I’ve been experimenting a lot with iPhone filters lately, particularly the ones that produce random results. I’m often delighted with the aftermath, as they produce images I never would have dreamed up myself. Take the pic above, for instance. It’s Frank Gehry’s Peix, run through the Tiltshift and Plastic Bullet apps. The Apocalypse Filter, if you will.

Also, I miss Barcelona.

Depressing combination of stories in my feeds lately. SETI has apparently been put on hold, while an article in Business Week argues the innovators and geniuses of our generation are doing nothing but selling widgets. Sigh….

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m conducting a little experiment in pricing to figure out the best price for Please. Not the best price to maximize profits, but the best price to attract new readers. I’ve had Please priced at $2.99 for April, and I’ll be raising it to $4.99 for the month of May. After that, I’ll set the permanent price and leave it there. Unless this crazy ebook trend changes everything again, of course….

So your time to buy the author’s cut of Please with bonus material at $2.99 may be running out. How can you possibly sleep at night?

The 21st century is a bubble. China is building entire cities no one lives in to keep up the GDP. The story of the toy-store owner with no customers is just plain sad.

Also, is this why China’s equivalent of Google Maps are hand-drawn? To hide the rust and decay?

I was recently asked be a guest on the Enthusiasticast podcast, which was a real treat because it’s the best literary podcast I’ve ever subscribed to, and it’s always at the top of my playlist. Guests are asked to endorse a book, so I championed Derek McCormack‘s The Haunted Hillbilly. (Take that, Canada Reads!)

Check it out to listen to me talk about The Warhol Gang and Please, the beautiful depravity of Derek McCormack, gunsight porn and — yes, you guessed it — why Harlequin romances are in fact feminist texts.

I was recently interviewed by Marissa Tiel, a Ryerson j-school student, about the ebook revolution. Check it out here.

I realized partway through the first draft of my latest book, The Apocalypse Corpse, that my writing style had changed. Hopefully for the better, you say! Ba-dum-dum….

Seriously, though, I’ve been writing shorter paragraphs and sentences, and making sure I’m always indicating the speaker when it comes to dialogue. I wasn’t exactly the sort of writer who carried on with long paragraphs in my previous books, but in the new book I’m really sharp and short.

I don’t think this is good or bad. It’s just an evolution in my writing based on my reading. And I credit ebooks for the evolution. I’ve found long paragraphs in ebooks can be a bit difficult to read. The screens are smaller than print pages, so you only have room for a few lines of text at a time. Those longer paragraphs that take up half a page in a traditional print book just turn into a wall of text in an e-reader, and I find my mind wandering as I stare at them. I’d say it’s just me, but other people on book forums have voiced the same issue, so it seems there’s something about our wiring that makes us lose interest when faced with too much text and not enough breaks. Make of that what you will.

The same goes for witty exchanges of dialogue between characters. On a printed page, I can usually follow who’s speaking without needing too many dialogue tags. But in an ebook, I sometimes get lost once I’ve advanced the page past the initial “he said, she said” tags. Then I have to go back and trace it out. In my own writing now, I’m careful to throw in a dialogue tag every few lines now to ensure that readers don’t get lost.

So there’s no doubt to me that the reading technology is changing writing style. I’m seeing it happen in real time.

I suppose some people may consider that a negative. Maybe it is. I don’t know. But if so, the positives still far outweigh it. Consider this: Last night around midnight, I was lying in bed and wanted to read some genre fiction. So I picked up my iPhone and logged in to the Kindle Store and bought Masked, a collection of dark superhero stories. A couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to make a spontaneous purchase like that in bed at night and be reading the book a minute later. So it all balances out.

Please note that the ebook version of Please is now available on the iBookstore and the Nook, as well as on the Diesel bookstore. Kobo and Sony versions should be coming soon. They’re in the queue.

And, of course, there’s the Kindle version.

I finished the first draft of The Apocalypse Corpse yesterday. I feel nearly dead myself.

It was the most intensive, feverish writing experience I’ve had yet, as I wrote around 80,000 words, or just under 300 pages, in three months (I started the book Jan. 1). I was hoping to have a first draft done in six months, so I’m happy and surprised to have managed a draft so quickly. And burned out.

It’s a very rough draft, and I imagine it will take at least another three months to polish the next draft, fill in the plot holes, etc. And then, me being me, I’ll want another half dozen drafts to polish things some more before I send it off to the agent. But the good news out of all this is you should be reading a new book from me sooner rather than later.

Oh, what’s it about you ask? I don’t want to talk too much about it at this point, so I’ll just say it involves a repo man with amnesia, a billionaire who made his fortune off the Chernobyl accident, a beautiful hit woman, and a mysterious, dismembered body. Actually, it features lots of bodies. And body parts. And people losing body parts. Just another fun Darbyshire novel. Although I warn you now: this one is slightly weird.