Introduction of Shades

While I am working on incorporating edits from different proofreaders, I thought it might be fun to go ahead an put up the main candidate for the anthology's introduction. This is about seventy percent likely the way it is going to look, but all feedback is welcome :)

Introduction

So whatever happened to ghost stories?

When I made the decision to write a horror anthology, I thought it might be a good idea to buy a few for my Kindle and see what was out there. I figured that would help me get a feeling for what people were reading, and what today’s reader expected. It turned out to be both an excellent and enlightening investment, for I discovered there are a lot of talented horror writers doing short stories. What started as research ended up being a valuable and entertaining experience.

But as I read through the different anthologies, I noticed something.

Where were the ghosts?

I would occasionally find one, here or there, but they were buried amongst the horde of vampires, werewolves, serial killers, and other assorted monsters that stalk the dark fields of the horror genre. Of those I found, only a few seemed to have been written with the intention of actually being frightening. Some were creepy, but just as many were sympathetic figures or even helpful to the protagonist. And this is all fine because it’s what the authors intended, and they did a good job of it…but I was looking for something different.

I wanted scary.

At this point, I went back to Amazon.com with the intention of downloading anthologies dedicated to ghost stories. But once I started searching, I was stunned at their scarcity. There were some, but I really expected there to be more than there were. It turns out there just weren’t that many collections dedicated to ghost stories, and many of them used the same stories from the public domain works of the Victorian era. So I downloaded what I found and kicked back to enjoy another week full of evenings reading.

Again, what I found surprised me.

The large majority of the stories were written by men such as Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwell, and other assorted writers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While I enjoyed the stories greatly, I could also see how they suffered from being told in the styles, settings, and conventions of the times. There were a few more modern single author collections. Yet once again I discovered the first or second story might be a ghost story and then the rest were other types of tales entirely. They were entertaining, though still not exactly what I was looking for.

On the other hand, this was about research and that research was paying off.

By this time, I began to get a clear idea of what my own anthology project should be. I wanted to write a collection dedicated to ghosts...not exactly in the modern paranormal style, but in the old fashioned “horror from beyond the grave” genre with a more modern voice. I wanted revenants of fearsome demeanor, but each also being the unique product of their own circumstances, history, and who they were in their former life.

At the same time, I wanted to preserve the novelette form (works of 7000 to 17,000 words) that many of the old masters used, before magazine space limitations shrank the short story to much smaller conditions. I think the novelette serves the ghost story well for, unlike many other terrors that one finds in the horror genre, the ghost is a character that requires a back story. A giant spider is fearsome merely due its existence, but half the horror of a phantom is how it reached his or her current state. Therefore the only story in this collection that weighs in at fewer than seven thousand words is Storm Chase, a reprint of the very first ghost story I had published in a short story anthology (Thank you, Pill Hill Press.) All the rest are tales written for this project.

So I humbly present to you, the reader, my very first single author anthology… Shades: Eight Tales of Terror. I sincerely hope the specters you find within give you both shivers and delight, and maybe food for thought as well. If so, then my endeavor was a success.

Now please get comfortable, sit back, and let me tell you a story…

Putting It All Together

I'm almost there. It's really starting to come together now. The largest part of the anthology has been edited, and I'm just waiting on a couple of things so I can go ahead an wrap things up in the next day or so. At that point  (knocks on wood) this stage of the project will be complete.

Then I'll be uploading for what  hopefully be that final proof.

One thing this exercise had definitely taught me is that, no matter how hard you try, you can't do all the editing on your own manuscripts. You HAVE to let other eyes go over you work, or it's not going to be ready.

Lesson learned.

Approaching "Enough is Enough!"

I'm now over halfway through incorporating the latest edits into the Shades manuscript. I'm almost there. With any luck I will be finished by this weekend, or Monday or Tuesday at the latest. 

And that's a good thing, because...

By Crom, if I'm still editing this damn manuscript by the middle of next week, I'm going to drag it, and all the materials it's saved or printed on, out into the back yard and set the whole friggen mess ON FIRE!

There, I feel better now...

It Had to be Done

So I got my second proof of Shades in last week and started editing it. It seemed like a big improvement over the last one, and I couldn't find much in the way of errors. But as I read it, I had a queasy feeling I was missing something. I was doing my very best to see it through fresh eyes and catch anything out of place, but I just couldn't help feeling I was missing something.

So my loving wife, Karla, agreed to sit down and read and edit one of the stories in the anthology...just to see if I was missing anything. I knew this was a sacrifice on her part, because she hates ghost and horror stories, and I was careful to pick out the one I felt she would find the least objectionable. I just really needed a fresh set of eyes to see the book before I declared it ready.

So, she sat down and started reading.

Almost immediately, the yellow highlighter was whipped out and she started marking. As I watched in dismay, more and more marks were made on the story as she read through it. It was torture. At last she was done, and I took the book back and surveyed the damage.

