew what I was talking about back then; the 700 Club was still only a dot on the horizon. Who knew then that evangelical media would become so big? I studied film at an evangelical college and in my twenties I wrote several low-budget screenplays but couldn’t raise any funding for filmmaking equipment. Who knew back then that such powerful filmmaking software would become available for free online? I also started a novel then, evangelical scifi of course, about a Space Shuttle that goes through a wormhole and encounters a planet with a human-like race that is unfallen and has no sin nature, similar to C.S. Lewis’ novel Perelandra. Most of my writing since then has been screenplays, until around 2012 when I finally made the switch to the novel format. But it can all be traced back to that first, earth-shifting visit to Disney World.

How long have you been writing?

My short-lived first attempt at writing was in sixth grade, when I started a novel about an Olympic athlete. I was inspired by the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City that year. So that totals up to, with some long gaps, 52 years.

How do you handle writer’s block?

Because I don’t have deadlines to meet, I generally ignore writer’s block. If I can’t think of the next scene to write, I don’t stress over it. Even if six months go by without writing anything new, I know that I’ll eventually get back to it and complete the project. I frequently re-read and edit what I’ve written, which keeps the project active in the back of my mind.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

I don’t really. I think I have a talent for writing, as well as a talent for writing music and drawing/painting. Maybe after my second book is published by an actual publisher I’ll start thinking of myself as a writer. That would require, of course, that I have a first book published by an actual publisher, which hasn’t happened yet.

How do you do research for your books?

Lots of online searches. I also buy too many books on the topic I’m researching. When I look over my collection of nonfiction books purchased for research, I wish I had spent less. But it seemed important at the time.

On a typical day, how much time do you spend writing?

It varies widely. I don’t have a goal of words per day.

What was your favorite part, and your least favorite part, of the publishing journey?

The least favorite part is querying literary agents, knowing that the book will go nowhere and I’ll end up just publishing it myself. My favorite part is when I’m maybe five or six chapters into the book and it’s taking real shape and I’ve created characters I like.

How many books have you written? Which is your favorite?

I’ve completed six novels now (my Amazon author page). My favorite is whichever book I’m currently working on.

What is the most surprising thing you discovered while writing your books?

I’m surprised that I keep writing even though I haven’t interested a literary agent in representing me and self-publishing my books produces only very slim sales. I continue writing because I find the process so engaging.

Who is your favorite character?

My favorite character is one of the characters in whatever book I’m working on. It’s usually the central character, but with my most recent book it’s the character who challenges the central character’s way of thinking.

Does one of the main characters hold a special place in your heart? If so, why?

The gay Amishman character in the Tinselfish books is the most autobiographical of all the characters I’ve created. I chose to give him an Amish background because my own Baptist background seemed just too drab to write about, and also to give the reader a better idea of how separatist my family was and how strictly they interpreted Baptist doctrine. My parents spent their entire adult lives fairly isolated from the outside world. The character’s fish-out-of-water experience of leaving isolated Amish culture and ending up in West Hollywood is pretty similar to my own experience of leaving my family’s isolated social environment and ending up in the Castro in San Francisco.

Tell us about the process for coming up with the cover.

Because my most recent story involves a theme park under construction, with an opening day steadily approaching throughout the story, I thought fireworks on the cover would look forward to opening day and the colors might make the cover thumbnail stand out. The park in the story has an airport theme, and one of the coasters I created for the park looks like a plane taking off from a runway and encountering massive turbulence before safely landing on another runway. I envision the vehicle of that coaster being enclosed and designed to resemble a downsized commercial jet, and so I suggested that on the cover with the silhouette of a jet that appears to be on the track of a megacoaster.

Are you working on anything at the present you would like to share with your readers about?

