Cover 4 (sort of)

Decisions, decisions.

I was looking at my Kindle books, trying to choose what to read, and started really noticing the covers. I realized that I could pick out most of the self-published books from the trade books by the size. Not that it was a glaring difference, but it was a difference. Even though this book will never be a trade paperback, It should probably use the trade paperback trim size, which meant changing the page format on Powerpoint from the standard to a 8 by 5.25 layout.


I also decided that the cover really didn't pop enough. I love the gray and the subtlety, but subtlety is not necessarily the most compelling selling factor. So I spent a half hour or so tweaking. I'm not sure I feel like it's an improvement though. It's brighter, but less balanced. I think I might need to start playing with the typography again. I did change the colors and move my name down to the power-corner. But I think I'll post it for a while and see how I feel about it after I've been looking at it for several days.

I posted the first chapter for critiques at Critique Circle and that's been fascinating. It's fun to find out what changes other people would make. I was an editor for long enough to know that there are always words that can be changed, sentences that can be improved and so on, and that no work is ever perfect, and a lot of that feedback is quite useful. If it wasn't going to take months and months, it might be fun to go through this process on each and every chapter. But I think that's the same level of obsessiveness that used to inspire me to spend days on a presentation that other people would pull together in a couple of hours, and I'm not sure it's actually a sensible use of my time. Do I really want to spend years on one book when I could be writing story after story and getting better with each one instead? And phrased that way, the answer is really obvious. At least to me. So on to Sylvie! I love, love, love the scene I wrote last night.

Writing badly

I think the chapter I wrote over the last couple of days is, um, not good. But I posted it to fictionpress anyway, so that I could let go of it and move on. I do keep trying to remind myself that first drafts are allowed to be terrible, that it's okay to be struggling in the early days while I try to figure out what's necessary and what's not, where the story is going and who these people are.

But I overwrote somehow the only paragraph I really liked and it seriously vexes me. It's the fiction of thinking that the work that's gone is better than the work that remains, but even knowing that it's probably not true doesn't make me feel better. I'm quite sure that paragraph was somehow perfect. The rest of it? Dry. Tasteless. Like the turkey from Thanksgiving dinner, only without the cranberry sauce and gravy to hide its flaws.

I think I have to get rid of the parts about Sylvie running. That was to set something else up, later, and maybe I just need to either not foreshadow that run and/or not have that run. Oh, well, either way, I can think about that when I'm revising. For now, it's time to move on and let Sylvie and Lucas meet up again, yay. Or no, actually it's time to write a 20-page paper. But after that, time for my characters to meet!

Thanksgiving

I think maybe I need a camera. And then I think I bet I can have Mom's old camera. Dad won't care.

And I know I need a new electric mixer. Then I think I'm sure I can have Mom's, Dad's not going to be using it.

And maybe I ought to try to get Photoshop, so that I can get serious about my book cover design? But maybe Dad will let me have Mom's software.

I can't decide whether it's good to know that my needs can be met so easily or just sad.

But I didn't  intend to write about that. I don't want to be bleak, just to save some notes for next year.

(That said, in a way, the day was just as bad as I expected it to be, although not in the way I imagined ahead of time. K had to work, and I just didn't want to try to deal with making a noon-time Thanksgiving meal. It was too much like a chore, too hard to do, too likely to make the end of the day be a long quiet lonely stretch. I didn't want to get up at 6 to start cooking. So although I felt bad that she couldn't there, I made a plan that worked for me, with dinner at 5. Only then her best friend died unexpectedly the day before. We don't know how yet: the optimistic vote is that it was a heart attack in her sleep; the pessimistic, that it was an asthma attack and she was unable to call for help. But it doesn't really matter, except that it turned an already rocky day -- Mom's birthday -- into something rocky in an entirely different way.)

Back to the food -- so much more fun to think about -- I made a recipe from Smitten Kitchen, roasted sweet potato rounds topped with celery salsa, and it was yummy, yummy, yummy. None of the kids would even try the salsa, but they all liked the sweet potatoes, I think. I also made brussels sprouts with maple syrup and chestnuts, which added a nice flavor to the table, but wasn't nearly as good as it should have been. And the cranberry sauce this year was orange juice flavored with cinnamon and allspice, and it was delicious. It's really tough to go wrong with cranberry sauce, in my opinion, although the one I made with Pinot Noir and blueberries last year was not my favorite.

Oh, but my real motivation for posting to make some notes for next year on the pumpkin pie. Mom always made really good pumpkin pie but her recipe actually makes no sense, so I'm going to have to experiment for a while to try to figure out what she did. (Her measurements would require actually measuring the ingredients like evaporated milk and pumpkin rather than just dumping a can into the bowl, and there's no way: she was a dump-in-the-can kind of cook. I think she had a basic recipe but she followed it loosely.) So this year, I followed the recipe on the can for the basic ingredients -- pumpkin, eggs, milk -- and then Mom's recipe for the spices. I would say that's probably pretty close to successful, but with a couple of issues. First, I used Mrs. Smith's frozen pie shells and no, they were not as good as whatever Mom used. I am absolutely sure that she used frozen pie shells, but next year I need to try a different brand. Next, my filling feels heavier than hers. I mixed by hand and she always used an electric mixer, so next year, assuming I've stolen her electric mixer or gotten one of my own, I should try it with an electric mixer and see if that gives the filling a fluffier feel. And there's something not quite there about the spices: I added cloves, which was part of her recipe, but I think maybe I needed nutmeg, too. There's a flavor that's just missing slightly. Most important, though, would be to try to get the filling lighter. I might need to switch out some evaporated milk for real milk (her recipe uses both, the can recipe used only evaporated.) That said, I ate two pieces for breakfast this morning, so I'm not really complaining!

