I certainly have left this blog fallow for a long time, but it's not like it has followers. Throwing some personal material in, the economy was a big problem for us, but I'm settled in a real job now and we have a 2nd girl. My wife's blog is The Rutherford Files.
While all that was going on, I got away from being stuck on the first book by plotting a second one. I then lucked out and Kim's aunt Susan agreed to edit the 1st book - someone that doesn't have to be nice to me, but, as a school teacher, was willing to really go through it. She gave me some good feedback that surprised me as much as anything because it was pretty minimal. She liked it and thinks it's work publishing - yay!
She also suggested I add chapter titles, which I had considered. That took a lot of creativity! I now have a spread sheet of over 200 doggies sayings and etc. to inspire chapter titles in future books.
So, I seem to have a version of my first novel that is fit to show people. Maybe I should update my blog?
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Monday, June 1, 2009
Sample Chapters updated - draft 9.5 finished
I updated the sample chapters. I haven't posted for a while while I've been focused on getting a real job, and today most of that just fell apart on me. Trying to do something constructive, I finished this draft. Nothing major is changed outside of the first chapter, which is more visual, I hope.
As a reminder to myself (after all, no one reads this blog yet, except for me), getting the chapters formatted for posting consists of:
1) save the word doc as a text file
2) open with notepad and turn off word wrap
3) highlight the blank spaces at the front of the lines, copy that and past into 'find and replace' then replace with the html paragraph tag
4) copy the entire chapter and paste it into blogger's edit html screen
NB - the blank spaces wound up in two different formats, 4 spaces and 5 spaces. That was easily dealt with by doing this twice. Each chapter was consistent for it's length
This should be good for the whole book in html, but certainly each chapter cut and pasted in blogger properly.
As a reminder to myself (after all, no one reads this blog yet, except for me), getting the chapters formatted for posting consists of:
1) save the word doc as a text file
2) open with notepad and turn off word wrap
3) highlight the blank spaces at the front of the lines, copy that and past into 'find and replace' then replace with the html paragraph tag
4) copy the entire chapter and paste it into blogger's edit html screen
NB - the blank spaces wound up in two different formats, 4 spaces and 5 spaces. That was easily dealt with by doing this twice. Each chapter was consistent for it's length
This should be good for the whole book in html, but certainly each chapter cut and pasted in blogger properly.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Designing a book cover in word
I really have to learn to blog as I go, and not save things up. So, as a quicky, how does one design a cover in MS word? Your milage may vary, as I am using the very anoying Office 2007
The cover size will depend on the thickness of the book, but that can probably be finalized post the general design. The paper needs to be set to a size to cover both front and back and the spine. In Word, page layout -> page setup -> paper Select paper size as custom. For a 6 x 9 book with a need for a 1 inch spine, choose 13 x 9.
Now use text boxes to build the cover. For the spine, insert a text box, position it in the middle and find how to change the text direction. In 2007, there will be a 'text box tools' section and that will have a 'text direction' menu item. Use other text boxes for the front and back cover text. You will need to play with position, font size, etc.
For examples, I pulled random images from my hard drive to experiment with. So a cover with a small, contained picture, and one with a bright colorful picture stretched across the book.
Your other key needs are use of fill colors and send to back/front. Note that 'no fill' or transparent are not white. For the superman image, it has to be sent to the back and the text box fill has to be transparent.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Dog defends owner from mountian lion
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/06/hero-dog-saves-hiking-own_n_198228.html
I should be blogging about figuring out how to design a cover, but ...
I should be blogging about figuring out how to design a cover, but ...
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Bloody Microsoft!
I just realized the sample chapters aren't formatting properly. It's just paragraph indentations, but they aren't there and aren't replaced with line breaks. So, cut and paste from bloody word doesn't work. Try saving as html; blogger doesn't like all that crap Microsoft includes in the auto generated html, and who can blame it? Try pasting to notepad - same loss of paragraph indents. Try RTF, that don't work. Word pad isn't here - did they remove it?
Sigh - I'll just have to take the time to put in the tags by hand. That will be a pain.
revised update - Word pad is there, but useless. Finally, I worked out, save from word to txt, it will insert 5 spaces for the indents. Open the resulting file with notepad. Then use find and replace to change 5 spaces to paragraph tag. Make sure wordwrap is turned off, cut and paste into the blogger edit html screen. The result is good.