My most recent novel, Port Aero, is a multimedia novel with about 20 minutes of video and audio embedded at various points in the story. I’ve also included concept sketches, graphics, photos and a few scripts written in JavaScript to animate graphics on the page. The story is about a theme-park designer with marital problems, and the motif of a new theme park taking shape lends itself easily and logically to multimedia. I wanted to explore with the story the political polarity in the US, and this is my first book where the central character is a conservative rather than a progressive. I wanted to write from a conservative’s point of view to try to see the issues as conservatives see them and to try to present that viewpoint sympathetically to my intended progressive readers. Originally I thought I would have the central character shift from red to blue by the end of the book, as political figures like Nicolle Wallace and Steve Schmidt have done. But as the story progressed, that seemed less realistic than having the character on occasion being confronted with inescapable logic that pushes him, reluctantly, to change his mind about a given topic. At the end of the story, I have him describe his politics as more of a raspberry, a red only tending toward purple. I portrayed the progressive who influences him as a young, very likable, very smart professional woman who is concerned that the new park is being positioned as a conservative Disneyland. The story is set in the timeframe of 2017 through 2019 and a few news events from that time are included to pin the story to those oddball years. The era of covid-19 is so drastically different that I didn’t want to attempt to integrate it into the story.

This is also my first novel without a gay character. In my previous five books, either the central character is gay or there are important gay characters. I thought that making all the characters straight might make the book more marketable but, ironically, literary agents’ wish lists and bios almost always include requests for LGBTQ stories.

The unfamiliarity of the multimedia novel is another hurdle. People automatically think “A novel doesn’t need video and audio.” I see the multimedia novel as a new genus of media, not just a new genre. The multimedia-novel category can include all the genres, and it exists in the space between streaming movies, eBooks, video games, websites, augmented reality, and other media and can incorporate them all. But I haven’t been able to convince a literary agent of that. It’s still too new. It’s ironic that once again I’m trying to push a new medium too soon. The mainstream film that came the closest to my grandiose visions of evangelical animated features is The Prince of Egypt from 1998, twenty years after I graduated with a degree in filmmaking. I’m sure that in the future, long-form fiction will integrate video, audio and computer scripts along with narrative text. And people then will chuckle that people now say “I don’t want video or audio distracting me when I’m reading a novel.” I see it as a natural evolution of storytelling, but I’m just a quiet little person who can’t be a Steve Jobs type showing people something completely new so they’ll know they want it.

I’ve also encountered the concept of transmedia storytelling, using different social media platforms to tell different parts of a story. I created an Instagram account in the name of the central character (instagram.com/leithahamilton) and have the character periodically post photos or videos. It adds to the character development in the book. If I wanted to I could create accounts for him on LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Reddit and others and even create a website for the online streaming-TV studio where he works, but that sounds like a lot of work without much payback. If the Instagram account generates buzz, it may get a literary agent’s attention.

Where do you draw inspiration from?

I draw inspiration from the news, books and movies. My novel about gay Templars in the 12th century was inspired by Brokeback Mountain and the reference to the Templars in The Da Vinci Code. The archaeology in The Talpiot Find was inspired by reading The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein. The continuing news coverage of the Mid-East in the early 00s inspired the inclusion of Iranian and Arab characters in the Tinselfish books.

Who is your favorite author and why?

John Updike is still at the top of the list. His prose style and his unpretentious braininess really resonate for me.

What books or authors have most influenced your own writing?

John Updike and Umberto Eco have influenced my style of writing, and Carl Sagan’s book Cosmos has influenced what I write about and how I explain complex topics like universes with more than three dimensions and quantum decoherence.

Favorite quote (doesn’t matter the source)

It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer’s feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years. —J. D. Salinger

Monday, October 05, 2020

Transmedia Storytelling

I think I have a good idea. And I’ve realized only lately how much potential for lateral growth it may have. 

I’ve written a multimedia eNovel about a theme-park designer with marital problems. I’ve embedded in the text about 20 minutes of video and audio plus graphics, concept sketches and a few scripts in JavaScript to animate graphics on the page. I completed the writing in mid-2019, months before Covid-19 entered the consciousness of the US, so the story’s main focus is the political polarization in the Trump era prior to the pandemic. 

While researching multimedia long-form fiction, which is almost non-existent, I ran across the concept of transmedia storytelling, which seemed like a good way to promote the unpublished novel to try and get the attention of a literary agent. The concept of transmedia narrative then began to appeal to me in its own right as a way to expand the narrative and flesh out the characters even more. In September, I created an Instagram account with the central character’s name and have the character posting images, videos and text that add details to characters in the story and the fictional studio where the central character works. 

