ABOUT RAR: For those of
you new to this site, "RAR" is Rick Alan Rice, the publisher
of the RARWRITER Publishing Group websites.
Use this link to visit the
RAR music page, which features original music
compositions and other.
ATWOOD - "A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliverance"-AVAILABLE
NOW FOR KINDLE (INCLUDING KINDLE COMPUTER APPS) FROM
AMAZON.COM.Use
this link.
CCJ Publisher Rick Alan Rice dissects
the building of America in a trilogy of novels
collectively calledATWOOD. Book One explores
the development of the American West through the
lens of public policy, land planning, municipal
development, and governance as it played out in one
of the new counties of Kansas in the latter half of
the 19th Century. The novel focuses on the religious
and cultural traditions that imbued the American
Midwest with a special character that continues to
have a profound effect on American politics to this
day. Book One creates an understanding about
America's cultural foundations that is further
explored in books two and three that further trace
the historical-cultural-spiritual development of one
isolated county on the Great Plains that stands as
an icon in the development of a certain brand of
American character. That's the serious stuff viewed
from high altitude. The story itself gets down and
dirty with the supernatural, which inATWOOD
- A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliveranceis the
outfall of misfires in human interactions, from the
monumental to the sublime.The
book features the epic poem"The
Toiler"as
well as artwork by New Mexico artist Richard
Padilla.
Elmore Leonard
Meets Larry McMurtry
Western Crime
Novel
I am offering another
novel through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service.
Cooksin is the story of a criminal syndicate that sets its
sights on a ranching/farming community in Weld County, Colorado,
1950. The perpetrators of the criminal enterprise steal farm
equipment, slaughter cattle, and rob the personal property of
individuals whose assets have been inventoried in advance and
distributed through a vast system of illegal commerce.
It is a ripping good yarn, filled
with suspense and intrigue. This was designed intentionally to
pay homage to the type of creative works being produced in 1950,
when the story is set. Richard Padilla
has done his usually brilliant work in capturing the look and feel of
a certain type of crime fiction being produced in that era. The
whole thing has the feel of those black & white films you see on
Turner Movie Classics, and the writing will remind you a little
of Elmore Leonard, whose earliest works were westerns.
Use this link.
EXPLORE THE KINDLE
BOOK LIBRARY
If you have not explored the books
available from Amazon.com's Kindle Publishing
division you would do yourself a favor to do so. You
will find classic literature there, as well as tons
of privately published books of every kind. A lot of
it is awful, like a lot of traditionally published
books are awful, but some are truly classics. You
can get the entire collection of Shakespeare's works
for two bucks.
Amazon is the largest,
but far from the only digital publisher. You can
find similar treasure troves atNOOK
Press(the
Barnes & Noble site),Lulu,
and others.
The
Virtual Reality of Future Reading
By RAR
While
working recently with New Mexico-based painter, illustrator, and
art designer Richard W.
Padilla, we were exchanging ideas on the development of
a truly immersive reading experience: immersive in that visual,
sensory awareness sense that is intended to be simulated through
virtual reality technologies. This conversation was precipitated
by our experience in developing books for digital publishing, as
we recently did with Kindle products. The potential for
development in delivering content electronically staggers the
mind with possibilities.
That's part of why this video,
from the recent International Consumer Electronics Show (CES),
highlighting the latest in full-body virtual reality technology,
seems so backwards in an evolutionary advancement. For one
thing, the guy demonstrating the product has to stand within a
frame to keep from falling down, which seems like an
insurmountable form factor
issue. Do the kids keep this cage in the living room, in front
of the tv? That impracticality is made even worse by the reason
for the contraption to even exist, which is that it features a
moving floor sensor that lets the gamer run through the virtual
world without ever moving from his spot in the game room.
Unfortunately, it requires that the player simulate a most
non-human style of movement.
It's weird. The Omni by Virituix
folks seem to be counter-engineering the human experience,
substituting natural human movement for that motion that is a
byproduct of the limitations of computer game animation. The
human is forced to simulate the mechanical movements of the
machine in order to make the virtual reality display work.
What, you might ask, does
operating a first person shooter virtual reality sensor pack
have to do with reading books on Kindle? Not nearly enough, I
would say, and it is because in our efforts to deliver these
alternate reality experiences we are concentrating on hardware.
It doesn't give us a virtual reality so much as it cuts us off
from reality by putting us in a cinematic facsimile.
While useful for safely training people to fly airplanes and
operate heavy equipment, virtual reality for the other purposes
that we have imagined to date is really a little stupid
inducing. We need to be focusing on software that speaks
directly to our brain.
Here is the path I want to be on.
Imagine a near future in which the reader activates a reading
device that triggers images in the reader's mind, as reading
actually does, accompanied by visual and other environmental
information. As the words of the book display in chunks sized to
the preference of the reader, he sees them rather like he is
watching a Head Up Display (HUD) in a fighter jet. They remain
in his line of sight regardless of how he moves his head,
displaying in a transparency that does not interfere with his
line of sight of the real world all around.
Also delivered with those words
could be coded information that triggers neural transmitters in
the brain, stimulating the reader's vision and sensory
awareness. Code tells the reader's brain the type of book that
is being read, the time period and the environment in which the
story is set, and the conditions. In the reader's mind, he sees a
layer of reality of which he has 360 degree awareness, but one
that does not remove the reader's natural awareness of his
actual surroundings. Rather, it exists as an awareness that can
be intensified or powered down as the reader desires. This is
exactly the way our brain functions, and we call this variable
awareness level "concentration" or "focus". We drift in and out
of it all the time as we track through multiple levels of
physical and mental awareness of what we are experiencing.
The code containing the book's
words could also populate the reader's mind with all of the
images relevant to the context of the story. The details of the
era trigger neural receptors to unpack packages of information
on the iconography of the story's environment, to be further
defined by the reader's own knowledge and imagination, for it is
in that inner world where books are actually experienced. The
good ones are "transportational". They unlock the power of the
reader's own capacity for conjuring up an inner cinema of fully
realized sights, sounds, and smells.
Of course, not every reader is as
imaginative as the next. Future reading devices may help with
that. We just need the science to understand how the brain is
triggered to deliver specific responses, and the code to provide
the stimuli. Then we will have a virtual reality experience that
does not require that we simulate our machines and walk around
funny, wearing goggles, protected by a framework in case we
fall.
