Radio Silence Explained

Hello all.  I know, I haven't been very chatty lately. I haven't been very creative either. Just after Tinna's Might was published, I discovered I was pregnant. Go figure. :)  Of course, with pregnancy comes the requisite trials and tribulations, starting with morning sickness and sore ta-tas to migraines and a desire to do little more than sleep.  Yes, I over-share. Live with it. :D

It is timely that I am with child when my heroine is also faced with this surprise at the same age as the author. Maybe it was a foreshadowing, maybe I'm a little bit psychic. Hah!  I have been writing, but sporadically. I've set aside book 3 for a bit, I am taking a break from Tinna's world for now, since Tinna's Might is still fresh on the market.  I'm focusing instead on a couple of other stories I've been working on.  I am finding inspiration difficult lately, but it's slowly coming back.

Hopefully I'll have some new titles available soon enough. I'm particularly happy with one book I'm working on right now, and look forward to sharing it with readers.  For now, I'm moderately quiet, except on my Facebook page, where I get a little too riled up by political and religious matters. I tend to be a bit of a blusterer--but I am a fiery character and I get worked up about the world around me. It's the blight of an writer, to be honed into the world a little too deeply.

Those of you who have purchased Tinna's Might, please don't forget to post your reviews on your preferred bookselling site... It's selling nicely in spite of my complete lack of marketing, so that's a good sign, but I'm only getting star reviews on some eBook sites, and I'd like to see what readers have to say. Writers (most writers) benefit greatly from reader feedback. Even the tough stuff. That doesn't mean I'm calling out open season of evilness, but I do hope you'll be objective in your review.

Thanks again for being supportive readers! I appreciate everything you do to keep me going as a writer, and I hope I'll have more stories to offer you soon.  And thank you for your patience while we waited out the editing process for Tinna's Might.  Ping me on Twitter or Facebook, I am responsive and always happy to chat it up.

Here is a lovely GIF of a children's book that I think every family should own. :)

MM

Some Seemingly Simple Tips for eBook Formatting

Formatting manuscripts for eBook ain’t no fun. But having struggled with transforming Tinna’s Promise into said format from .pdf, I did learn some valuable lessons, learned mostly by experience (and repeated fails) and also learned a great deal from Mark Coker’s style guide for Smashwords. How I write my manuscripts now is influenced by how I will have to format for eBook later. I try to keep up with the formatting needs now so I don’t have to wrestle with it down the road.

If you’re not the kind of person inclined to read the directions (as I am often too impatient to do so), I thought I’d share some basic instructions on how to do it quickly and simply.

I don’t know if all authors operate as I do, but I’ve been known to write blocks of a manuscript in new documents and then cut and paste the new text it, if I don’t have the original file on hand. I also have been known to email paragraphs I’ve written on the fly to myself right in the body of the email. To make things worse, when a book is edited by someone else on another computer in possibly another version of MS Word (or switching between word-processing software), and you add and subtract text from your main file, you’re very likely to end with a Frankenstein formatted manuscript and you won’t even know it. Word has all these various styles. Whatever the defaults are on whatever computers your manuscript has been whoring with, by the time you’ve cut and paste the last of your text in and added all your revisions, it’s likely your styles are all mixed up and there’s really no easy way of telling just by scrolling through it.

Unless you wrote the whole book in that one main document, and passed that same document back and forth to editors or proofreaders, your book is going to be a patchwork of invisible ugly that won’t raise its hideous head until you’ve published to eBook and downloaded the ePub. You’ll be happily proofreading on your reader when boom... your font sizes are all over the place and blocks of your manuscript don’t match the rest. It can be annoying. More so because when the document is open in Word, everything looks quite consistent. Smashwords’ ‘vetting’ process also alerts you as to what problems may remain with your formatting that is preventing it from being submitted for the Premium catalog—but it does not always detect some formatting issues that appear in your final ePub. I take this vetting process quite seriously because Smashwords converts your manuscript to a variety of eBook formats to suit a variety of eReaders, so if you can pare it all down to the simplest, elegant format, you’re good to go. So the intent is to make it work for all.

