OKC Tidbits

I've just returned from a trip to Oklahoma City, where my husband presented a paper at an eighteenth-century literary conference. It was nice to get away and see some new things.

Here are some of the stories:

We checked into our hotel and then walked back to the parking garage to get our bags. We got into the elevator with two other people who were journalists of some type: he had a handheld video camera and she held a microphone like those you see on TV news. Another man also got on at the same time. We rode down a floor and the doors opened to reveal five or six Japanese students, as well as three long, narrow drums. Those of us in the small elevator were ready to go on without them because it was already almost full, but the students laughed and piled on. We were really crammed in there and I was thinking about weight limits. The female journalist tried to interview the students but barely got past her name and "reporting live from Oklahoma City" before the doors opened and we all spilled out. You never know who you're going to share an elevator with.

When we went to the room where the panel would be held, another professor and my husband decided to set up the screen for their presentations. It was one of those old-fashioned pull-down screens on a tripod, and I had to smile as they juggled the whole thing and tried to work out how to get the screen unfurled and the legs spread out. At one point, the other professor said, "How many PhDs does it take...?" They got it figured out, though.

After the conference, we walked to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, which has an impressive collection of works by Dale Chihuly. He does incredible things with glass and color, including the work shown below in an OKCMOA postcard. It's 55 feet high!

Postcard of Oklahoma City Museum of Art

Inside the museum, there's a section of clear glass ceiling about 15-20 feet long, and resting on top of the ceiling is an assortment of glass in all shapes and colors. The light came through and it was like walking under a stained glass window. There was a wooden boat full of glass globes, each with a unique pattern of color, and they all looked like exotic planets to me. There were glass bowls, sculptures and abstract shapes. All of the works in the collection were displayed with carefully arranged lighting to make them stand out. It was an amazing exhibit.

We also visited Bricktown (including a terrific lunch at TapWerks), Myriad Botanical Gardens and the Crystal Bridge Tropical Conservatory (butterflies and orchids in February!). The conference was at the Skirvin Hotel, which is a place worth visiting itself: amazing architecture, beautiful furnishings, an incredible assortment of crystal chandeliers, something to see at every turn.

We did a lot of walking (my thighs are still speaking to me about that), ate some wonderful food and had a good time. It was a short trip (a little over two days) but well worth it.

I'm already wondering where we can go next!

On My Own ... For Now

I came home from work this past week to find a message on my answering machine. Before we get to the message: yes, I have an answering machine! No, I don't have a smartphone yet. (Insert amazed gasp from the audience here.)

I guess it's ironic that I write science fiction, which involves changes in technology that I haven't always embraced myself. My characters fly in a spaceship and I'm still using an answering machine. I never said I always make sense!

Anyway, the message was rather hard to understand but it appeared to be a publishing company. This gave me an instant rush of excitement: this was my big break! Next stop, New York Times Bestseller List! Fortunately, I do have some common sense, so I looked up the company online. I then realized it was not a publishing company, but a publishing service. They want me to pay them to format, design and market my book. (I'm not going to name the company since I decided not to go with them.) Thanks, but no thanks.

It made me think, though. If an actual publishing company called, would I go with them? At first, I thought, "Heck, yes!" But then I thought more about it. It's true that my marketing attempts are feeble and would be wildly improved by a national publisher, but that's one of the few benefits they could offer. Right now, I control my future and my novels. No one else has told me how to format the next novel or when to release it. No one else has told me what to blog about or what I need to put on my Facebook page. No one else has told me what my next story should involve. Those are the advantages of self-publishing.

I'm definitely not saying I wouldn't change my mind. If anyone at Tor is reading this, for example, I'd love to hear from you! But you'd better have a very good offer. The one thing a big publisher could do for me is this: they could spread the word and interest a whole new group of readers. I'd like that.

For now, I'm on my own. And that's okay.

For those of you who have been asking, I'm hoping to release the next novel in January. Thanks for your continued patience!

P.S. Happy Flag Day!

Slight Delays

Now that I have the proof copy of In the Shadows, I thought I'd just sail through the rest of the process ... but I wasn't quite right about that.

My biggest problem is that I happen to have a job where I basically proofread all day. During the week, I get home from work to discover that more proofreading just doesn't sound fun, so that mostly leaves the weekend. By then, though, my eyes are tired and need a break. Because of this, I'm moving a little more slowly than I thought I would.

Another issue involves the cover. When I took the proof copy to the artist, the first thing she noticed was that part of the right side of the image was cut off. When I picked up a ruler, I discovered that the width that CreateSpace lists on their site for my cover design is actually about .25" more than what the proof copy width is, so that's a problem. The artist and I are working on that and hope to get it resolved soon. (Actually, she's doing more of the work on that right now.)

So things aren't moving quickly. I promise I'll keep working on the proofing, but I already see that one scene needs a rewrite, which will take a little time.

I'm still aiming to get this novel released in January, but it's starting to look like it will be late January.

