Vintage Monday: The Odd Ones

This is one of the more peculiar vintage photos I've discovered on Pinterest. That place is like quicksand for a visual hoarder like myself. It has a wonderfully clean interface, simple but easy to use search, and the option to both link and upload images. When you search one image leads to another till you've killed hours.

I've set up my own boards, covering subjects from food to street art, and I have them for my books too. Being rather visual, I tend to look up pictorial references for all sorts of stuff as I write, even if thing is question only appears for a few lines. Like the steampunk wristwatch that plays minor role in Spirit Sanguine. In the old days I kept the images in folders on my desktop, later in folders within Scrivener. Now I put them on Pinterest too, keeping the board private till the book's release day.

I have no idea how many readers actually look at the images I've put up to illustrate my stories. The Dead in L.A. board has a photo of the lookout spot in Griffith Park where Jon and Leander have a conversation, and the Dead in the Desert one has pictures of the library in the desert where Leander make an important discovery. They are both real places, even if the characters and events are fictional.

Now excuse me, I have important "research" to do.

A Joyful Giveaway

Another chance to win a copy of Dead in the Desert--this time at Joyful Jay's place. There's also a lovely review there. :)

Manic Monday

I spent the (long) weekend in Seattle, at GRNW. Tracy (ttg) did a superb job organizing the event. She has my admiration.

It was a strange and exciting experience to meet people I'd only known online before. I have slightly anxious the whole time, especially before and during my panel appearance, but I managed not make a huge ass of myself, and that's good.

By the time I got home on Sunday night I was exhausted and still recovering. No rest for me though—I have a crap ton of stuff to do.

At the time it sounded like a good idea to time the release of Dead in the Desert with GRNW, but it meant that I was mostly off-line during the release day crazies and now I'm still catching up.

It was great to see glowing review of the book at Reviews by Jessewave and Mrs. Condit & Friends Read Books.  They certainly put my mind at ease. The romance in Dead in the Desert is low-key, and I've wondered/worried if I was slipping out of the genre too much for the readers. All seems well, however.

Sinfully Sexy Giveaway

There is a chance to win a copy of Dead in the Desert at Sinfully Sexy Book Reviews.

I was tickled pink to read Monique's review of the book. It was like butter to my soul.

Vintage Monday: The Book

I have a few of these types of photos in my collection—man and women, dressed formally, sitting in the garden with a book, looking serious. People in those days tended to present a solemn expression for the camera and all pictures were deliberate and posed, yet these still have a certain candid quality that make them more attractive to me than studio shots.

On a book related note, I spent the whole weekend formatting Dead in the Desert for ebook and print, and the process left me tired and irritable. Despite all my previous experience I made several mistakes that I had to go back and correct.

Formatting for print was the biggest headache. Fortunately, Createspace now accepts .doc and .docx documents for uploads, not just PDF. On Macs when you save a word doc with section breaks into PDF it creates separated files for each section. Bloody annoying. You have to find some software to stitch the parts back together. Alternately, you can replace the section breaks with page breaks, but that messes with the headers and footers—the main benefit of section that you can have different header and footer in each. So you can have page numbers start on page one of chapter one, instead of the title.

Not having to make PDF, simplifies things a little, but Word, being the Spawn of Satan, is still a pain in the ass to work with. For example, your layout will be flipped. Print books start on a right page but a Word document always start on the left. So when setting document margins inside is the outside and vice versa. The same principle applies if you're doing something fancy like putting page numbers, your name, and title at the edge instead of the middle of the page. You most likely to want them to align with the outer edges, and that means that in your word doc they need to look like they are inside.

Anyway, I uploaded the whole damn thing to CreateSpace and they wrote back that my cover is less than 200 dpi resolution, and might look blurry in print. No, it's frakking not. It is 300 dpi. But of course, they said the same damn thing about Dead in L.A.'s cover and it look fine.

Minding your p's and q's has a whole new meaning when it comes to digital publishing.

Status Update

I've been editing Dead in the Desert (sequel to Dead in L.A.) for over a week, with short breaks for cover designs. My brain is fried, but I'm close to finishing. Of course, I'll have to immediately jump on editing a novelette.

My writing process has changed since I started. I penned Hanging Loose and Last Stop in a thorough, chapter-by-chapter way, so I was able to send them to my trusty beta-partner, Josephine Myles as I went. The problem with that method was that I write slowly and even halfway through the end seemed unreachably far away. During Last Stop I lost steam twice, and was in the danger of not finishing at all. I had to seriously rally to get back on track. And that book is only 55,000-words long.

So now I rush toward the finish line—as much as a turtle can rush. If something threatens to bog me down, I leave it for later. I write "naked dialogue" without tags or beats. Often times, instead of going into details, I give myself stage directions. If I notice word repetitions or other things that need fixing, I highlight them and move on. I leave notes to remind myself of things that might need research or checking details in previous books.

The end result is that I have two passes of edits before sending the MS out for beta. First, I go through the story and fill in all the wholes, do all the fine-tuning. Next, I compile the story into a mobi format and upload it onto my Kindle app. Then… I do nothing for a few days, because at the point I just need a damn break. When I finally get around reading the story, I highlight problem areas, take notes, and follow it up another round of edits.

Interestingly, in case of every story comes a point when I just hate the whole damn thing. That's when I know I'm almost done.