The first thing you should do is make it a uniform formatting ‘style’.

If you are worried about having too many formatting issues that might trip up the conversion process, my first tip is to take your text and drop it into Wordpad . That will reduce your whole manuscript to its simplest form without any fancy-schmancy formatting mumbo-jumbo added in by MSWord and whatever other editors you’ve been using and pasting from. However, do not paste into Notepad because that will also remove intended formatting; such as italics and even paragraph indents, making the whole manuscript one giant text block. When you paste it all back into a word document, it will probably paste as ‘normal’ style, formatting it in paragraph blocks again anyway. But if you have italics or other special formatting in your text, you’ll likely lose it if you use notepad. So stick with Wordpad.

The ‘nuclear option’ for formatting can often be accomplished with simply selecting all your text (ctrl-A) and clicking the ‘Normal’ style. Your paragraphs will be separated by a blank hard return, with no paragraph indent—much like this blog post. It’s the easiest way to go. You can justify the text as well and be done with it.


If you look for the yellow box, that's the option you want to choose.

However, if you want your text to look like it looks in the book, indents and all, you select all of it, and you click the next style over, ‘No Spacing’. Don’t be afraid, because it will look scary first off—no indents, just one continuous paragraph of text until the first hard-return.


Gah! WTH! Kill it with fire! Don't panic. We're not done yet.

BUT with all the text still selected, you want to grab the little indent arrow on the top ruler (it’s the top one of the two pointing at one another on the margin), and drag it out to where you want your indents to be. The paragraphs ought to fall right in place as they’re supposed to, and you won’t look so scary anymore!


Above the page there's the ruler. On that ruler are little grey arrow boxes. The top arrow
box determines your indent. Drag it out to where you think your indents ought to be.
I go with a quarter inch as a mean.

All you have to do is pick your preferred font (you can always stick with ‘default’) but in this case, I chose Garamond. Keep in mind, if you’re using some foo-foo-la-la font you found on Abstractfonts.com or something like that, your results could be questionable. Stick with the ones everyone has. Arial, Helvetica, Garamond, Times, etc). I also justified the text. I like it to look like the page of a book.


See? It's getting prettier.

Now... the next step is to check your text for formatting features that might interfere with the conversion process and make stupid things happen, like soft line breaks between paragraphs and sections that will vanish, and tabs that screw with your indents. Click on the little paragraph symbol (¶) on your 'home' tab (assuming you're using a recentish version of Word) and all your formatting symbols will pop into view. Once those are up, scroll through your text and look for messy things. There should be only the ¶ symbol separating lines and ends of paragraphs, nothing else!

Gt rid of ‘soft returns’ and use a hard return to replace them. That means replacing the little symbol shown below (arrow going down and then pivoting left) with the ¶. Just delete it, backspace and return; that ought to do it.



Delete those little arrowy bastards!



That also means you should watch for tab symbols, as shown below, the little arrow pointing right. Use your center function to center text, do not tab it out to the center of the page. Select your text while it’s up against the margin and click the center text button. Easy as pie.



See that tabby whore? Backspace it into oblivion! There should be NONE in your manuscript.

Once the manuscript is all cleaned up of that, you can move on to formatting your title page and your chapter headers.

The first thing is to create your title page. So at the beginning of the very first line of your manuscript, insert a page break and push your first chapter down. Use this new page to build your title page—keeping the page break right after the last word on your new page.


Type out your title page as needed. Note that the text is still indented.

Remember, your document is a uniform style now—and all indents are set to where you just put them. But when you want to center something on the page, you need to remove that indent on those specific lines so that it doesn’t put the ‘center’ off kilter.


Select the text on your title page only, and drag that little indent arrow back to the margin.

Select only the text you want to center or justify, and set the indent back to flush with the margin for just that selected text.