I’ve realized since then that the character logically would have a LinkedIn account, a blog on Blogger or WordPress, a Flickr account, a YouTube channel, an email address and so on, and the fictional studio would have a website where they promote their online streaming entertainment and news channels and the new theme park they’re building. With a limited budget, I can’t get to all that on my own. But it would be interesting if an immersive-entertainment company took on the project as transmedia promotion for an actual theme park, which would be integrated into the eNovel and replace the fictional theme park currently in the story. 

A transmedia promotional campaign, for a theme park like Europapark or some other non-Disney park, that takes advantage of free access to social media to reach targeted audiences that number in the millions and that engages their continued interest with a serial narrative. That seems like a good idea.

Saturday, August 08, 2020

The Multimedia Novel

When screen sizes went from phone-size to tablet-size, the multimedia novel became a possibility, a novel with embedded media like video, audio, and JavaScript-animated graphics.The possibilities for the multimedia novel are limited only by the available technology and the designer’s imagination and coding skills. Designer-novelists can take this still-new medium in unexpected and experimental directions, exploring immersive techniques like some computer games do with augmented-reality graphics. It's easy to imagine a horror novel silently accessing Alexa to turn off lights in the house at an appropriate moment in the story and add poltergeist effects with any connected electronics and appliances. There are many more possibilities to explore.

Port Aero is a story of the birth of a new theme park in Southern California.

The designers and investors begin with the best of intentions. They want to balance ideas like “It’s a small world after all” with ideas like “In America we speak English.” But big construction projects seldom go exactly as planned or budgeted. Some of the good intentions are met with centuries-old hostility, and the designers and investors are left bickering over what kind of park to build. Do they compromise and accommodate? In the age of Trump, compromise is considered weakness. Should they plow ahead and present concepts that modern cultures need to hear? Or should they act reasonably?

Leith, one of the lead designers, is a workaholic who is content in a loving, stable marriage that doesn’t require much maintenance. Until he realizes that’s just the theme-park version of marriage.

Port Aero is soon to be published. Check back for updates. In the meantime, the video and audio in the eBook can be viewed on YouTube. The eBook will include 40 short video clips and 34 original music cues, along with numerous graphics, photos and concept sketches.

Saturday, July 25, 2020

Dear eReader developers

My review of the Kindle iPad app on the App Store:

As time passes, there will be increasing demand from users for the full implementation of HTML5, CSS3, and ePub3 in reflowable-text eReaders. The features that users could be experiencing as they read include video, audio, JavaScript, background images, embedded fonts, and much more. The current requirement that eBooks with embedded media use the fixed-layout format is inappropriate when text-based eBooks include media designed to flow along with the text. That requirement can result in many consecutive pages of fixed-layout text that can’t reflow or be resized. Fixed-layout is for magazine-type eBooks. The current implementation of reflowable text is for text-only eBooks, like traditional novels. There should be a third option available that utilizes all the features of ePub3. Currently, the display of media in reflowable-text eReaders is very haphazard, with images or video halfway off the page or not displayed at all. Scripts in JavaScript are ignored or appear as text in the body text. If a user pays extra for a multimedia eBook, they would like to experience the media they paid for. Please provide users and designers a third option, multimedia-text, in addition to reflowable-text and fixed-layout. Thinking that reflowable-text eBooks don’t need video or audio is like Norma Desmond saying she’d had the eyes of the world but they had to have their ears too. Was she right? Movies don’t need soundtracks? Please allow the eReader to continue to evolve.

Sunday, May 10, 2020

Dear Music-Software Developers

Always keep in mind that your software represents in music composition what the brush represents in painting.

An artist picks up a brush, loads paint onto it, and brings the brush to the point of contact with the canvas. What occurs after that point is what matters. The painter usually doesn't need a brush with rows of buttons on the ferrule that adjust the input and output of the paint and he usually doesn't want to set up as many as 64 channels to get the paint out of the brush. He wants to focus on how he applies the paint to the canvas. That's where the art is. Picking up the right brush, picking up paint, and approaching the canvas isn't an insignificant part of painting, but he doesn't want to have to master that part of painting before he can start painting.

