And It's HERE!

There was a package waiting for me on the porch when I got back from picking up the  kids from school today. I knew what it had to be the moment I saw it...my first authors proof of the new novel. With an excitement I know many writer's can relate to, I hustled my prize into the house and tore it open. And after a quick perusal of the results, I found myself startlingly pleased with the outcome.

The cover works. As a matter of fact it works well enough that I can pretty much accept it as is. That is a first for me. I had to tweak and re-upload the cover to Dead Stop four different times. But it gets even better.....

...I can now put graphics in the books from Createspace. This allows me to make a more stylized interior title page, and it also allows me to include a piece of art rendered by my niece Courtney. (it also reminds me I need to give her credit for that piece, so there is one small tweak to the interior documents there). The ability to include graphics opens up other possible avenues in future projects as well. It might be kind of cool to have my next anthology with one or two illustrations per story. Maybe even redo Shades. 

Oh, and it also allows me to do one more thing...

Yep! Advertise! Maybe in the future, as I get more proficient at this, I might figure out how to resize these things so I can include text on the page as well. But for now this is a big step forward for me so I'm very happy. 

I intended to start a last reading of it tonight, in order to give it one more proofing, but a slight complication arose. My son, snatched the book as soon as he got the chance and scurried off with it to read. Seeing his glee at holding a book that his Dad wrote only multiplied my own internal glow by a power of a hundred. Yeah, it's a book with gunfights and big giant spiders but I was into that kind of stuff as a ten-year-old too.

So I am heading towards the end of another long journey with the destination being another published novel. Unless I encounter something really awful, there is a very real chance that I may only need to make some minor tweaks to the manuscript and interior....which means I might not even need to order another proof. I'll just have to see how it reads once the boy goes off to school tomorrow and I can get the book back. If so, I might be able to turn to formatting the ebook on Monday.

So as things stand, a late September or early October launch still seems to be in the cards.

It won't be long now.

UPDATE: Leave it my ten-year-old son to spot a couple of cover flaws that need to be fixed. Oh well, a second proof was in the works anyway :P

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Let the Proofing Begin!

     Well, actually the proofing has been going on all summer but today the first author's proof of Spiderstalk has been ordered from Createspace. The files have all been uploaded, and in three or four days I should get to see how the manuscript and artwork translate into a physical book. I have already discovered a couple of tweaks that will most likely need to be made, but so far things are looking good.

     This is probably the funnest and yet most frustrating stage of the writing/publishing process. The fun part being getting that package and tearing it open to see what I have made....and the frustrating part being all the niggling little tweaks to formatting and image adjustment. As I learned last year, never trust what the website says your book will look like. The only thing to trust is that physical copy you hold in your hand. THAT is what the finished product will look like , and what the reader will be holding in his hand as well.

     You are not ready to publish until that physical copy meets your satisfaction.

     Still, it's pretty amazing how all the tools to make it possible to publish your own books are now readily available. Whether it's photo editing programs you can design your covers with, word processing programs you can write your manuscript with, or online publishing companies like Createspace or Amazon KDP you can bring your book to market with,...a writer now has the tools to bring his work to life from start to finish. And all from the comfort of his laptop.

     Oh well, we'll see how this first proof turns out in a few days.

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Things Move Along

Still edting. Stillllllllll editing.

I have just reached the halfway point in editing Spiderstalk. It’s taken longer than I thought it would. I think it’s mainly due to it being a much larger work than I’ve worked on before combined with me not getting the free time I thought I would during the kid’s first week of school. Funny how that happens.

Oh well, we’ll see how next week goes.

A good friend of mine took me on a small tour of downtown Houston recently. We felt that since I have used Houston as a setting before...although only in a minor way...there was a reasonable chance I might do so again so it behooved me to have a better idea how the downtown looked. It was very educational and I got to go up to the sixtieth floor lobby of a skyscraper. Seeing the rooftop pool on an adjacent building was a surprise.

But such is the life of a writer. Research, research, research…

…and edit, edit, edit.

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Spiderstalk

There is still much to do, but it looks like I have a cover. Woohoo!

I'm still shooting for a September, or early October release. Lots of polishing yet to go, though.

But it's coming!

Progress is About to Pick Up

     Yes, it is that time again. In just a few short days that wondrous yellow vehicle will show up to transport my children to magical lands of education...and me to the wondrous realms of six hours of undisturbed peace and quiet. I love the little buggers dearly, but they are like two blond-headed little obstacles to progress when it comes to getting anything published.

    Now the serious work begins.

    Spiderstalk still moves forward. I'm doing some checks on a potential cover now. I still intend to do a little photography in that regard, but it may no longer be absolutely necessary; I'm also getting feedback from different proofreaders, and the effects have been very positive. Some scenes are now better than I originally envisioned them, and while the editing and revision this summer has been a long process, it has really borne fruit.

     Much of what needs to be done now is me actually implementing the fixes into the main manuscript. This is something that the aforementioned six hours of daily peace and quiet is going to be perfect for.

     The light at the end of the tunnel draws nearer

So I'm Going On A Spider Hunt

One of the joys of being an indie writer is being responsible for absolutely everything. This includes book covers.

As an indie, you pretty much have two choices when it comes to those. You can either find an artist online to make a cover for you, or you can make your own. Both are reasonable paths, but the second is only reasonable if you have taken the time to learn what works in book covers, what's necessary graphically, and you have at least a passing grasp of some photo editing program.