Oooh, ahhh... purdy.

Then center them and format them as needed. Smashwords’ vetting process does not like fonts over 18pts. Just a tip. On an eReader, the title on the title page doesn’t have to be more than that to stand out. You can bold or italicize things as well.  You can justify any text blocks on the title page, just to make it look neat (you can center it too, it’s entirely your call—it’s your book).

If you intend to add in a table of contents that’s hyperlinked, then here’s an easy way to do it.



I bolded the TOC words, and you can put whatever you like on each chapter line, of course.

Go to the next page and insert another page break, and type out your Table of Contents as you want it to be.

Then click down to your first chapter and add in your chapter header if it's not already there (be sure to fix the indent on that line and all chapter header lines (and any other sequence separators to follow, such as the ****s used to divide sections). This will insure all of them are truly centered.


Chapter 1 or whatever you want to title it.

 Once that’s done, click your cursor right after the last letter of your chapter header and go to Insert > Bookmark.

The window will pop up. You can only use text and underline, no symbols, you don’t have to put all that much in there, a simple 1 will suffice if you like to keep things simple.  Click 'add'.

Once that bookmark’s made, go back up to your table of contents and select the text you want to hyperlink to that bookmark. Then RIGHT click on your mouse and pick ‘Hyperlink’

On the hyperlink window, there’s a button that says ‘bookmark’. Click it baby.




'Bookmark' button is on the right margin of the little window, second button down. See it?

You’ll see your first bookmark there. Select, hit OK twice, and you have your first hyperlink. You repeat that process as you go along, making bookmarks for chapters in succession and connecting them to the text on your table of contents.




Select the first (or appropriate bookmark from the list and hit 'OK'.




Et voila. That's your first hyperlink. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Another tip, Smashwords converters (and other converters) are not fond of .rtf or .docx format. So when you save your newly formatted document, save it as a Word 97-2003 document, it will make your life simpler. That *ought* to do it. Some eBook publishing sites have their own license notes you need to add, so be sure you do that as well (as shown above on the title page).


Just for good measure, to avoid problems.

You can add in extra pages for dedications, other title listings, web information and more. Just don’t clutter up your intro pages too much, you can always add some addendum pages, and maybe some sneak-peek paragraphs of the upcoming sequel or your next novel.

Those are tips from moi. :)

One down... and other ramblings.

So I finished book 3 of the Trilogy of Tinna the weekend before last. Believe it or not I finished writing it while driving through the stunning Columbia River Gorge to Eastern Oregon for a visit with a family member who lives in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by colossal wind-turbines. They remind me of the alien ships in War of the Worlds. My little netpad made the trip with me, and while my husband drove, I balanced my computer on my knees and tippety-tapped away while I sipped tea from my thermos, and finished the book.

Mind you, it's not completely done. I think of it like house that's been framed, roofed, sided, but still needs the wiring, plumbing, drywall and details finished up.  It's a good feeling, I dare say.  Tinna's Might is still hanging on the edge of being finished completely and being published to iU and Smashwords.  I'm hoping my editor can sit down and get the last few chapters cracked out very soon. I'm  hoping my next post will be the one saying: It's Here!. ::crosses fingers::

I did the Christmas giving tree again this year. The local one was put up and taken down so quickly, I actually missed it, so I went to the one that my work sponsors. The tag I picked belonged to a young girl who was 8 and she wanted Monster High dolls. Now let me tell you, I had NO idea what those were until I set foot in Toys-R-Us (a mind-boggling experience on its own).  I imagine many of you have set foot in this store, I haven't. I don't have children, and I usually shop for kids if at all at Barnes & Noble where I can get those cool projecty kits and that sort of thing.