While a couple of the marks really amounted to stylistic difference of opinions, the most of them were entirely justified. Some were even painfully obvious, and I still can't believe I missed them (three times!). And while the number of errors wasn't truly horrific, it was enough that she felt compelled to offer to edit the other stories of the book in order to make sure it was ready before I hit publish. Looking at all the yellow marks in the story, I had no choice but to agree...although we also agreed she didn't have to read two stories that I know she would have found the most upsetting.

So she went back to work.

The marker flew. Observations about certain tendencies I had in punctuation were made. Other observations about my usage of certain words were made. I was also dryly informed that one of my characters was "too stupid to live," which I took in good graces since I knew she hated reading this genre. Anyways, the deed was done and now I need to go back through the two manuscripts (ebook and softcover) and incorporate her corrections. It will be a lot of work, but it's well worth it.

I want to get this right.

Noggin Work

Well, proof number two arrived and so far it is a big improvement. At least this time the errors don't just leap off the page at me.

But, alas, there are still errors.

So I'm starting the process of reading the book again. I'm going to go even slower, and try to find everything this time. I'm almost there. I'm really hoping this will be the last read through. I know there are some people out there wondering when this thing is ever coming out, and I just want you guys to know I hear you.. Nobody wants this done more than me.

But it needs to be right.

I'm close. But there is still editing to be done.

Soon, folks.

Soon.

Here We Go Again

Here is something a lot of people may not know about being a writer. 

When you write a book, you are going to read it over and over and over again. You are going to read it so many times you're going to end up hating the author. Then there will come that wonderful day you get the thing done, and then you format it, and get it a cover, and then you get it approved by the printer, and then they send you a proof...

...and then you find more mistakes. 

So you sit down with the book in one hand, yellow marker in the other, and read the damned thing yet again. And you wonder what you had been smoking when you wrote the thing in the first place and somehow made such stupid mistakes that escaped attention till now.

Ugh!

But I've done it. The book was read through...line by line...and yellow marks were made. Then the manuscripts...both for the paperback and for the ebook...were corrected one page at a time. And now the manuscript has been uploaded to Createspace for review again, to make sure it meets their guidelines. I should hear back from them in a day or two and if it clears...which it should...then I order another proof. Then it will be another week of waiting for that proof to arrive in the mail. Then, if it passes muster... which it should... I tell Createspace to publish.

Then I'll be entering uncharted territory again and will have to learn what happens next. While that's going on, I'll get the ebook ready so I can upload it once the paperback is out. Then, assuming I haven't completely broken the internet beyond repair by this time, I should be done.

I hope so, anyways. I think it's a really good book... but I really don't want to read it again.

So Close, Yet So Far...

So my author's proof for Shades arrived in the mail from Createspace yesterday afternoon.

It felt like Christmas in February when I saw that package on my front porch. All other things on my daily to do list got pushed back as I hustled the box into the house and tore it open. And there it was...my book. 

The cover had come out even better than I expected (thank you Justyn Perry), and the formatting had worked as intended. To say I was delighted would be a woeful understatement. I was ecstatic.

But then trouble loomed in Paradise.

I sat down to read through my book, and started spotting errors. It seems that a couple of stories weren't edited as thoroughly as others, which I guess can be a hazard in an anthology.Don't get me wrong, there wasn't a whole lot of them. But what was interesting was how much those errors stood out once the manuscript was in book form as opposed to being on screen or printer paper. So...

It's back to work.

That's what proofs are for, after all. My job today is to break out the yellow marker and read through the entire book. Then once I find all the errors, I will fix the manuscript and upload it again. This book is going to have my name on it, and it isn't going to reach the market until I'm comfortable with the level of quality inside. It's almost there, but it's just not quite done yet.

Oh well, it's all part of the process. Soon, folks....

Soon.

LOL! at me....

Sometimes I'm just too linear of a thinker.

I should go ahead an get that ebook file ready, but because I planned on doing that after approving the print book, I'm just not mentally at that place yet. It would take about thirty minutes, and common sense says to go ahead and get it done, but nooooooo....

Same thing with starting a new project or getting to work on Dead Stop. There really is no reason I can't...but I'm still in the Shades mindset because it isn't "done" yet. Oh well, it's just a few more days, and I can change gears.

I hope.

Woohoo! Approved! Time to Hurry Up and Wait...

So, here is the final full cover for the Shades anthology.

I'm almost done.

This morning I received an email informing me that Createspace approved my manuscript and cover! Woohoo!

Now I have finally reached the stage where I order a proof for review. I have already done so, and hopefully I will be holding the first copy of my book in my hands in about ten days. If that copy meets my approval, then I think all that is left to do is to let them know they can put it up for sale, and then for me to get to work on uploading the ebook.

So now I sit in sort of a limbo. I suppose I can go ahead and incorporate the very last edits from the book manuscript into the ebook manuscript, but that will take about thirty minutes. After that, it's "hurry up and wait". Ten days of not being able to do much of anything.

I suppose I could start thinking about picking up the Dead Stop manuscript and figuring out how to go forward with it, but I'm still really focused on Shades and I probably will be until it's published. Argh! This is going to be a long ten days!