The Pickle: A Conversation About Making Digital Books

7: Recruitment

Russell, Eli, I have to say: more than anything else, reading your comments makes me feel lucky, in an almost giddy, can-you-believe-it, we-won-the-lottery sort of way—the payout in this case being that I live in the splinter timeline in which you guys were not successfully recruited by MegaPubCo and OmniBlarpTech in 2007 and 2011 respectively; in which you signed up for this struggle; in which something in your brains and hearts, some innate creative GPS that wouldn’t shut up, kept you on this path, the path towards craft and story and weirdness.

And pickles.

Woodcut by Ian Huebert

And honestly, I think there are some designer-programmer types out there right now who are going to read your description of the work (“fluidity and looseness, experimentation and fun”) and think, Wow, that sounds… amazing. More rewarding than the stuff I’m doing here at OmniBlarpTech, which they tell me is important — we have over a billion daily blarpers, after all; we’re changing the world, or at least the way people blarp — but, gosh, I did always love books.

Those designer-programmers might bend their trajectory a bit, begin to obey their own creative GPS. We might see some more interesting, beautifully non-scalable digital books in the nearish-future. Not 2068.

This conversation is a recruitment drive, is what I’m saying.

Note to readers: This is (going to be) a long, loopy conversation. The Pickle Index is crisp and compact. Consider sampling its tangy delights.

The Indexed Pickle

1. Opening Salvo [Robin Sloan]
2. Blank Slates! [Craig Mod]
3. Opportunity Cost [Robin Sloan]
4. The Struggle (Sorry) [Russell Quinn]
5. Self Selection & The Jaws of Venture Valley [Craig Mod]
6. The Many Futures of Storytelling [Eli Horowitz]
7. ➡ Recruitment [Robin Sloan]
8. Blarp [Eli Horowitz]
9. That Oracular Feeling [Robin Sloan]
10. Benevolent Leaders of the Frothy Kingdom [Craig Mod]
11. The Left-on-the-Floor Weirdness [Russell Quinn]
12. Territory of the Book [Eli Horowitz]
13. At This Moment [Robin Sloan]
14. Make a Book, Even Just One [Craig Mod]