Stay tuned for updates.

Interior Finished

That's right: the interior of In The Shadows is finished!

You may be wondering, "Diane, what does that mean: interior?" The best way for me to explain is to ask you to grab the nearest book. (If you don't have any books nearby, shame on you! Ha, ha.)

Okay, once you've got a book, flip through it and notice everything that isn't a cover. See all those pages at the beginning that tell you copyright information, legal mumbo-jumbo, possibly other works by the author, etc.? See the pages in the middle that contain the story? See the pages at the end that might have information about the author and other material? All of that is the interior of the book.

And my interior is done! Woo-hoo! I went through the whole thing and cleaned it up before I added the front and back pages. I crossed my fingers when I added those because I was afraid it would mess up the page numbers, but it didn't! Big relief there.

I'm hoping to finalize things with the artist this week. Then, with luck, I'll be ready to get an ISBN by next weekend!

We're on the way! Stay tuned!

Continuing to Format

I finally feel I'm making some progress on In The Shadows!

The artist and I have been meeting and emailing, and we're getting close to the finished product for the cover image. I think the black and white version is done, so now she'll add color to it and we'll see how that turns out.

Meanwhile, I've started to format the novel in earnest. I typed In The Shadows before I had the template that I used before, so there's a lot of work to be done. I already worked on the headers (which I talked about in a previous post), so now it's on to the rest.

First I worked on the margins. I use custom margins, which are set up in Page Layout in Word. Once I set it for mirror margins, I could set the margins for the top, bottom, inside and outside, using the guidelines from CreateSpace.com.

After that I justified everything except the chapter headings, so the text goes all the way to the edge both inside and outside. It looks a lot cleaner that way. I had to watch out for the last line of each paragraph, though: if I forgot to press Enter at the end of the line, it was all spread out and looked very odd!

Next I set the trim size, which is 5"x8". This is also set in Page Layout and is applied to the whole document.

I had to wait until after I set the trim size to set the Drop Caps. I learned the hard way that these might look great in one size, but then look absolutely wrong in another size, so I don't set them until late in the process. If you don't know what Drop Caps are, that's okay (I didn't at first either). If you look at the first line of each chapter in either of my novels, you'll see that the first letter is much larger than the others and extends down to the next line. I set this to "drop" down two lines rather than three, because I think it looks better that way. I have to manually set this for every chapter.

Now the slow part: I need to scroll through the entire thing, looking out for bad page breaks, bad scene breaks, bad line breaks, etc. This takes quite a bit of time, but I don't mind. It's kind of an excuse to run through the story again, although I'm not rereading the whole thing. It gives me little reminders of scenes that I particularly like.

And that's where we are for now. I need to keep checking the format and the artist needs to apply color to the cover. After that, I'll be ready to try submitting the whole thing to CreateSpace.com. I'll let you know more about that when the time comes.

Onward!

Artwork Update

I was finally able to meet with the artist this past week about the cover of the third novel. For various reasons, this was the first time we'd seen each other for a while. She had an image of the artwork she's creating and we talked about that for a while. I was kind of relieved to see it because somehow the physical drawing reminds me that I'm working on something tangible, not just a jumble of words that happen to reside in my three-ring binder and my head. The artwork isn't finished yet and we talked about a few tweaks, but at least progress is being made.

I've been working hard on the novel itself. I can't keep putting it off or telling myself I can read it "one more time." If I keep doing that, it will be 2016 before I think it's ready! If there's one thing I need to remember, it's that I can't keep tinkering forever if I want anyone else to read it.

And I want someone else to read it! I like knowing that my characters are in someone else's imagination, even if only for a while. It's like giving them life. I feel I have a responsibility to introduce them to as many people as I can. It's the least I can do to repay them for the years of entertainment they've given me.

For those of you who enjoy a pun, compliments of my husband:
We were driving near a local shopping area last evening when a male deer ran across the street in front of our car. I asked if the deer had been shopping at Wal-Mart and he replied, "No, it was shopping at Dollar General because you can get everything for a buck there."
(rimshot)

Thanks for reading!

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!

Images

It's time to work on the image for the cover of In The Shadows. I met with the artist recently to discuss the image I'm seeking this time, as much as I could describe it. I had a pretty vague idea for Another Shot, but this time I have something a little more specific in mind. On one hand, that's good for the artist because she knows what I want, but on the other hand, it might be a drawback if my internal image is so specific that it's hard for her to match it.

I'm going to try to be flexible. I really like the image that's in my head, but I have to be willing to allow for her creativity and her own vision. I guess it's a lot like anything else you approach for the first time: you might have an idea of how it will go, but you can't ever know for sure. If you can adapt as you see the whole image taking shape, you'll be a lot better off than if you rigidly stick to your original plan. It's also true of life in general: my life now is certainly not how I envisioned it twenty, ten or even five years ago!

Stay tuned for updates.

Bookmarks & Spacesuits

I know that seems a rather unlikely combination, but I have news about both so that's the common denominator.

