Late Bloomers

I'll be honest: I don't have a green thumb. Whatever finds its way into our yard usually does so without my help.

In the spring, however, I decided to add some color to our front yard. We have a little circle garden out there, but it offers nothing more than green during the spring and I wanted something to match the riot of colors I saw in other people's gardens. So I fell back on an old favorite from years past: cosmos.

Face it, there could hardly be a better flower for me to plant. For one thing, look at its name! Could cosmos be any more appropriate for a writer of science fiction? For another thing, they're easy and hardy, just the thing for someone like me. So I bought a little packet of seeds and carefully planted them in the bare spots of the circle.

Of course, Mother Nature always needs some amusement, so she promptly sent torrential rains to Southeast Kansas. It poured and poured. It was with some sadness that I watched the little garden get flooded. I knew my cosmos seeds had washed away and various complications prevented me from trying again. So the garden remained simply green.

But our little garden has a secret: it's a fall garden. You can laugh at it all you want during the spring and summer, but then in mid-September, a patch of pale pink appears. Then another. Then another. Before long, there's a big fuzzy group of sedum showing the world what a little garden can do. And the butterflies love it! I walk through a virtual cloud of them each time I mow out front. It's kind of fun to crouch down and examine all the little butterflies, moths, bees and unidentified bugs feasting on the blossoms.

And this year, there was a bonus: just last week, I noticed an out-of-place patch of magenta among the pink. Puzzled, I went to investigate ... and I discovered a little group of cosmos rising up toward the sky, some of them already blooming. I don't know how they survived but they did. I guess they just wanted to join their sedum friends in showing the world that late bloomers can be pretty special.

Which really makes me happy. Not only because I get a reminder that it's not winter yet, not by a long shot, but also because I get to reflect that not everything happens early. I wasn't exactly young when I published my first novel, but that's okay.
Sometimes it just takes time to get it right.

Have a beautiful autumn.



Sedum and Cosmos, September 2014
 

Sean

(SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't read Another Shot yet, you might not want to read this post.)

I think I always knew that Sean wouldn't stay with the crew.

How many times have you seen a movie or read a book where the main character gets snatched from his/her surroundings and thrown into a completely foreign situation? After a bunch of adventures, the character decides that this is where he/she belongs, no matter what his/her original plans might have been.

It always troubled me a little. I mean, sometimes the writer goes to great pains to let us know that this character is much better off this way, instead of in the dreary life that was abandoned, but sometimes it's not clear. And I always wondered what that character might have achieved in that original life.

So, being the stubborn person I am, I decided that my main character would not only have a good goal in life (teaching), he would also continue to pursue it, even after meeting Lamont's crew and acknowledging the importance of what they do. Sean didn't really fit in with them anyway, no matter what Hawkins might think, and it wouldn't have made a lot of sense for him to stay.

Some of my readers have expressed surprise at Sean's fading into the background. "Isn't the series about Sean?" they ask.

Well, no, not really. Sean is our introduction to the crew and he's a major character of the first novel, Outsider, that is true ... but he was always just one of the characters. Anybody who's willing to destroy the ship that her first novel was named after is going to be willing to jettison a major character. Call me brave or call me stupid ... it seems more true to the story that way.

Don't worry, though. You haven't seen the last of Sean. He's sure to pop up sometime in the future.

Starting to Format

Formatting is an important component of preparing my novels for publication. As I think I've mentioned before, this is one of my least favorite parts of the process, but it has to be done. I'm rapidly approaching that point in the third novel, so I'd better get started.

One aspect of formatting that's already done for this novel is the headers. When you look at my novels, you'll notice that there's a page number at the top of each page. There's also either my name or the title of the novel. I had to set all of that up.

First I create the headers and select the style that puts them on opposing pages. I had no idea how to do any of these steps a few years ago, but I learned a lot from createspace.com and from Googling various things like "how do I put headers on opposite pages." Whenever I get stuck, those two sources are invaluable.

I needed to select a font for my headers and that took some experimenting. The recommendation I got was to use a sans-serif font, meaning it doesn't have the little flourishes that you find in a font like Times New Roman (which I use for the text). After some testing, I went with Calibri. Then, after some trial and error, I got even pages to have my name and odd pages to have the title.

My next problem was figuring out how to remove page numbers from the front pages and the first page of each chapter. This was surprisingly difficult, possibly because again I didn't know what I was doing when I started. Rather than get into a complicated explanation (and get part of it wrong), I'll just tell you that it involves creating sections and marking the first page of each section as different. On this novel, I had to go through several attempts before I got it right. Thank goodness for the option to close without saving the latest changes! After a few failed attempts and perhaps a little swearing, I finally got it right (although I don't have the front pages included yet, so we'll see how it goes once I add those).

One step down, several more to go!

To Print or Not to Print

I had a temporary setback in working on the third novel: our printer suddenly decided it didn't want to print anymore. We tried to get it repaired, but the manufacturer wouldn't sell our repair guys a part so they couldn't do anything. I then promised that I would never buy another printer from that particular company.

The reason this was a problem was that when I rewrite, I usually write notations in the margins of the paper copy that give me some idea of the changes I made to the digital copy, but there usually isn't enough room to show everything I rewrote. It usually looks like "really? NO" or "NOPE! this doesn't work" or "rewrite." As a result, when I'm looking through the paper copy again later, I have no idea what I did with that section. Normally I just print out a copy of the revision and I'm all set for proofreading ... but when I can't print it out and my memory doesn't retain every word I wrote, it makes for less-than-effective proofreading. (I'm terrible at proofreading on a monitor.)

So we got a new printer. I was amazed to realize that we got a printer/copier/scanner for less than a third of what we paid for a black & white printer about twenty-five years ago.

This is the first time we've owned a printer that is entirely wireless. The last one allowed us to connect wirelessly to some of our gadgets, but this one didn't even come with a USB cord. That means it took us a little longer to get it going, but it's nice to have one less cable on the desk.

So I'm using a very modern piece of equipment (the wireless printer) to let myself proofread the old-fashioned way (on paper). I never said my methods make sense!

Thanks for reading my blog. If you're on Facebook, don't forget to check out my Facebook page at www.facebook.com/DianeMcCallumAuthor . Thanks again!