By the way, the spelling check in blogger leaves an ugly mess of html behind it. Interesting.
Sigh - I'll just have to take the time to put in the tags by hand. That will be a pain.
revised update - Word pad is there, but useless. Finally, I worked out, save from word to txt, it will insert 5 spaces for the indents. Open the resulting file with notepad. Then use find and replace to change 5 spaces to paragraph tag. Make sure wordwrap is turned off, cut and paste into the blogger edit html screen. The result is good.
By the way, the spelling check in blogger leaves an ugly mess of html behind it. Interesting.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Editing ongoing - Modified Sample Chapters
Editing is the most important thing right now. Kim has gone through several of the early chapters and I've incorporated those edits. It sparks some nice ideas on fleshing a couple of scenes out. I updated the posts for the three sample chapters. With an update note at the bottom of each, but I'm not really treating those as posts anyway.
The other primary editor I'm hoping to get detailed input from is Kim's good friend Becky. We had dinner with Becky and her husband last night, and it was rather funny what she had to say about the novel. I should have memorized her exact words, but she said she was pleasantly shocked that I can actually write. Not that she doubted it, just, a friend asks you to read something, that is dangerous territory.
I had a similar reaction from our neighbor when she came over last week. She has been very interested in the fact that I've been doing this, and when I read the first couple of pages to her, she was shocked that it was pretty good. I understand this quite well, actually. That's why I'm on bloody draft 9. I thought this thing would take 3 drafts and 6 months tops. I can honestly say, my wordsmithing sucked on draft 3, where I was still hammering out plot holes.
So, draft 8 is ready for serious editing, and draft 9 aught to be publishable. Sheesh, this thing has been work.
The other primary editor I'm hoping to get detailed input from is Kim's good friend Becky. We had dinner with Becky and her husband last night, and it was rather funny what she had to say about the novel. I should have memorized her exact words, but she said she was pleasantly shocked that I can actually write. Not that she doubted it, just, a friend asks you to read something, that is dangerous territory.
I had a similar reaction from our neighbor when she came over last week. She has been very interested in the fact that I've been doing this, and when I read the first couple of pages to her, she was shocked that it was pretty good. I understand this quite well, actually. That's why I'm on bloody draft 9. I thought this thing would take 3 drafts and 6 months tops. I can honestly say, my wordsmithing sucked on draft 3, where I was still hammering out plot holes.
So, draft 8 is ready for serious editing, and draft 9 aught to be publishable. Sheesh, this thing has been work.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
To Blog or not to Blog?
Pretty much everything that precedes this post is an experiment or planning for the future. The point of this thing is to ultimately sell my novel, A Girl and her Neodog .* In a way, this may be the first 'real' post to this blog.
So a little 'about', until I update the appropriate areas:
A Girl and her Neodog is the story of Kim and Rosie, a sort of near-future Nancy Drew with her talking service dog; a service dog genetically engineered for intelligence and equipped with a chest speaker and a pair of mechanical arms. Think Dr. Octopus's cuter, friendlier dog.
The characters are inspired by my wife and the extremely cool dog she had when we were dating, so Rosie is a Portuguese Water Dog, a breed that recently got a lot of publicity thanks to First Dog Bo Obama. The breed is hypoallergenic, which is important to my fictional use of them as super service dogs, and a reason the Obama's got Bo over a shelter dog.
I've recently completed the novel, although it needs editing from others. I call it 'complete' despite the lack of input from others because I massaged it to death for a very long time and I feel it is pretty solid at this time. I sent copies to a number of people, and started looking at selling and marketing.
The other point of this blog is to document the business journey of getting somewhere with this book. I'm looking at parallel pursuits of independent self publishing, print on demand publishing and traditional publishing. In the near term, I imagine posts will be much more about what I'm learning about publishing than about the book itself. Hopefully, that will get somewhere soon, and it will change to being about the second book in the series!
