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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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