First thoughts on the Cybook Gen3

I bought a second-hand Cybook Gen3 ebook reader from my writing partner last month, and I've been using it long enough now to have some initial thoughts about it. This isn't a proper review, as I haven't been exploring all its features. What I *have* been doing with it is simply reading some of the books she'd loaded on it, mostly on the bus to and from work.

And the obvious question is — do I regret spending one hundred pounds on this thing? After all, I could buy quite a few paperbacks for that money. To which the answer is "no", and for a specific reason I'll get to at the end of this post. And it's not one of the obvious reasons, like saving shelf space or being able to carry a hundred books with me at all times, although I can see the advantages there.

Would I buy one at full market price? (Currently 269 pounds if shipped to the UK.) Probably not, but mostly because the wee beastie is physically fragile, and I fully expect that I'll manage to break it within a year or two given my current usage of it. I can see why other people would pay that for it, and why I might in other circumstances.

( read more about the pros and cons )

And the killer app for me? I can read it on the bus without feeling car-sick.

If I try to read a dead tree book on the bus, I start feeling sick after a few minutes. I can read if I'm careful, but it requires a certain amount of thought and stopping as soon as I feel in the least bit queasy. I took the Cybook with me on the bus the first week I had it, mostly because otherwise I'd have to wait until the following weekend to have time to play with it — and was still reading at journey’s end. By the end of the week, it was clear that this was not a one-off. In the month since, I've found that if the bus is *really* bumpy I need to put the Cybook down for a minute or two, but I can usually read it without problems. I don't know why there's a difference (my guess is that it's at least partly to do with the Cybook being completely rigid), but since I spend around an hour a day on the bus at the moment, something that lets me read during that hour is *well* worth the hundred pounds I paid for it. While I'm doing that commute, you will have to prise my Cybook from my cold dead hands...

Still passing as male

Now there's a coincidence. I was in a conversation elsewhere yesterday about female authors of m/m pretending to be men for commercial reasons, and pointed out that readers keep thinking of me as male even though I have never explicitly presented myself as a man, and have in fact made efforts to correct reviews that referred to me as male.

And this afternoon someone linked to my post about my Cybook, and referred to me as "he". Okay, this is a stranger and someone from outside the world of romance epublishing who was obviously misled by the subject matter of my books, but it's not that many months since the last time a romance reader did it. (I'm not going to embarrass her by naming her.:-) I suppose I *could* redecorate the blog in pink bows and hearts, but I'm not really into pink. Which is doubtless a contributing factor in why so many people think I'm a guy, or at least can't decide.

Writing: Things I'm not writing right now

I don't get the volume of fan mail that some of my more successful writer friends get (no, I'm not jealous *at* *all*), but I do get some. Mostly I answer it directly, but occasionally it sparks something that I think might interest other people. This by why of explanation as to where this post suddenly appeared from.

One of the first non-fanfic stories I ever wrote, and the first one I ever sold, was a fluffy (if steamy) little tale about a burnt-out dotcom millionaire meeting a mermaid, and thinking at first that she was a product of his nervous breakdown. She's puzzled that she doesn't have the effect on him that the old tales she knows suggests. When he tells her why he's not affected by her glamour, she introduces him to her brother.

A couple of years later, I wrote a short story about the sidhe, again drawing on old themes but seeing how they might work in a present day setting. That was "And if I offered thee a bargain", currently available in a back issue of the webzine Forbidden Fruit.

This generated the idea for a collection of short stories with a specific theme -- that they be British and Irish myths and legends, just like the ones I'd read as a child, but set in the present day. And not presented as fiction, but framed as if they had been collected as true folktales about things the tellers at least half-believed. I imagined a world where the things of fairy had been real, but had died out or withdrawn into another world as the magic they depended on slowly dwindled away. Here and there, there might still be odd pockets of magic, or occasional gate contact with another world, that would allow a few people to still encounter them as real rather than pure myth.

The next story I wrote in the sequence was about the silkies. Spindrift was supposed to be a short story, but it got away from me, and ended up as a 58 kword novel with an 18 kword sequel.

I didn't exactly abandon the idea of the collection, but after that I never got around to writing any more short stories on that theme. Dolphin Dreams sort of fits into the sequence, although unlike the others it's not based directly on existing British myths (being also influenced by the Greek and Roman myth collections I'd read). But Dolphin Dreams is also 101 kwords, and definitely not a short story or even a novella.

The frame story I had in mind for the collection means that in theory all of the stories happen in the same world/timeline, and it's possible that some of these creatures/people know of each other. In particular, when I was planning Dolphin Dreams I thought that it was likely that the dolphin shapeshifters and the silkies of the Spindrift series knew of each other, even if the shrinking populations meant that the current generation had probably never encountered each other. But I didn't explicitly write it into the book, and I reserve the right to change my mind. :-)

The other common feature these stories have as a direct consequence of the frame story I'd planned is that the first few were all written in first person. I normally write in tight third, but Gone Fishing came to me as a first person story. One of the odd phenomena you run into as a writer is that sometimes characters turn up inside your head and insist on telling you their story. That really is what it feels like, even if in reality it's a segment of your mind. In this case it was Pearl the mermaid, and I kept it as first person when I wrote it, although I switched it into the other character's point of view. That probably contributed to the concept for the frame story when I came up with it, because what the frame story involved was a character who had a good reason to seek out potentially real accounts of dealings with the fae in the present day. In other words, people's written accounts of their own experiences.

I may yet write more of them. I've mostly lost interest in the frame story, but the basic concept of the sequence is still one I find inspiring, and in fact one of the novels in the queue draws on it to some extent. Of course, one problem with the collection is that I'm writing modern day myths, not romance stories. Some of them have happy endings, but some of them don't. And that means I'd probably have to find another publisher if I wanted to collect the shorts into a single volume. Since I can be a lazy bum, and I know that most of my "short" stories end up being novella length or more anyway, I'm not trying very hard to make that collection of short stories happen.