Anyway, I walked in, and it seemed like I had to make my way through every aisle because they were set up like a huge labyrinth forcing me to walk past every toy known to man to reach the cash registers. I could not help stopping to ogle some of the cuter toys. For instance, there was this whole section dedicated to these eye-wateringly, sickeningly sweet and adorable flocked forest critters (I'm not kidding, they're so effing cute I misted up and almost bought a family of chipmunks and a little baby bedroom and accessory kit. But when I spotted the cottage and the furniture and accessories and I found myself tempted, and I had to slap myself back to reality). I also did a slow drive-by in the Lego section where they had a display of the Millennium Falcon kit, it was only <---sarcasm about $140... and they even had a little Lego wookie.

Admit it, skanky .. perhaps. Cute? Undeniably.

At length, after passing through the barbie aisle, which was so saturated in pink, I nearly vomited, I came across the Monster-High merch.  The first thing I will admit is that they are cute. The dolls are really kind of adorable in a weird way. But the second thing I have to admit is that they are dressed like small, monstery whores. They have these little Lady-Gaga stripper-platform heels, and teeny skirts that barely cover the no-no square.  But admittedly, the idea is freakin' adorable. There's a frankensteiny one (the cutest one in my opinion), and a vampire one, and a werewolf one, and they have little mini coffin-shaped trunks for their skanky outfits, and little accessories and teeny pets; WAY more accessories in the package that Barbies came with when I was a kid.  I was half-tempted to  get one for myself.  Instead, I bought the Frankensteiny one and the one with fins who looked like a mad scientist, and I bought a little packet of outfitty things. I'm hoping Miss Selena is happy with them.  Now I want one. Not sure why. Shopping for kids is so much fun.

Aaaanyway, let's hope the next post is good news about Tinna's Might. :D

A Will To Live

The only way one of my kind can truly die, is to want more than anything to live. This is a cruel joke played on the immortals; a punishment imposed by pitiless gods. I’ve died so many times and have risen so many times that even the idea of wanting this life anymore seems beyond my capacity. In order to finally rest, I am supposed to find something inside me that will desire life more than anything—to replicate the same sense of purpose and joy that I had before it was all erased by my first death and first resurrection so many years ago. It is impossible not to become filled with anger and bitterness, to always have but a brief taste of that final peace only to be wrenched back to the drudgery of rain, of mud, of stinking mortals, of more of the same. After seven hundred years, there is no more room for anticipation and idealism; both things you need in profusion to appreciate the days you have on this earth. Even mortals find it hard to want to live sometimes.

It is thought to be impossible; to finally find rest and oblivion from the pain that is existence. But there are always those rumours that give one hope; the story of this immortal or that immortal who discovered a well of happiness inside them, a joy of life, the appreciation for the gift of existence that allowed them their final escape from it. But it’s never anyone you know, never anyone who can tell you what the secret is. But here I am... entering my seven-hundredth year with little to look forward to but seven hundred more years of the same.

There are no rules or purpose for us otherwise, except to walk the changing world in rancor. We were once called the caretakers, a few of us once ruled as gods, but in the end, we all just grew tired of it all, and chose to sleep for an age; or to wander and live like hermits. Sometimes we play a role—portray a life that is not real; we go through the motions so we can try to derive whatever it is we are supposed to; what it is that mortals derive from their blessedly short lives.

We die only when killed. And that is short-lived. We are always given that false hope, as we slip into that dreamless, empty state, that we will be given the gift of the cessation of everything. To end our existence. But instead, we awake again in an agonizing pain, and we suck in air into our tired lungs and we hear our bones knitting and our wounds drawing themselves together, and there is nothing but hopelessness as we lie in the pools of our own blood and weep for an end.

We are hopelessness embodied. How any one of us can find it in our hearts to love this endless cycle, and to wish for another day of it is beyond me. I was convinced for the better part of my long life that I would never be allowed to die.

But I found the joy and the raison d’etre. I found my will to live, and it was not some great romance with a mortal that finally brought me mortality at last. It was much worse than that.

