Update on The Other Side

Rewriting The Other Side has taken a lot of time, as you can tell by looking at the calendar. This is the latest I've ever gone without releasing a novel, but I feel I need to take as long as necessary to get it right. I'm sorry for the delay.

Right now, though, I'm formatting. That's good news because it means the rewriting is mostly finished. Yea!

The initial formatting is done because I put together a binder with instructions on how to do it and that really helped. There are a lot of steps involved with margins, gutters, headers, drop caps, etc. and my brain doesn't like to remember all of that after a year so it's nice to have a reference.

That means I'm at the hard part: making it look good. I think I've written about this before. Sometimes when I'm scrolling through the document, I'll see a sentence that has a paragraph at the end of one page and a single word of that paragraph on the next page. It looks terrible!

For example, I found this on one page: Lamont turned on the radio. “This is Captain Ben Lamont asking you to cease fire. Who are you and what

On the next page I have this: do you want?"

That's not the worst example I've seen, but it makes the reading a little awkward. I'll have to check the first page to see if I can remove a word or two so the last part of his question can go with the rest of it.

It's amazing how hard that is sometimes. I've written it the way I want ... and now I have to change it! I'm trying to add words on some pages and remove words on others. It can be frustrating.

I'm hoping to get the bulk of it done this weekend, however. After that I'll get an ISBN and we can move forward!

If you want to review the teasers I've given about the novel, here they are: Teasers

Please remember to spread the word to your friends and family (and complete strangers) about the Penumbra series. Word of mouth is the best way to let people know about it!

Also, if you happened to buy a copy of any of my novels on Amazon, thank you and please consider writing a review there.

Thank you! I'll keep you posted.

New Horizons

This is the week that New Horizons will fly by Pluto and we'll have the first close look at it in history. I think that's pretty exciting!

There have been images released already, but this week's images should be better and give scientists much more information about the dwarf planet. Who knows what they will learn?

Here's a site by the Planetary Society that gives more information about what will be happening this week, as well as links to other sites that will have news about the flyby: New Horizons Info

So what will it mean to us? For me, it's the equivalent of when you're taking a hike in the mountains and you see that the trail curves ahead of you. You might have been hiking for a while, you might have a vague idea of what's around that curve ... but you can't know for sure. How many of you would turn back with a shrug and say, "Oh, it can't be anything that new or exciting"? And how many of you would realize you can't lose: no matter what you see, even if it's not new, it should be worth a look?

I'm definitely in the latter camp. Maybe Pluto is a chunk of rock. Maybe there won't be any amazing features (like the so-called "face" on Mars). But it's still something we've never seen before! It's like when you visit an art gallery for the first time: some art you'll like, some you won't, but you'll enjoy exploring it because it's new. Maybe Pluto isn't a work of art, but I'm willing to take a look.

Speaking of new, I've added a new page to my blog. I am certainly not an authority on writing or publishing, but I've learned a few things along the way. Every once in a while, I try to share what I've learned, because other writers have done the same and helped me. So if you look to the right under Pages, you'll see the new one: Advice for Writers. If it helps only one writer, I'll be happy with that.

Thanks again for reading.

In the Shadows Update

I've made more progress since last week, so here's the latest update.

On Monday, I got the final image from the artist for the cover. It's now on my hard drive, ready to be submitted.

On Wednesday, I registered In the Shadows with CreateSpace.com and received an ISBN for it. (That's always one of my favorite steps.) I then typed the ISBN on the copyright page.

On Thursday, I submitted the interior and it was accepted. Whew! I paged through their Interior Reviewer, which shows me what the interior will look like once it's printed, and it all looked pretty good. I also got some Likes for my posting about it on my Facebook page, which I really appreciated. Thanks for your support, everyone!

Now I'm frantically trying to write the cover blurb. I've told you a little about this in the past: I need two blurbs, one for the cover and one for the Amazon page. I think I've got the one for Amazon done, but the cover blurb is proving to be pesky. I'm getting some editorial help from my husband, who keeps telling me to "punch it up," so I'll work on it some more and try to get that finished today or tomorrow. Once that's done, I can start working on the cover at CreateSpace.com.

The book is starting to come together! Don't forget, though, that I'll have to order a proof copy and proofread the whole thing again, so we're still looking at January for a release date. I feel I'm getting closer, though!

Thanks again for your support.

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!

Making Corrections

The proofreading is done! At last.

Now I'm making corrections to my file, based on the proofreading I did. However, it's not quite as easy as it sounds. Since my file is already formatted the way I want, I can change the whole look of it simply by adding or removing a single word. This can be a problem if it means a paragraph is broken awkwardly or the page count changes. I've had several instances where I changed one word and then had to go change several other sentences just to make things line up again. Oddly enough, the forced changes occasionally made the phrasing better than the original! It's funny how that works.

For example, I had a sentence that read this way: "Your altitude is good," Hawkins said, his eyes glued to the controls.
I never liked that part about "eyes glued to the controls" because it's a cliché and why is he looking at the controls anyway?
I changed the sentence to read this way: "Your altitude is good," Hawkins, said, keeping his eyes on the instruments.
Doesn't that seem better? That also meant that a two-line sentence farther down appeared on the same page, rather than being broken up between two pages.
Little adjustments like that are what make this a slow process, but it will make the finished product much better. (It makes me cringe to think of my novel as a "product," but that's ultimately what it will be.)

Once I get the corrections made to the file, I'm going to double-check all aspects of the formatting. While I'm doing that, I'm going to create a notebook of the various format settings so I'll be ready when it comes time to format the third novel. (Yes, there will be a third!) That should save me some time in the future.

So I'm making progress. Remember to tell all your friends about Outsider so they can get it read before the sequel is published!

Snafu

I don't have much of an update today because the artist and I weren't able to meet this past week, but I have a few notes to mention.

First of all, Blogger doesn't work quite the way I thought it did. I assumed I could have separate posts on different pages--I wanted to have news and updates on my Home page, and then have fiction on The Crew page--but that isn't how Blogger works. In the next few days, I'll be playing around with the possibilities, so if something looks wrong, it's just me proving that I'm a novice at this! (SNAFU will be an appropriate title for it.) Once I get things closer to the way I want them, look for a page called something like "About This Blog" and I'll try to explain what I've done.

Given my problems with Blogger, this might seem ridiculous but I'm toying with the idea of having a Facebook page. (It would be a business page, not a regular page.) Do you think I'm nuts to try that, especially given my limited knowledge of social media and other computer-related things? I don't see that I'd spend a lot of time on the Facebook page, since I have enough to do with this blog and my "real" life, so I don't know if it's worth it. I'll keep thinking about it. Post any thoughts or suggestions or advice you might have. Thanks!