Fortunately, (or unfortunately) I fall in that category so I do make my own book covers. But being responsible for that means this author ends up doing some pretty silly stuff that doesn't always have much to do with writing. For instance, I'm about to grab my new Fujifilm SL1000 and go hunting a bunch of the above pictured spider.

You can't just grab any old picture of a spider off the internet due to copyright issues, and there are very few pictures that would have worked for what I needed anyway.  The one above is the closest I have found to an acceptable subject that was public domain. I had found one that would have worked but unfortunately couldn't get commercial rights to it.

I need a large 12 or 16  megapixel positioned and posed pretty much like the one above.Yes, that would be a huge picture, but if you're intending to make a bookcover that's going to look professional at 300dpi you need one that size. I'll also be carrying a solid green or blue piece of construction paper to put behind the subject when I take my picture so it will be a lot easier to remove everything but the spider in the photoediting program later.

So if anybody out there knows where a bunch of these are near north Houston, feel free to let me know in the comments. I'm gonna be going on a "bug hunt" soon :P

The novel is still in the editing stage, and being gone over by proofreaders yet again, but it is still on target for an autumn launch. Woohoo!

Getting It Together

A long time ago, I was enjoying a Writer’s Night Out with my good friend and fellow author Cherri Galbiati. We were in the middle of discussing character creation when she pulled a spiral bound notebook from her bag and laid it on the table. I asked what it was, and she stated it contained lists of all the characters from all her stories and books.

She explained that she kept this book to prevent accidental reuse or overlap of names and characters. At the time I thought this was a very sensible idea, but at the same time I felt confident in my own ability to keep my characters straight in my head.

But now that I am in the middle of editing and polishing my latest novel, and had to rename two characters due to name reuse, I have become a believer in her system. So I spent today listing all the characters in Shades, Eight Tales of Terror, Dead Stop, and my upcoming novel tentatively titled Spiderstalk. It turned out to be a bigger chore than I thought…

…and it looks like it ain’t over yet.

Sadly, my first publisher LL Dreamspell is closing it’s doors. They were a great small press with a sterling reputation, and I learned a good deal about writing from the feedback for my short stories from their editor, Lisa Smith. Their closing is a true loss.

A side result of this closing is I suddenly have the rights back to eight other short stories of mine. Combine those with a few I have lying around that Pill Hill Press published, and a couple that I haven’t tried to publish yet, and I have an instant anthology. And here I was worried about my “shelf being bare.”

Putting together anthologies can be a bit of a pain, because each story will need to evaluated with how it fits with the others, and many of them could stand to be revised and re-edited. (back in the day, I leaned towards these big blocky paragraphs.) And, of course, I’ll also have to weed through this finished product and write down all the characters in these stories so I don’t get behind again.

Gotta stay organized!

Sigh…work, work, work.

Fixing Stuff

So it's July, and what's been going on?

I bought a new camera....courtesy of my eight-year-old drenching my old camera in lemonade. This time I bought a Fujifilm SL1000. So far I'm very pleased with it, and I think it has a lot of potential for making future book covers. It's not a true DSLR, but it's a fantastic bridge camera for the price. I'm very pleased with the picture quality, and the zoom is incredible.

On another front, I've been editing Spiderstalk and it's turning into quite a project. At 167,000 words, it's a much bigger task than I've done before. I have gotten the first draft back from my first tier of proofreaders, and I'm slowly implementing fixes. I had originally intended to get the second draft out to my next proofreaders today, but it simply isn't ready for that. So work continues.

Actually, I'm sorta nervous about finishing this one. I've had it on the shelf for years, so it's always been there when I didn't have another project going. Once I hit that publish button on this one, my shelf will be bare.

Scary.

Action Packed Contents

     I was conversing with another author over the internet recently and he bemoaned the fact that nowadays a book should be designed to grab the readers attention within the first page or two. Although I am a firm believer in grabbing it much earlier than that, I understood his point in missing some of the more old fashioned styles of writing where authors sometimes took chapters to draw the reader in. As he summed up the current state of writing, he made the somewhat facetious remark that before long people were going to want action packed Tables of Contents.

     It was that last line that stood out to me, because I realized I'm already there.

     I actually do believe in an "action packed" Table of Contents. Seriously, why not? If that is the first thing the reader sees, there is no reason the Table of Contents shouldn't be doing their part to grab the readers attention as well as the rest of the book. I think I've always unconsciously believed that, hence my propensity to give my chapters names. Now that I've thought about it consciously, I'm more convinced than ever it's the way to go.

     I named the initial chapters of Dead Stop after the times of day, then shifted over to a storm theme once the weather moved in. They also reflected the intensity and momentum of events in the chapters they depicted. In my upcoming novel, Spiderstalk, there will be no overarching theme to the chapter names, but once again I'll try to find chapter names that reflect the chapter while hopefully also whetting the readers curiosity. In today's reality of ebooks and Amazon allowing customers to read the first part of the book for free, it only makes sense to have a Table of Contents that does it's part to capture the customers attention in the rest of the book.

     So yes, I think we're already at the point of "action packed Tables of Contents" and it's a tool that I heartily recommend to other authors as well. There is no reason not to, and much to be gained.