It started with a simple act. An act of frustration. A rash lashing out for all the injustices in my life. Sour and bitter, he stepped into my life at the worst possible moment; the poor hapless fellow—my first victim. Drunken and filled with vitriol, I stumbled out of a circa 70s Oldsmobile the size of the Titanic that I’d stolen. I’d just driven it recklessly into the gravel parking lot, and skidded to a stop only inches from the wall of the dive, angled over two parking spots. I threw open the land-yacht’s door and staggered out, blind to the colours of the signs in neon, seeing only a bleak daguerreotype of reality.

He entered my field of vision like a wraith, drunk too, and ready for a fight. He blurted out some incomprehensive blather and made the mistake of putting his hands on me. The moment was electric; like I’d touched a power line. It was like all the colours of the world flooded back. His blue flannel shirt, the flush of his cheeks and nose, the scarlet of his blood as my fingers followed my blind rage and bore into his eye-sockets. I stood there, looking down at the drunkard’s quivering corpse when all was said and done, my blood rushing, my inebriation completely obliterated by the adrenaline that burned through my veins. I was alive. This tiny, enviable mortal was not.

The elation filled me. It surprised me how it never occurred to me to do what I had done in all my years. I’d killed before, in wars, in accidents, but never for a reason as ridiculous as to direct my rage at something, to exert power over it, to destroy it. This became my vice, and with every killing, I desired more. My desire for death was no longer even remotely on my mind, I greedily looked forward to every new day where I could hunt and kill what I now saw as vermin; living, mortal vermin.

I did not know this was enough; that this zeal for life, fueled by evil itself would count. I did not know it would mean the same as someone finding love to make them wish to live on. My love was senseless murder; it gave me a will to go on.

Now I lie here in a pool of my own blood. I wasn’t granted the graceful period of aging and infirmity as the rumoured others were. My bones are not knitting, my wounds not healing. I weep for the life that is draining from me, this long and sometimes meaningful life that needed to find pure evil before it could be permitted to end. Around me, the mortals in their navy uniforms and silver adornments advance upon me from the shelter of their car doors, gripping the blue-steel implements of my demise. Their voices seem distant. I can’t stop myself from becoming fixated on how the blue and red lights that flash play illusions on my pale skin. I can’t help but notice how my heart beat sometimes misses, and how my breath bubbles in my throat. I am riddled with holes.

The only way one of my kind can truly die, is to want more than anything to live. I have never wanted to live more than today.

Them's fightin' werds!

"Take that, old bean!"

Fight scenes... I hate them. I hate reading them, I hate writing them. Blow-by-blow descriptions of battles small or army-sized, do not float my boat. Some readers love it. Not me. If I’m reading a book, and there’s a page or two of fight descriptions, I’ll just skip those paragraphs and take up where the story left off. My boredom with fight scenes naturally affects how I write them, and I’ve just gotten a little note from my editor telling me in none so many words; “Miranda, you don’t know what the hell you’re writing about. Your fight scenes suck.” And he is 100% correct. I suck at fight scenes!


If I could get away with it, whenever my books demanded a fight-scene (and they invariably do, because I am irrevocably drawn to writing about ‘power-chicks’ who kick ass, so I’m kind of digging my own hole here), I would simply write: “She came at her opponent like a spider-monkey and kicked his jerky ass into oblivion” for a fight scene, I probably would. But I can’t, so in this special case, I have to summon the assistance of someone who can. Luckily my editor has some experience in this realm, so he has helped me get through this first one. It makes me wonder about Tinna’s Promise and how much help those fight scenes require...!

The lesson here is that if you are knowingly weak about a certain subject; don’t try to fake it because it comes off that you’re faking it. It’s why writers who don’t have direct experience about something do research and make sure they get their facts right because invariably, someone is going to come along and say; ‘dude, that’s so wrong!’ And if you haven’t experienced something, you should refrain from trying to write about it, because again, your reader who does know about this stuff will be turned off. Credibility is an important thing when it comes to writing books, no matter what the genre. Aside from comic-book ‘credibility’ stumpers, like spider-bites and falling into vats of radiation (you ever wonder how it was possible that all the vampires and demons in the Buffy and Angel series were martial-arts experts as soon as they clawed their way out of the earth/hell-chasm?), most books try to create the incredible in a way that allows their readers to suspend their disbelief. And when you have small, feisty little dark-haired women kicking the ass and taking names of anyone that dares confront them, saving the world, and raising general hell, you sure as hell better be writing it all in a way that doesn’t sound completely contrived.

