This began as a post in praise of the Kindle as a reading device. For writers the Kindle is much more than that. KDP transforms the e-reader into a publishing platform, and the most powerful device a writer has at his or her disposal. But don’t be fooled into thinking you necessarily need professional help to format your e-book. While an editor is invariably beneficial, designers and other opportunists are trying to mystify e-book formatting and cover design for profit. The paybacks of the Kindle will be self-explanatory to anyone who’s held one for longer than a minute. Writers who own a Kindle that doesn’t contain their entire body of work are either slow or have never had cause to refer to their own writing. Being able to instantly search text strings while away from your desk, look up words in the dictionary, research online via a wireless connection, highlight sections earmarked for revision and tweet quotes are just some of the more obvious benefits.

“While cutting back the flat-leaf parsley today I discovered a South American rainforest tribe living in the vegetable patch.” Those who know me and who are familiar with my writing won’t be surprised to discover that Steve Jobs doesn’t appear in this new, previously unpublished short story. It doesn’t include his much-reported last words, either; so if you don’t know what they were, I recommend the search engine of your choice. The first ‘chapter’ follows, by way of a teaser. “Steve Jobs’ last words” is US$0.99 from the Amazon Kindle Store and if you join Amazon Prime you can borrow it for free.

An island rising from the sea, sand strewn with coconut husks frothing at its perimeters; the hills a mirage of purple looming from the rainforest… Set on an imaginary Caribbean island, ‘Dream Me An Island’ tells the story of local taxi driver Charles Wesley ‘Smiley’ Gumbs, who is coerced into using Obeah Magic to pressurise a multinational corporation to stop mining for gold.

Das Schicksal (‘Fate’, also known as the ‘Cruel Countess’) is a 1905 sculpture by German artist Hugo Lederer. It stands in the world’s biggest cemetery: the Ohlsdorfer Hauptfriedhof in Hamburg. It’s among the most distressing, unforgettable works of art I’ve seen and my short story germinated when, after stumbling across the statue, I imagined her coming to life. The story first appeared in the UK magazine The Third Alternative (now Black Static), then in Germany’s Heidelberg Review and subsequently in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s annual anthology, The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror (10th Edition), published by St Martin’s Griffin Press (USA). It’s now available as a Kindle e-book, with a cover designed by Elisa Bowman. Some history and a brief excerpt follow.

Cover photo: Uwe Barghaan © 2006

“Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Trusting intuition and making decisions based on it is the most important activity of the creative artist and entrepreneur. If you are facing (and fearing) a difficult life decision, ask yourself these three questions: 1) “What are the costs of inaction?” 2) “What kind of person do I want to be?” 3) “In the event of failure, could I generate an alternative positive outcome?”

(Author: Dan Andrews; image by Victor Trac, who kindly granted me permission to use his photo of a heavily stapled telephone pole as the cover to my e-book Iniquity)

‘“Hey, Nigel!” Kev shouted. “We’re going on a boat-trip.” He was already at the gangplank.’

What happens when three drinkers take an impromptu boat trip? And why are the other day-trippers so relieved to get back to port? The title of this e-book comes from a reference in the introduction to Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, and a quotation from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. JP Donleavy’s A Fairy Tale of New York also gets a mention.

Get Port After Stormy Seas on your Kindle, PC or iPad for US$0.99 – less than you pay for the coffee you drink while you’re reading it. A link and short extract follow the jump.

The first prompt I received as part of Project Domino’s #Trust30 writing challenge – an initiative that encourages us to look within and trust ourselves, reflect on our now and create direction for our future – was from author Liz Danzico:

How would you describe today using only one sentence? Tell today’s sentence to one other person. Repeat each day.

A noble call to action, but after retweeting and commenting on it today, I remembered that all of my days have to be described in exactly one page: an A4 sheet of my Impact desk diary. On 1 January 2011 I committed to keeping a page-a-day diary as a way of marshalling my mind and disciplining myself to write about something without excuses.

Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians is a 33-year-old piece of music I discovered relatively recently that’s had probably the most direct influence on my writing – so much so that I wrote it into one of my later short stories as a character. Steve Reich is now 75; not that you’d guess from listening to this record. I can’t think of a more modern-sounding piece of music – it’s positively futuristic, which in itself is extraordinary, since he uses only orchestral instruments (cello, violin, clarinet, bass clarinet, pianos, marimbas, xylophones, unamplified vibraphone and women’s voices), no electronics, and only the musicians’ breath to create the effect of what could be mistaken for a sequencer.

“The bullet point party’s electro-shock therapy hadn’t cured my ‘internet addiction’, which is what it claimed countless citizens were suffering from when its propaganda also said the net was killing print, the banks and big business, presaging bailouts and the more drastic measures we came to call the Almighty Crunch. I completed the treatment programme around the time they began prosecuting bloggers and citizen journalists for ‘media crimes’.” Ask the dissidents in Venezuela, the revolutionaries in Egypt, the rebels in Libya, or the protestors in Bahrain: the enemies of the internet are legion. Repressive governments, police states and fundamentalist regimes abhor a free internet. Iniquity is now available as an e-book on the Amazon.com (US$0.99) and Amazon UK Kindle Stores.

In 1921 Macmillan published a novel by British ghost story writer Oliver Onions (author of The Beckoning Fair One), the today largely forgotten book The Tower of Oblivion. It tells the story of a writer called Derwent Rose, who begins to grow younger instead of older.

The following year, in 1922, celebrated US author F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, Tender Is The Night) published his short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, about a man born with the appearance of a 70-year-old and who ages backwards until he becomes a baby, in Colliers magazine. Had Fitzgerald read the Oliver Onions book before he wrote his story?