Progress report

Busy day today, so I’m just doing some editing.

One of my pet peeves (keep in mind, I’m quite bad with names) is when characters are given really similar names. You know, “Elaine” and “Ellen”—like, there are thousands upon thousands of names out there, and this is what you do?

I always try to guard against that in my own work, but what I realized was that I had two characters whose names didn’t sound the same, but they looked similar written down. It’s more of a deal in book two, because one of the characters is much more prominent here than in book one.

So I took care of that—again, there are thousands upon thousands of names out there….

Progress report

I forgot to do this before, but yesterday and today I wrote 2,100 words!

What I’m realizing with this genre is that the sex basically has to be its own storyline. And then that storyline has to be incorporated into the overall story, hopefully in an interesting way. So that can be kind of challenging.

Progress report

I wrote 600 words today, which doesn’t sound great, BUT I wound up doing quite a bit of continuity editing on the first book as well. This is why I want to write the romance series all at once—it makes that a lot easier.

Dreyer's English

Since I got my second shingles shot yesterday, I’m not good for much today, so I thought I’d read a book my sister got me for my birthday: Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style.

It reminds me a lot of Eats, Shoots & Leaves in that it’s waaaaaay more readable than one of the classic style guides or a grammar textbook while managing to cover a lot of very important information about how grammar works (including an entire section on ghost rules! yay!).

But I think there’s one aspect that less-experienced writers might find confusing. As you may have gathered from the subtitle, the book isn’t really intended to be the final word on anything.

The problem in my mind stems from the fact that Dreyer will sometimes posit his pet preferences as the “correct” (or more accurately, standard) way. They are not. If he’s noting that, hey, all the style guides disagree with him, but they’re wrong, you need to realize that he is espousing something that is not standard.

It’s fine if you want to use what Dreyer thinks ought to be standard English—maybe you agree with him that Dreyer’s English is better than regular English! But if you’re trying to convince a reader that you actually do know how to drive a bus, then you’re much better off using one of those standard style books he occasionally disagrees with.

Progress report

For some reason, it’s vaccination season for me right now, but I had a day between the shot hangover and the next shot, so I wrote the first chapter of the second romance novel! The next shot is for shingles, so chapter 2 may take a while….

Doing a hardcover book in KDP

So, the proof of the hardcover edition of A Dislocated World showed up. The proof took longer to get here than a normal paperback proof, and I don’t know if that’s because this is in beta or if that should always be expected.

Honestly, I think it looks pretty good, although I have no idea how durable the binding is going to be or anything.

IMG_8694.png

The stupid banner is annoying, of course. But the cover template gave a pretty accurate idea of what would be visible and what would not be.

The cover is (quite) matte, and the art is printed directly on the cover—just like you see with a lot of YA nonfiction titles. There’s no jacket, but hopefully it’s a little more durable for the librarians out there.

IMG_8693.png

Good luck proofing that cover text, though!

With this particular book, I did not have to adjust the interior layout. The binding’s a bit tight, though, so the gutter is a little tight as well.

IMG_8698.png

I feel like this is good enough, but certainly if you need to adjust the layout from paper to hardcover, I would throw any extra margin space right into that gutter. If people have to force the book flat to read the text near the gutter, then that will significantly reduce the lifespan of the book, which will make the librarians all sad again.

I approved it for publication as well as the large-print edition of Tribulations, so they should both show up on Amazon soon. The hardcover can’t be put on expanded distribution (at least not yet), so keep that in mind if you’re thinking of doing one.

Just one of those days that makes you technophobic...

I got the large-print proof of Tribulations, and there were some changes that needed to be made both to the cover and to the interior.

So I had to fire up my old computer, which…yeah. At this point I’m like, How did I survive with this thing? Everything takes FOREVER.

But I made the changes and put the files on the new computer to upload. And then Amazon started doing the same damned thing it did last time I tried to upload the large-print version of Tribulations, which was to not process a PNG file. Keep in mind, it did fine with a PNG file when I did the hardcover version of A Dislocated World a whopping two day ago.

