It’s taken me months to get there, but my novel, MOTET, is now finally available as an e-book! It’s the first of many yet to come. I plan, in the next few months, to convert all of the out-of-print books on my backlist into e-books and to make them available on popular e-reader platforms such as Kindle and Kobo. You can, of course, also read Kindle books on your iPad or even, if your eyes are sharp, on your smart phone.
The actual “publication” of an e-book is easy – just as Amazon tells you it is – and takes only a matter of minutes, but getting a book up to that point is an enormous task, much like republishing it. I had to start with published books – the physical objects. That meant that I had to cut them up, run the pages through a scanner, convert the scans to editable text, and proofread them. This process also gave me the opportunity to correct some errors and typos in the original texts, but it was certainly time-consuming.
When our Creative Writing Program at UBC began offering a course in Graphic Fiction, I decided that it was about time for me to learn something about it. Several colleagues recommended that I begin by reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, and that was excellent advice. Then I read a dozen or so Canadian and American graphic novels—enough to become genuinely excited by sequential art. Japanese comics seemed to be on everybody’s mind, so I thought that I should take a quick look at them too. It’s three years later, and I’m still looking—still deeply immersed in the world of manga. Much of what I’ve been reading is shōjo—that is, comics written for girls. That has struck some of my friends and colleagues as a bit odd, so I want to take some time here to try to explain my fascination.