For the past six months, I’ve been working with my collaborators Carsten Lambrecht of Creatokia and Honolulu based digital artist Femmebot to bring my book Notes from Nowhere to life. This has been an immersive process that has involved all of us exploring new technologies and ways of telling stories – which is fitting since this is a story about a man who is telling the story of Hawaii, three-hudred-years in the future.
At it’s core, Notes from Nowhere is a look at what an idealized future Hawaii might look like. Our protagonist, Harold Haggins isn’t too terribly different from a certain author writing this post. He’s not me, but he has the same dream to see a better world and at mid-life (like me) he is becoming frustrated at the lack of progress in his lifetime. Harold’s one dream is to experience that future and after a night out during the height of the pandemic which is by turns joyful and frustrating, Harold falls asleep wishing to see the world of the future. Then he awakes in it!
I’ve always been very transparent about the fact that Notes from Nowhere is modeled on the book News from Nowhere, written by the futurist, socialist, and utopian community founder William Morris back in 1890. The plot is roughly the same – a disappointed socialist wakes in a version of where he goes to sleep that is three hundred years in his future. Morris lived in and wrote about London. For me, it’s Honolulu. These are very different stories and the one-hundred-and-thirty-years that separate their publication dates mean that they were written from very different worlds.
In any event, after six-months of work preparing this launch – we have finally done it. Femmebot has put together an amazing array of illustrations and a book cover that capture the retro tropical future I imagined when I wrote of it and Carsten and his team have created an amazing drop dynamic that gives readers and collectors the chance to read, listen, own, and collect the story in affordable increments that can be either held in a Creatokia account or minted to the blockchain. The audio is yours truly reading his own work. I can’t begin to tell you how many retakes and stumbles I made – but the end result is (I hope) enjoyable for those who prefer to listen rather than look at the page (or screen).
This is an exciting moment for me and for us. I hope you enjoy this work. I hope you appreciate this vision. I hope that you too fall in love with the possibilities that lie before us.
https://www.creatokia.com/en/page/cd-vagobond