I spend so much energy and time espousing the benefits of editing not because I believe manuscripts (regardless of their being independent or commercially published) should be clean and professional, but also because an editor does so much more than fix apostrophe use and fix your homonym mix-ups; they are also your consistency checkers, they question your character points of view, they call you out on your bullshit and they help you shape your story into something *they* would want to read. And *they* are the readers you are striving to sell this story to. They are your test-reader, your first audience, so for God’s sake, if your editor is telling you something sucks, do not just sit there and whine about it or assume you know your potential readers better... listen to them and fix it. And don’t think so highly of yourself that you think you have all the bases covered and you know enough about something to just fake it.

Trust me. It just won’t fly

E-book formatting is for the birds.

What have I been up to lately? Not much except struggling with the perils of e-book formatting. O... M... G... Seriously; what a nightmare. I have put Tinna’s Promise up on B&N’s NookBooks and Smashwords, I downloaded it to my nook and there are STILL formatting errors. The worst are the line-breaks problem.

I spent an entire weekend recently reformatting a pasted .pdf of the final manuscript for Tinna’s Promise. I had to go from the back of the book to the front, reintegrating every line of every single paragraph of the novel because the PDF paste had obviously kept each individual line’s hard break when I moved it to word.

Otherwise the
book would read like
this and it would
be oh so annoying.

Of course, had I used an iota of the intelligence that my daddy gave me, I would have thought to save my final manuscript that I sent the publisher into a folder somewhere where I could bloody find it. Then I would have had the original .rtf with all its soft line-breaks in all their glory. But I did not find it anywhere, and so I had to use the final version of the book in .pdf format as the framework for the ebook to insure I had all the right chapters and such.

Naturally, when re-formatting over 120,000 words of text, you’re bound to overlook a line break here and there (sometimes they hide), and you are also bound to accidentally delete spaces between words while doing it so you get the occasional mergedword. It’s really irritating. I also noticed that one book section had been merged into the paragraph of the prior section, making a hideous jump in the story in the same freaking paragraph. To discover this was really defeating. After I’d already re-uploaded it twice.

What I’m going to do this weekend is to try to re-read the damned book page by page on my e-reader, and follow along on my laptop, making changes as I go. I am *then* going to go and get my dog-eared, personal copy of Tinna’s Promise (with the old cover and cracked spine) and make sure that each paragraph matches the hard-copy version for the ebook.

When I do that, I will upload that ONE FINAL TIME to both PubIt! and to Smashwords. Of course that means it will take THREE more days for the modified copy to become available to buyers on PubIt, and put it back into Submission-Pending mode for the Smashwords general distribution catalog, which is another week.

Oh, and the really irritating part? Smashwords doesn’t let you overwrite your old, error-riddled versions, no. They keep every single freakin’ version you resubmit. Right now... I have FOUR versions; all in varying states of errorsville. It’s really embarrassing. They should take those down. Argh.

What I *should* have done was view my formatting and let the little dots and ¶ markers would help me track down the problems. But I didn’t use this wad of grey matter in my cranium I guess, and I just derp-de-derped my way through it while watching my DVRed shows from that week. Now I’m paying the price!

So I encourage you to yes, buy Tinna’s Promise in ebook format, it’s wicked affordable, I've put it up for 99¢ for a limited time(normally $4.00; it’s $6.00 on iUniverse) HOWEVER, perhaps you should wait for another week before you download it so you are sure to get the least buggy version. The latest version does however have the whole of Chapter 1 of Tinna’s Might previewed in it. Just so you know. ;)

Anyway, on the brighter side, look what my hubby gave me for an early Valentine’s Day present?



