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It is possible…
It is possible that tomorrow I will begin writing again. That would be good, because I basically have 2 weeks to finish the utter mess that is my nephew’s book, and to write a proposal for STONE’S THROE, the Spirit of the Century pulp fiction novel coming out from Evil Hat Productions sometime (handwave) after I get it done. Because I’m doing STONE’S THROE as my Nano novel, and so I have to get my shit *together* for that.
I have been doing all sorts of Work That Isn’t Writing in the meantime, though. With assistance from the lovely Fred Hicks (of Evil Hat Productions, in fact), I have conquered Adobe InDesign, at least to the level I require, and have put together the Kickstarter print edition of NO DOMINION. It’s going to *rock*. And I’ve just sent out an update about that, so you should read it if you’re on that list.
I expect the general release for NO DOMINION will be in January, after everybody’s gotten all their physical material for the Kickstarter. Which you have all been very patient about, and for which I am grateful! If I run another one of these, I will have a much better sense of the timeline involved… o.O
I’m blogging over at Bitten By Books right now, in with a give-away of the Old Races e-collections, if you’re interested in that!
Oh look, AAs for MOUNTAIN ECHOES.
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triage
URSULA WON THE HUGO YAAHAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHH YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!
Ahem.
After a holiday there is triage. Isn’t that how it usually works? Granted, triage was going to the zoo this morning, but it’s not like I was going to get any work done anyway, since one doesn’t with a toddler, except during nap time. :) Wonderful day for the zoo, too. I’d forgotten school was back in session, so everyone there was pretty much a parent of 2-4 year old. Later I’ll…post some pictures, except our desktop has crashed and I don’t know if it’s the All-Spark that’s burned out, or if the Magic Blue Smoke has been released, so my “later” plan may not be as clever as I think it is.
Doesn’t matter. Still have a triage list to complete.
thinks to do:
– last walker papers story
– answer bryant’s email
– pay faith
– find paperwork
– water the orange tree & rebuild the top of its treehouse
– laundry
– fix this #$(*& book
– make dinner
– other things I can’t even think of right nowI got (did I say this? I don’t think so, not here anyway) the proof copy of the print-on-demand edition of YEAR OF MIRACLES that I spent so much time futhering over to Make It Right. And it’s genuinely gorgeous, with a couple of minor fixes that I need to attend to. It looks like it belongs on the shelf with the others.
Except for its one glaring problem: at 6×9″, Lulu’s trade paperback size, it is an inch taller and wider than my books in general, which turn out to be 5×8, more or less (considerably more than less). It is, in other words, The Wrong Size. And that makes me barmy.
Lulu’s mass market size is industry standard, so I /could/ do mass market if I wanted things that would at least fit tidily on shelves, but mrghgl. I *want* a Lulu 5×8 option. :p
Amazon, I said bitterly, does 5×8 trades. (It doesn’t matter. Amazon, at least for the NO DOMINION project, isn’t an option, because I’m not shipping books from America to sign.)
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triumph complete. :)
I couldn’t help myself. I did up the formatting properly and I’m quite happy with it. I’ll have a proof copy printed, and perhaps I’ll do a give-away with it or something once I’ve had a look over it to see what detail work might need fixing.
And yay, my ad is up at Bitten By Books! I’m running a 2 month ad there to see if it boosts sales any, and then in October I’ll be doing a guest blog there and elsewhere to see if /that/ makes a difference to sales. This is all very interesting stuff to me, finding out what all Makes It Go.
Mikaela commented on the earlier post about Doin’ It Right, saying, “Well, you might not plan to sell them now. But who knows, maybe you plan to sell them next year or something :). ( Unless you are sitting on awesome news.)”
which I thought I would lift the reply into public space for, in case anybody else had wondered the same thing:
I am not, sadly, sitting on awesome news. I have to wait and see how BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER does with SubPress. If it does well enough and they want to give another one a go, I’ll probably split the ORSSP stuff into 2 new collections, and write “Kiss of Angels”, the Grace O’Malley story, as a novella for the anchor piece for one, use “Year of Miracles” as the anchor for the other, and write a bunch more short stories to fill out both of them so they’ve got a lot of new content to go along with the stuff people’ve read.
But that all depends on how BYD does. :)
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more on formatting
…because *I’m* interested even if you’re not. :)
Turns out the method of formatting page numbers, footers, headers, etc, for POD isn’t that difficult. It is only not that difficult, mind you, because I have already learned how to use Open Office style sheets thanks to LJ Cohen’s brilliant primer on ebook formatting, so I basically comprehend what I’m doing.
The problem, of course, is that I’ve been using stylesheets fairly willy-nilly through the document as I’ve realized and discovered more bits I need to do, so it’s not nearly as well-organized as it needs to be in order to implement the not-so-difficult header/footer stuff. It is, in other words, more difficult than it needs to be, because I’m not yet good enough at this to have all the right pieces in place when I begin.
The good news is I can recognize what I need to do in order to make it all work beautifully. The bad news, of course, is that it’s time-consuming, especially for a first attempt. And whether it’s worth it for a personal POD project is…debatable. If I was going to sell this thing, yeah, I’d fix it all, and I will certainly Do It Right with NO DOMINION, but…eh. Eh, sez I. Eh.
OTOH, the satisfaction of Doin’ It Right is considerable, so…*flails* :)
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1 down, 34530987 to go…
I have nearly finished the AAs for WALKING DEAD. The rest of the afternoon will be spent reading the last few chapters and typing them in so they’re no longer a burden on my tiny little mind.
I’ve also, much more satisfactorily–which should tell you how fond I am of doing AAs–finished converting cemurphy.net back over to WordPress and hacking it until it looks like the rest of the site. The biggest advantage to this is it allows individual entries instead of the flat file I had, but having comments available again is nice too. :)
After the AAs are sent off I need to do a cemurphy.net newsletter, because among other things, I’m going to be doing an all-day interview at Bitten By Books on Tuesday this week. I’ll post a reminder on Tuesday, but you should drop by and try to win an ARC of THE PRETENDER’S CROWN.
It’s been an utterly slug-like weekend. I’ve barely left the house. It’s been alternating between being really gorgeous and absolutely pissing rain, with an emphasis on the latter, which hardly encourages one to go anywhere. So yesterday I watched six episodes of Doctor Who: that was my big effort for the day. :) (Well, that and stayed up too late working on cemurphy.net, but that might actually qualify as work, so I’m allowing myself to forget about it.)
Right. Off to finish the AAs.