So, while I'm waiting for input from people (and trying to finagle real editing for future favors), I'm trying to evaluate three paths for hard copies. An ebook version is very simple to put up.I plan on a detailed post on that at some point; probably when I put it up. For hard copy, I've got three resources I like:
http://www.aventinepress.com/
Aventine seems to be the place to go to self publish with PoD and get into book stores. The plus in that, their pricing is right to get you into bookstores. The minus is, the margins are small, because they are setup for bookstores and online booksellers; they do not have their own order process. So it's sell only through Amazon, etc. and bookstores, or build/find your own online orders.
- Note: they must have some kind of back end. I need to dig deeper.
http://publishing.booklocker.com/
Booklocker has thier own order website, and, if the order comes through there, very high margins. There are a lot of other interesting resources on a no-frills looking website. Somehow, they give me a very nice feeling.
http://www.stoneinthesurf.com/
Rich Neumann is very inspiring. He is the friend of a friend, and I owe the man an introductory email. My bloody book took much longer to reach the 'fit to show others' point than I expected. Rich outlines the real do-it-yourself, going to the printer himself, bypassing the whole PoD system, and not breaking the bank. He is his own publisher, gets short print runs done such that the total upfront money is comparable to a PoD, but the cost per copy is much lower. If I were more confident of my abilities, I think this would be the way to go. He is very soup-to-nuts the independent publisher guy.
Curriously, only booklocker seems to have a real ebook strategy, although ebooks are simple enough to post to your own site.
Now, many I should clean up some the gadgets around this?
* Speaking of learning, there is no 'underline' button in the blogger post editor. I better find my old html references (I guessed right on the tag) and or find a good offline blog post editor.
So a little 'about', until I update the appropriate areas:
A Girl and her Neodog is the story of Kim and Rosie, a sort of near-future Nancy Drew with her talking service dog; a service dog genetically engineered for intelligence and equipped with a chest speaker and a pair of mechanical arms. Think Dr. Octopus's cuter, friendlier dog.
The characters are inspired by my wife and the extremely cool dog she had when we were dating, so Rosie is a Portuguese Water Dog, a breed that recently got a lot of publicity thanks to First Dog Bo Obama. The breed is hypoallergenic, which is important to my fictional use of them as super service dogs, and a reason the Obama's got Bo over a shelter dog.
I've recently completed the novel, although it needs editing from others. I call it 'complete' despite the lack of input from others because I massaged it to death for a very long time and I feel it is pretty solid at this time. I sent copies to a number of people, and started looking at selling and marketing.
The other point of this blog is to document the business journey of getting somewhere with this book. I'm looking at parallel pursuits of independent self publishing, print on demand publishing and traditional publishing. In the near term, I imagine posts will be much more about what I'm learning about publishing than about the book itself. Hopefully, that will get somewhere soon, and it will change to being about the second book in the series!
So, while I'm waiting for input from people (and trying to finagle real editing for future favors), I'm trying to evaluate three paths for hard copies. An ebook version is very simple to put up.I plan on a detailed post on that at some point; probably when I put it up. For hard copy, I've got three resources I like:
http://www.aventinepress.com/
Aventine seems to be the place to go to self publish with PoD and get into book stores. The plus in that, their pricing is right to get you into bookstores. The minus is, the margins are small, because they are setup for bookstores and online booksellers; they do not have their own order process. So it's sell only through Amazon, etc. and bookstores, or build/find your own online orders.
- Note: they must have some kind of back end. I need to dig deeper.
http://publishing.booklocker.com/
Booklocker has thier own order website, and, if the order comes through there, very high margins. There are a lot of other interesting resources on a no-frills looking website. Somehow, they give me a very nice feeling.
http://www.stoneinthesurf.com/
Rich Neumann is very inspiring. He is the friend of a friend, and I owe the man an introductory email. My bloody book took much longer to reach the 'fit to show others' point than I expected. Rich outlines the real do-it-yourself, going to the printer himself, bypassing the whole PoD system, and not breaking the bank. He is his own publisher, gets short print runs done such that the total upfront money is comparable to a PoD, but the cost per copy is much lower. If I were more confident of my abilities, I think this would be the way to go. He is very soup-to-nuts the independent publisher guy.
Curriously, only booklocker seems to have a real ebook strategy, although ebooks are simple enough to post to your own site.
Now, many I should clean up some the gadgets around this?
* Speaking of learning, there is no 'underline' button in the blogger post editor. I better find my old html references (I guessed right on the tag) and or find a good offline blog post editor.
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