I wish software applications would unfold when first opened. I'm always amazed when I open a new program and see that the entire program fills the screen—splat! the first impression of the program is how extremely much the whole program can do. Is that an alpha-male thing? When I'm just starting with a program, I hardly need any of the program. So why is it there taking up space? Demonstration of prowess to attract a mate? Yes, music software can do an amazing amount and can produce truly beautiful sound. But it's mostly designed for performance and mixing. When I'm composing with the staff view, I don't need all that. I want the interface to get out of the way and let me have easy access to instruments that don't sound like the tinny default MIDI instruments. The instruments could even include a touch of reverb so I don't have to dig into the interface to find out how to set that up. Then, at that point I can start creating music, usually with complex harmony like some of Manhattan Transfer's music (eg "A Nightingale Sang," "Birdland").

There are apps for tablets that emphasize creating with the staff view and I'll probably end up using one of them. But why aren't they on the desktop? It's a little strange to be sitting at my computer while working on my iPad. (Isn't it? Or am I missing the point of wireless?) After some frustrating searches for PC software with a simple staff view, I've concluded that I must be among the few of the old-school who compose in the staff view. The piano-roll and dropping loops and beats methods seem alien to me (That's a quarter note? But what note is it? Which octave is it in?). My searches have turned up Sibelius and Cakewalk as applications that include a staff view. Both are accessible, but neither is simple enough to just start clicking notes and playing them back. I started in both creating four chords of whole notes in a piano staff and then moving notes and switching instruments, to see how involved it would all be. Sibelius' interface is the plainest, with most everything tucked up in the ribbon at the top of the screen, but I still have to look up how to do something as simple as scrub with the playhead. That should be just click and drag. While Sibelius' focus is a little heavy on creating beautiful sheet music right from the start, Cakewalk emphasizes recording and mixing. In the default view, the screen is heavy with electronics and I have to manually open the staff view and resize it to fill most of the screen. I used Cakewalk's MusicCreator back in the 00s to create two CDs of public domain music I extensively arranged in staff view. After I learned where things were it was fun to create music with the program. The interface, of course, has substantially evolved since then and I'm back to square one having to learn where things are. I created and played back the four chords a little faster than with Sibelius and remembered that scrubbing was accomplished while holding the J key while click-dragging. Switching instruments was about equally hunt-and-click with both programs. I've seen some apps with a small group of buttons on the side for switching instruments. Simple. It would be nice if simplicity like that could be embraced by software developers for the introductory levels of an application, and from there the user could add complexity as he wants. Starting out with the whole powerful program on display on the screen seems a little like chest-beating.

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Redirect $3.8 Billion

Congressman Schiff:

Now is a very good time to stop the annual $3.8 billion gift of weapons to Israel. $3.8 billion? The Israel lobby is very effective, aren't they. Your pro-Israel voters are very strong. But you know as well as they do that PALESTINIANS HAVE SOULS TOO. If you listened only to the lobbyists and those voters you'd think that Palestinians were just another breed of dog. But you know that they are people deserving of protection from oppression to the same degree as Jews worldwide.

The now-13-year Israeli blockade, repeated bombings, and 72 years of settler-colonialism—funded by our taxes—have systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip’s infrastructure and healthcare system. Now is a very good time to stop the flow of military aid to Israel. USCPR calculates that $3.8 billion would provide 76,000 ventilators, 760,000 N-95 masks and 25,888 ER doctors' salaries. Now is a very good time to redirect $3.8 billion where it is needed most.

How many Uzis does $3.8B buy and how many deaths will they result in? How many ventilators are needed in the US and how many deaths will they prevent?

Now is a very good time to argue down the Israel lobby and your pro-Israel voters. They do not have a strong case. You do.

Thanks very much for your laudable work in Congress.


Monday, March 16, 2020

Dear Kindle Digital Publishing

Amazingly, eReaders still aren't able to display multimedia novels in the way that the author-designer intends. eReaders display text beautifully, but in ensuring that the user be able to customize the eReader so his reading experience is the best possible, eReader developers strip out many multimedia elements that the user would otherwise enjoy. The promise of eReaders doesn't stop with beautifully rendered text. They offer the possibility for the novel to move to an entirely new area somewhere between novels, games, movies, and websites. I would like to see an option in eReaders that allows the author-designer to have more control and asks the user to relinquish some control over the eReader's display in order to have an enhanced reading experience. One solution would be to offer something like a "browser mode" in which all the features of HTML5 and CSS3 can be employed offline to enhance the user's reading experience. Currently the only eReader I've found that comes close to this is Sigil's previewer, but even it, as far as I can tell, doesn't allow for audio playback without the control panel. But it does allow videos to be placed anywhere on a page with any level of transparency. It would be very nice if the user were able to see what I see when I'm designing a multimedia novel with Sigil. Please allow eBook technology to continue evolving in this direction.