Squee! I’m sorry, I’m revealing the depth of my geekery here, but I am and have always been, since the late eighties, a track-ball kinda girl. Both my dad and I are (and were in his case) geeks that way. I’ve always had them, for a long time, until my last Logitech died after years of abuse. Now, instead of a normal computer, I have this tiny little netbook that I use to write with (in addition to obsessive internet browsing and Stumbleupon benders). I hate track-pads so I just turned it off and got a wireless mouse that had this thick jump-drive sized USB connector on it, and it was always sticking out the side of my little 9” screen netpad and annoying me.

I am cheap though, at least when it comes to spending money on myself, so I didn’t want to drop almost $60 on a trackball. So instead, I just complained incessantly to the ether (but always when my husband was within hearing range) that I wanted a trackball again—a wireless one, so I can just put it down anywhere I want, on my thigh, on the sofa, wherever, and that I want the thumb kind, not the one with the ball in the middle, and I wanted a Logitech with the itty bitty USB thingie (it’s teeny-like; Pez-size when plugged in) so there’s no thumb-sized protrusion poking out of the side of my little computer.

I must have whined enough, because hubby heard. I came home the night before last, and was doing something on my little baby computer, and started mumbling about hating my stupid wireless mouse and its behemoth USB connector, and he got up, went into the guest-room and then came out with an Amazon.com-blue-gift-wrapped package, which he hucked at me and said: “Fine... I’ll get you ANOTHER Valentine’s present... just take this already...” Yeah... Happy girl now. Silly things make me happy, I’m such a gadget whore—that’s from my dad’s genes, he was such a tinkery, geeky gadget guy too.

So at least now I have something smooth and comfy to help me through this formatting nightmare. Yay! Oh, and BTW.. I’m at *least* 50% through Tinna’s Reign. It’s turning out VERY dark... and there’s a scene in there that’s so dark, so raw, I’m almost afraid to keep it. It’s also very soon in the book; so it might be really jarring to some of the more sensitive readers. I dunno. ::groan:: I will keep writing, and then when I am ready to revise and proofread before editing, I’ll make my choice.

I revamped the http://www.mirandamayer.com/ website, by the way. NO MORE ADS! Yes, I finally sucked it up and bought hosting (told you, I’m cheap). I will add a bit more content soon... but at least there’s no more godaddy bar at the top. :)

Here is a picture of a passed out puppy. Just because.

Please.... edit. I beg you...

Independent writers... hear me out. It is no reflection on your creativity or your talent if you require the services of an editor. A real editor. An experienced, professional editor. It really doesn’t mean you can’t write, it should be a matter of pride, it should be a moral obligation to have someone proofread and edit your manuscript before you go out and have that baby published. Period.

Your readers pay a significantly higher cost for your print-on-demand work. What they should be paying for is a carefully assembled, professional package, from the cover to the contents. You paid money to have your book made available for print-on-demand publishing and ebook... then pay the money to make sure it is a product that respects the customer that is buying it. And by respect I mean having it EDITED. :::ARGH!:::

I’ve been reading a lot of indie work lately because it’s really cheap for my nook... and the thing that stands out most with these self-published authors is that they are not disciplined enough to keep from publishing their work when it obviously isn’t ready. PubIt! and Kindle authors especially—they seem apt to slap anything up there and call it finished, and that is a total no-no.

I read a book the other day; a Twilight-wannabe book where the author left at least one grammatical error per-page. From blatant misuse of words, to horrid spelling to outright bad writing—it was a bloody trainwreck. Last night I bought a book I wish I could return. In the first three pages, I was assaulted with the most horrendous writing. For one, the tenses are all over the place:

“The women laughed as they walked back into the house. When inside, Lizzie sits down at the bay window and gazes out thoughtfully...” GAH!!! This writer also writes dialogue like it’s written for Robbie the Robot; “I am glad you share my beliefs. This is an omen. We should go to Egypt. In my dream it was raining. It doesn’t rain in Egypt.” Who speaks like that? The writing is as dry as the desert the author is writing about and I couldn’t get past page 16. In the span of the FIRST TWO paragraphs, I was told three times that the space was an ‘expanse’. STOP OVERWRITING! Edit yourselves! I haven’t gotten through 2% of the story and I’m already bored.