Names, names, names

I got reminded the other day (from a review) that I started writing Ghosts almost as an extension (rebellion might be a better word, really) of Eureka fan fiction.With two glaring exceptions, the connections are subtle enough that no one who didn't know that would ever guess it, but the two exceptions are my hero's name and the company name.

When I started writing, I figured, eh, if I ever decide to do anything with this, I'll change those. Turns out, though, it's much, much, much more emotionally difficult to change a name after spending 60,000 words with a character with that name. I probably spent half an hour today using find-and-replace on my file, changing Zane's name to something that doesn't belong to a character from a television show.

Zeke. No. Zack. No. Niall. No. Neil. No. Nathan. No. Aidan. No. Mark. No. Kieran. No.

I finally settled on Shane, because it was as close to Zane as I could get without staying Zane, but it still feels wrong, wrong, wrong. I may have to keep his name Zane, despite the connection with the television show. I'm pretty sure if they tried to sue me, they'd have a tough time, since the differences are far more obvious than the similarities. But still, I wouldn't like it.

General Directions, I'm not so bothered by. On Eureka, it's GD, too, but that's short for Global Dynamics, which is a very different name than General Directions. And I like the whole vagueness of General Directions, so I'm keeping it.

But Zane/Shane, I just don't know. If you're reading this and you've come to the blog from one of my fiction accounts, what do you think? Can I keep his name Zane or does that make it just too much like Eureka? 

Why Is My Book Not Selling?

Okay, not my book -- it's not posted for sale anywhere yet, so that's a fine reason for it not to sell. But I stumbled across this blog, Why Is My Book Not Selling, and spent a fascinating hour reading. I also added it to my RSS feed. It's such a terrific source of help for self-pubbed authors and I'd like to start commenting there. Partially to build up karma for when Ghosts gets there, but also just because it seems truly useful.

I did realize, though, while reading other people's blurbs that I'm a truly critical reader. If I do start commenting, I'm going to have to qualify everything I say with 'just my opinion' and 'personal taste.' Reading for a while made me want to go through my work and delete every adjective and adverb. I wonder what Ghosts would be like if all the adjectives were missing? I might have to try it and find out.

Thought defusion

I learned this little mindfulness technique for class and I've fallen in love with it. It's called thought defusion and it's from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and also dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). Both types of therapy emphasize learning how to accept life as it is and yourself as you are. Basically that's figuring out how to know that my natural instinct is to be anxious and to worry, and acknowledge that that's just who I am, and then still try to let go of the anxiety, rather than telling myself to stop being so anxious.I think it instills self-sympathy instead of self-criticism, if that makes sense. Anyway, this is thought defusion:

Pick an image of something moving away from you, clouds in the sky or leaves on a stream or waves washing in and out. Then take a few slow, deep breaths and close your eyes. Imagine your thoughts moving away from you. Let the thought arise, and then picture it floating away on the clouds or leaves or being wiped away by the waves. As new thoughts come up, let them float away, too. Don't judge the thought -- don't think about it as being a good thought or a bad thought -- and don't judge yourself for thinking it. It just is what it is and then it floats away. Go for as long as you can, and then take a few more slow breaths and open your eyes.

I say go for as long as you can because me being me, two or three minutes is about as long as I can handle. But if you're better at being peaceful than I am, you can set a timer and go for ten minutes or fifteen minutes.  The nice thing is, two or three minutes, at least for me, can almost feel like a nap. It's very relaxing to let my thoughts float away instead of having them build intricate webs inside my brain.

I wish I had a picture of a floating leaf to add to this post! 

Cover design number three

Somehow, I'm going to have to figure out how to get other people's opinions on my cover designs. I need to do a poll or something, in a place where I can get more than a response or two. I guess that probably means Facebook, but eh, that gets complicated, too.

This, however, is cover design number 3, and yes, I am starting to enjoy the cover creation process a little too much. I made it in Powerpoint, using a public domain photograph of lightning. I cropped and rotated the photo, so I could keep the palm trees and put the lightning on the left, and then tweaked. I think I enhanced the brightness by +20, and did something to the contrast, then nudged the color to the cooler side. I wanted to bring the green of the palm trees out and make the lightning look a little more magical than it did.

I then spent an endless time playing with the text and the fonts. Powerpoint does not exactly have the best font tools, and I didn't go absolutely insane in the way I would have if I were a real designer. (To wit, the G in Ghosts is too far away from the H, in my opinion, but in Powerpoint, I would have needed to make them separate text blocks to nudge them together, and I was not quite willing to go that far. Six text blocks were quite enough.)

I took a quote from a review on fictionpress that was from someone who reviewed only at Chapter 33, figuring that review was for the whole thing, not just a piece of it. I didn't want to be misleading by using a review that was just for a chapter. Maybe if and when I actually get ready to publish, I'll ask a couple people for reviews that I could put on the front page. It's not possible to read the quote on the thumbnail, I don't think, which is a pity. But I suppose I can use a bigger image that then gets turned into a thumbnail? I'll have to figure that one out.

I'm still trying to refrain from revising until December, but I have definite ideas about some big changes toward the ending. I think I'm going to try not to go crazy on most of it, though. These are just words 300,000-360,000, and if I get too obsessed with achieving perfection, it'll join my first novel (oh, book of many names) in spending the next decade on my hard drive.

I really like this cover, though. I think for me, it's definitely jumped ahead of both 1 and 2.