So I had to work with GIMP on the new computer and generate a PDF file. Currently Amazon is chewing over the print preview—fingers crossed I can order a second (and maybe even final!) proof sometime today.

Is this all because the book is so damned big?

Lordy

I had one of those impulses that finds you THREE HOURS LATER cursing your own very nature. Amazon has started offering the ability to make hardcovers, and while I don’t think that’s necessary for the fiction, A Dislocated World has sold quite a bit in paper, plus it seems to be of interest to the sorts of institutions that might prefer hardcover. And of course I was like, How hard can it be! I’ve already got it going on in paper!

The interior didn’t require changes—the hardcover are available in a more limited range of sizes, but luckily (?) A Dislocated World is my only paperback already in the correct size.

The cover is the sticky bit, because you can’t just adjust your existing paper cover—much like with the large-print edition, it’s too different. I put together a new one from scratch, which was when I discovered that my existing version of GIMP doesn’t actually play that well with the new computer. They’re putting out a new version that will, but it’s not quite ready yet.

I powered through and have ordered a proof of the hardcover, so I’ll let everyone know how that works (it’s still in beta, according to Amazon).

The business with GIMP made me realize that I needed to look at some of my other software. I was wondering if TextEdit had advanced to the point where I could just not use LibreOffice, but looking at it, I don’t think it has—it just edits text, and I need more. But I am updating stuff, so hopefully everything will be a little more stable and smoother now. (ETA: There is also Pages, which I’ve never used before. I might give that a go.)

Hmm....

So, in theory the trade paperback of Tribulations is up on Amazon, but if you actually go to the link it tells you that the book is temporarily out of stock. I know that there have been supply-chain issues affecting physical books, so that might be at play here (although A Dislocated World is still selling paper copies). Maybe it’s just too soon and the book has been approved but not produced. I’m going to hang off of putting up links & announcing the trade paperback until there’s an actual book that people can buy.

ETA: Now it’s up!

Progress report

Well, I wasn’t able to order the large-print proof last night because Amazon wasn’t able to upload the cover as a PNG. So today I figured out how to make a workable PDF. Amazon was able to preview the book for me earlier in the day (some of the front matter is in! the! gutter!), but then it couldn’t preview. Now it seems to have fixed itself, so I have ordered the proof. Yay!

I’m working on switching computers—this one is much older than I thought it was—so in case the software I usually use doesn’t play well on the new machine I also prepped the versions of the e-book that will go onto Smashwords in a couple of months.

Progress report

I’m finishing out the large-print edition and should be able to order a proof today—assuming I don’t misspell my own name on the cover AGAIN. “Sisson” is a name that just cries out for more s, don’t you think?

Progress report

Finished proofreading the body text of the large-print edition. Now for that, I need to do the front matter and cover, and then I can order a proof.

I ordered what will hopefully be the final proof of the trade paperback, and I updated the existing e-book!

Progress report

I proofread & corrected chapters 22-26, and then I laid out chapters 27-31. I’m going to wait on proofreading them until tomorrow, at which point I’ll also reupload any corrections to the e-book (they’re all quite minor) and order what should be the final proof of the trade paperback. It will be nice to have that more or less finally off my plate.

After a literal decade of using this desktop, I’ve ordered a new one, so I’ll have to start migrating stuff soon…blah. At least I’m not completely swapping operating systems this time around. My thinking is that I should polish everything off on the old computer just in case the newer software doesn’t play well/predictably with the older versions.

Progress report

Kind of a lot going on today. I laid out chapters 22-26, but I didn’t proofread them. Also the proof the trade paperback came today—the chapter ornaments actually looked fine. I have found a couple of very minor errors going through the large-print edition that would affect the trade paperback as well, so I’ll wait until I’m done proofreading it before I do what will hopefully be the final proof of the trade paperback edition.