I know I’m guilty of the repeated word or phrase. For instance, count how many instances of the word ‘albeit’ appear in Tinna’s Promise... I’m so annoyed I didn’t notice it until after editing. Editors are not the cure-all, but they can take something that’s over-thought and simplify it... they can take ideas that are not consistent and make them flow... they can make conversations interesting, they can make reading the text an easy, simple task and keep the reader’s eye from being held up by stupid errors.

Yes, my short stories are full of errors, yes my posts are full of errors, but I'm not asking anyone to pay for what I'm posting up here. If you are taking money for your work... G.E.T. A.N. E.D.I.T.O.R or DO NOT PUBLISH! Please. Damn. I want my $2.99 back!

/Rant

A NookBook at last.

It took me a while to figure out that Tinna's Promise was not available in any e-book format on Barnes & Noble. Then it took me another eon to figure out how to go about having it put on the NookBook list. I had to go through their PubIt! program... which took three long days for it to appear (not to mention a LOT of formatting I had to perform beforehand). I forgot where I put the final version of the manuscript after I sent it to the publisher... so I had to buy the publisher's ebook version, cut and paste it into an .rtf file, and start cleaning it up and reformatting it. I did the best I could considering how tedious it was re-constituting lines where there were breaks inserted, re-spacing chapters, etc, on to mention deleting page numbers and crap like that. There are still some annoying issues here and there that need fixing.

But it's there! Finally; and like the Kindle version, I've offered it up for a mere $4.00 (which isn't a lot). It's still $6.00 on the publisher's page... so it's a deal. There might be a formatting muss-up here and there, but please have patience... I've been refining it as I go along, and I will be adding in the first chapter of Tinna's Might on the end of it this weekend. Please help my book climb the ranks at the NookBook site (if you're nook owners). It's in ePub format... I think a few readers can open those.

Editing on Tinna's Might continues on through the arduous process... I'll keep everyone apprised. Editors are busy people.

Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeech

:::facepalm:: Curse you job! It's like it is a black hole... sucking away my creativity, my enthusiasm, my motivation. It's so frustrating. Book three has come to an impromptu halt. Of course, waiting on the editing work for book 2 is also taking its toll.. it's like I need to get my second kid out of the house before I'm ready to continue working on the next one. I've been reading a lot lately... Trying to just give my brain a break.... Witing is hawd. Bwaaah. /whinefest. :^D

He turned away.

They’re reaching, they’re grasping,
They’re smiling and asking
Her questions that she doesn’t hear.

Their faces are crowding,
They’re all talking loudly,
They see her but she isn’t there.

They claim that they care
While they all strip her bare
And they greedily take in the show.

He watches this madness
He can see all her sadness
Underneath her gaze, he knows.

He turned away,
He closed his eyes,
He knew her shame
Under her disguise.
He saw the soul
Underneath the skin
That the others longed
To crawl within.
He turned away,
He was being kind,
Showing her in truth
That he saw her mind.
He turned away.

They decided and chided
And sometimes they guided
Because they all thought that they knew best.

He watched and he frowned
They turned her life upside-down.
But he wasn’t at all like the rest.

She’s exposed and she’s naked
While the rest of them take it,
He can just avert his eyes.

Her unseeing gaze
Caught the turn of his face
And she thought she was going to die.

Because he turned away
He closed his eyes
He knew her disgrace
Under her disguise
He gave her space
Gave her a reprieve
He turned his back
But he didn’t leave

He turned away.
He closed his eyes
He turned away.
From all the lies.
He turned away
He turned away