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Campus Protests and Free Speech

Congressman Schiff,

The petition website for the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights collected my name before I had a chance to include a message to you, so I'm following up with this email. USCPR states that AIPAC is a "pro-apartheid, pro-racism, pro-segregation, anti-Palestinian-rights lobby." Is that true? USCPR also states

"President Trump’s Executive Order issued last December encourages government agencies to censor campus organizing for Palestinian rights. Legislation pending in both the Senate and the House demonizes the use of boycotts for justice in Palestine."

Censoring campus protests? Is that legal? Isn't that unconstitutional? I understand that you must have many strong supporters who will not budge in their opinions regarding the Palestinians. And you need their continued support in your opposition of Conservatives on Capitol Hill and in the White House. Your work has been stellar and laudable and historic in your refusal to yield to the massive bullying, and so it comes as a surprise that someone like you would support censoring boycotts and protests. Campus protests were very influential in getting us out of Vietnam and bringing that death toll to an end. Would you have supported censoring those protests?

If your opposition to censorship of campus organizing for Palestinian rights is based on its unconstitutionality, your pro-Israel supporters would be obligated to support you in that, no matter how repugnant they find the topic of Palestinian rights. If they don't support you, they are putting their Israel citizenship above their United States citizenship and should be called out for that if they benefit from being permanent residents in the US.

I hope my occasional emails have been reaching you and aren't filtered out by a well-meaning assistant or by an unyielding pro-Israel assistant. I feel the need to address the discrepancy of someone as highly ethical and moral as you are, supporting the censorship of boycotts on campuses.

Thanks.
John Garvey

Thursday, July 25, 2019

Schiff approved of H Res 246?

Congressman Schiff,

What were you all thinking when you overwhelmingly approved H Res 246?

For what other nation would you make it illegal to protest and boycott their human-rights abuses? Please, list for me the countries for which you would pass the same legislation. You would make it illegal to boycott Russia? Ukraine? France? Israel is no longer exceptional. The laws are the same for Israel as for any other nation.

Your vote to oppose efforts to delegitimize the State of Israel and the Global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement Targeting Israel is reprehensible. What would you do if you had been chased from your home at gunpoint and then other people moved in and the courts issued them a new deed to the property without the new owners paying a penny for your home? Seriously, what would you do if that happened to you? You would say that the nation whose military pushed you out of your home at gunpoint was perfectly justified in doing so? Don't shrug it off. Don't evade the question. Address it. What would you do if it were you?

What does the Israel lobby provide for you?

I'm appalled that the vote was 398 to 17. What were you all thinking? That making boycotting illegal is constitutional? That Russia's disruption of our election process is far more important than the treatment of the people of Gaza? This vote simply makes me shake my head and think "That Israel lobby, they're good."

You know the history of Israel. What other nation would you approve of being retaken after 18 centuries of diaspora? Seriously, which? Not only approving but abetting the takeover. Which nation? South Africa retaken by native Africans? England retaken by the peoples conquered in the Norman Invasion? The US retaken by Native Americans? You would oppose an uprising or armed incursion in any other nation, but you oppose any protesting of Israel having done the same thing.

If your reasoning is something like "God gave the land to Israel forever," consider that you and a large percentage of Jewish people admit that Torah and the history books were redacted and synthesized by the priests and scribes themselves before, during and after the Babylonian captivity. You're overlooking that Israel gave the land to Israel forever. Israel's claim to the land is based on an unwitnessed verbal agreement 4 millenia ago which was not written down until centuries later? Now there's a strong basis for a claim.

The answer to "what were you all thinking" is that you pander to the Jewish voters in your districts. The bloc of Jewish voters in your district is very strong, but they are also very wrong. Israel's exceptionalism faded about the time of the Six Day War. Their privileged status before then was earned by what they had endured in Europe. By 1967, however, the need for a Jewish homeland had diminished, as most Jews were successful and living safely outside of Israel. I know that, as a Congressman, you're obligated to faithfully represent the beliefs and wishes of your voters. But if your voters believe something wrong, it's your responsibility to educate them so that you can faithfully represent them and do the right thing, at the same time.