First of all, I have new bookmarks for Another Shot! The people who made the bookmarks for Outsider did such an excellent job that I went back to them ... and they didn't disappoint. They didn't need to change the design very much, but the color is royal purple instead of dark blue. I chose that because there's a tiny bit of purple in the cover image and the purple background really brings it out. I think it works. Unlike the first bookmarks, these include my blog address and Facebook page, so people can find me if they want to do that. (By the way, I tried to scan a bookmark so I could show part of it to you, but the scanner doesn't like it and keeps distorting the color.) I'll be handing out the bookmarks at various events and I'll probably donate some to the local library. What better place to find people who might use a bookmark?

I discovered the other news today on cnn.com: you can now vote for the design of the next NASA spacesuit! That's right: there are three potential designs and they want you to vote for one. However, when I read more carefully at the site, I learned that these suits will only be used for testing here on Earth, not in space. (So why call them spacesuits? Hmmmm... These will lead to the next design, which could be used in space, I guess.) Anyway, if you want to check out the three designs, they're here: http://jscfeatures.jsc.nasa.gov/z2/  (If you have trouble seeing the designs, refresh the page.) I'm leaning toward the Technology design, but I haven't voted yet. Feel free to leave a comment about which one you like or dislike the most. By the way, you can only vote until April 15, so vote soon!

Thanks again for your support.

Little-Known Facts about Another Shot

As you've probably noticed, Another Shot is a little longer than Outsider. That's partially because Another Shot started out as two novels. As you're reading it, see if you can tell where the original break was.

The first of the two novels wasn't bad, but the second one was too short and I didn't want to do some major padding, so that meant only one thing: major cutting. I must have cut almost 100 pages from them, which wasn't easy, believe me! It's seriously hard to cut a scene you love with your whole heart. I had a conversation between Booth and Hawkins that I still miss, but it just didn't work—so out it went.

I found the name of the series totally by accident. I was flipping through a dictionary when I stumbled upon a line drawing of the sun, Earth and the moon. There were intersecting lines drawn between the edges of the sun and Earth, and on the far side of Earth there were three shadows: one dark triangle in the middle with two lighter gray triangles on either side. These lighter triangles were labeled the penumbra, the area between the darkest shadow and the light. The area between the dark and the light!! That perfectly sums up one of the big images of my novels, where Lamont is trying to guide his crew closer to the light and farther from the darkness that threatens to engulf them. I still can't believe how lucky I was to discover that just by turning some pages of a rather large book.

I've partially recreated the image below, with color and without the moon. During a lunar eclipse, the moon would orbit around Earth and pass through the first penumbra, then the umbra, then the second penumbra before emerging into the light.

A version of this drawing is what I used to create my Penumbra Series logo, which you can see on my Facebook page. It will probably pop up in other places, too.

Unfortunately, I've discovered there's a Penumbra Series horror adventure game that gives you some pretty scary images if you Google "Penumbra," so beware of that. I am in no way associated with that game, just to be clear, and I named my novel series before I knew about it.

Please spread the word about Outsider and Another Shot. There's a button at the bottom of the page that should let you Like or Share this blog if you're on Facebook. Otherwise, word of mouth is very good, too!  Thanks for your support.



 

World Premiere of Another Shot Description

I think the title sounds a little pretentious, but it's true! I'm about to share with you a description of the sequel, Another Shot.

First, though, let me give you some good news: I'm in the process of getting the book published. I've uploaded both the interior pages and the cover to CreateSpace.
(You should see the cover! It's awesome!) Now I have to wait 24 hours to see if CS will accept the files. After that, I'll order a proof copy so I can double-check everything.
As you might expect, that could take a week or so, but I'm certainly much closer to publication. It's exciting to be involved in this process again.

So here it is, as promised:
   In Volume 2 of the Penumbra series, Outsider has crashed to Earth and the crew is in disarray.
   And that's only the beginning: a fugitive from Captain Lamont's past has returned to seek vengeance, vowing to destroy everything the captain holds dear.
   Sean Foster rejoins the crew as they try to stop an elusive killer before it's too late.

Please keep spreading the word. I rely on you to help me introduce the series to new potential readers. Together we can make Another Shot a success!

Sequel Schedule

I'm posting a little late this weekend. Sorry about that, but there were baseball games to watch. I'm sure you understand. ☺

Okay, let's see, publishing schedule for Another Shot. Since I published Outsider in January, I'm really aiming to get its sequel published in January, too. It's possible it might be ready to go in December, but don't count on that. Let's say next January at the latest. (Fingers crossed!)

Right now I'm working with a graphic artist to come up with a cover design for Another Shot. Outsider's cover has a stock image from CreateSpace, which was okay for my first attempt, but I wanted something better for the sequel. It was hard for me to come up with a good image, though! Either the image was nearly impossible to create or it gave away a plot point. I think we might have come up with something, though. We'll see what happens!