Writer Wednesday! Jeff Mariotte on the Kindle Fire. Sorta. Yeah, no, not really.

Red here.  Yes, it’s me in italics again.  

It’s winter (nearly) here in the Midwest, and there is little I like more than cozying up beneath a blanket with a good book.  In my rich fantasy life, I also add a roaring fire like the photo above to the scene.  Why not?

How about you?  Do you indulge over the winter months in a slew of great reads?  I gave myself an early Christmas gift this year—a new Kindle Fire—and got to thinking about some of its applications, as a multi-media device.  

Because my brain doesn’t shut off, it wasn’t long before I was wondering what we could expect to be prepared for us, as consumers.  Tie-ins between TV shows, movies, books…and naturally, my mind turned toward the prolific Jeff Mariotte for his thoughts.  You should read Jeff’s blog and subscribe to his updates on Facebook, because his thoughts are typically good ones.  

Aside: I recently attempted to use Jeff’s remarks on Conan to influence Tim to rent the new Conan movie, but alas, one look at the cover and my case was lost.  I don’t know what about this bare chest my husband would find threatening, do you?

  (In preparing this post, I just learned I can rent it for $.99 and watch on my Fire.  Hrm…something to think about.  The rental, not the chest.  Repeat to self, do not think about Conan’s bare chest.  Okay.  Whew!)

Anyway, before I get myself into even deeper trouble, I’ll let Jeff take it from here!

So it went down like this:

Ages ago, Red asked me to write a guest post for her blog. I agreed to do it, because one of the high points of my late summer/early autumn was getting to know Red, and I have the greatest respect and admiration for her. Besides, when people ask me to write about myself, it’s hard to turn them down.

Red had a particular topic in mind when she asked me: because I’ve written a fair number of licensed novels—aka “tie-ins,” books that take place in existing fictional universes (for instance, I’ve written novels based on TV shows like CSI, Supernatural,Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and others, books based on fictional characters like Conan, Spider-Man, Superman, and more, and books based on comics like 30 Days of Night), she wanted me to explore the potential advantages of the Kindle Fire as it related to such books. For example, someone could read a CSI novel that references a specific episode of the TV show, and then watch the episode. Or stop when the reference is reached, watch the episode, then return to the book.

Makes sense to me. Only, as I tried to think it through, I realized that Red’s suggestion was pretty much the sum total of what I thought about the topic. I don’t own an e-reader of any kind and hope I never have to. I read the occasional e-book on my computer, but I don’t like doing it that way. I like holding a book and turning the pages and marking my spot with a bookmark and setting it down. And I especially wouldn’t want a reader that required that I buy all my books from a single source—unless, possibly, that source was Mysterious Galaxy. (Full disclosure—I’m one of the owners of Mysterious Galaxy, quite possibly the finest mystery/sf/fantasy/horror bookstore in the world.)

So, yeah. You can use a Kindle Fire for that, and I’m sure there will be other areas of synergy. As we get closer to the day that our pads are also our entertainment systems and e-readers and photo albums, etc., we’ll discover more and better ways to blend these things together. Maybe we’ll have texts with interactive elements, stories that combine video and audio and possibly other sensory experiences with words and pictures. I’m interested in story, and anything that can enhance storytelling or provide new opportunities for stories, I’m in favor of.

But I don’t have any particular insight in or experience with such things. I told Red that, and she generously said, “That’s okay, write about whatever you want.” I assured her that I would send something in posthaste, because usually that’s what I do—instead of letting the deadline get near, I like to get the work out of the way as early as I can.

Only it was this autumn, and this autumn has been crazy.

I’ve been traveling, promoting a book called Dark Vengeance, Vol. 1. Dark Vengeance, Vol. 1 is actually what’s called a bind-up containing two novels, Summer and Fall, of a four-book teen horror series. Dark Vengeance, Vol. 2, containing Winter andSpring, comes out in May. The whole thing is the story of Kerry Profitt, who, during the summer after her freshman year in college, finds herself caught up in a centuries-long war between witches. Loved ones die, and she has to become a witch herself, just to survive.

This travel, though, was no glamorous book tour (and that’s an in-joke—if there’s such thing as a glamorous book tour, I haven’t seen it. Most book tours consist of the author landing at a strange airport late at night, finding his or her way to a hotel, then getting up early in the morning for a radio interview, maybe a morning TV show interview, maybe later in the day phone interviews on another couple of radio shows, a brief chat with a local reporter, a bookstore appearance that night, then back to the hotel or the airport to head to the next city. It’s a brutal, exhausting marathon. I have literally known authors who trained for it like an athletic event).

My “tour” had to be worked around the dreaded day job, for one thing. That meant it was weekends only (with a couple of exceptions—days that had to be taken off work without pay, for reasons too complex and mind-numbingly boring to be addressed here). And while my publisher, Simon and Schuster, arranged a couple of the bookings and picked up some expenses associated with those, the rest of the travel costs were on me. Airfare, hotels, meals, ground transportation, and so on. Those things add up when you’re doing it a lot. And I was. (And yes, some of these expenses are tax-deductible, but not all. And you can’t deduct ‘em unless you pay for ‘em first.)

My whirlwind of travel started on Labor Day weekend with a science fiction/fantasy/horror convention called CopperCon, in Avondale, AZ. After that it was KillerCon, a horror convention in Las Vegas (where I was a Guest of Honor); the Orange County Children’s Book Festival; Mysterious Galaxy Redondo Beach; the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association’s annual Authors Feast; Mysterious Galaxy San Diego, the World Fantasy Convention; the Tucson Comic Con; and the TusCon sf/fantasy/horror convention. Now only one event remains, a panel discussion at the Arizona Library Association’s annual convention, on a weekday after Thanksgiving.

Just typing the list makes me exhausted all over again.

The crazy thing is, while traveling around the West talking about my book, I couldn’t actually do much writing. It’s almost impossible to write anything worthwhile on weekdays, because between the day job and the commute, there’s a 13-hour chunk missing. When I get home, it’s dinner and maybe a little family time and catching up on e-mails and other online necessities that I can’t tend to during the day. Then it’s time for bed, and up at 4:45 to do it again. That leaves weekends, which are also the only times to do chores around the ranch. And since I’ve been gone most of the weekends since Labor Day, there’s been precious little opportunity to do the thing that is behind the tour, the ranch, and everything else.

They say people go insane if they can’t dream. I could make a good case that not being able to write has a similar effect.

Jeffrey J. Mariotte is the author of 46 published novels, numerous short stories, occasional nonfiction books, and more than 130 comic books and graphic novels. He’s way too busy and frequently tired. Find out more by liking his Facebook fan page at http://www.facebook.com/JeffreyJMariotte, visiting his website at http://jeffmariotte.com, and reading his blog at jeff_mariotte.typepad.com/my_weblog. But if you follow him on Twitter at @JeffMariotte, you’ll see that he rarely uses it.

Jeff!  Thanks for taking the time to pen this guest post in the middle of what sounds like an incredibly busy season for you.  I don’t know how you manage to do it all, but I’m grateful you made some time for me and mine, and what you’ve told me about your new project sounds so very cool.  Happy writing!  :)  

I will add to Jeff’s links the very cool Jeff Mariotte Reading Challenge, set up by one of his fans.  I am personally starting with The Slab, then I think I will mosey along to Dark Vengeance.  If you’re on Goodreads, you can become a fan Jeff there, as well.