I know what I’m doing for NaNoWriMo this year. So, what do I do with October?
Ah. From a tangential mention from my beloved wife, I’m going to spend October writing down the facts my father-in-law has told me over the past quarter century… WWII, the Hungarian Gulag, his escape in 1956. It lends itself to a story, but I want the facts down before he dies, so he can check it. Should take no more than two weeks.
You’ll be hard pressed to believe it when you see the raw data.
Got the interior completed and uploaded last night. More clumps of hair out this morning trying to get the front/back covers done. At only 24 pages, there’s no ‘spine’ per se, so had to work around that. Then, the primitive graphics program I was using decided it was done for the day.
The nice thing about flat-panel screens is they go much further once they’ve cleared the glass of the window.
*ahem* After applying the typical IT solution (“Did you restart your computer?”), things were less bad. Images formatted, converted, uploaded. I’ve gone ahead and submitted them for review by CreateSpace, even though I’ve no blurb on the back cover, yet. I want one of their proof copies in my hand: until you’re holding a physical copy, you’ve no idea what stupid things you’ve screwed up (such as leaving page numbers out of my first novel; my then 11 year-old caught that one).
As always, I cannot thank Claudia Gadotti enough for her amazing illustrations. Please go to her place and lavish her with commissions!
Last night was crashing and burning: came home hopped up on coffee (recall: I’ve high blood pressure) to get things done on HBD!, only to be confronted with hysterical wife: “my J-drama torrents won’t work!!” An hour lost there, then another making dinner, I finally sit down to format some jpg’s to pdf’s . . . forgetting that twice 2700 pixels is not 1350, but, in fact, 5400. Re-re-formatting everything, I do a trial upload at 2215. All clear. Time for bed.
Tonight, adding text. As this is a book aimed at 2nd graders, I think there’s about 120 words, total. This issue – ONCE AGAIN – is formatting: my pages are set to ‘bleed-out’ on the edges, so when making text boxes, I have to guess where my perimeter is. That’s been three tries so far. I’d also some issues about ISBN’s, but would rather toss my desktop out my window than even think about discussing it.
Below the fold, a snapshot of page 17. God bless Claudia Gadotti, my illustrator. How she could reach into my mind from my poor, bare-bones description of my characters to make what she did . . . well, just wait until I’ve wrapped this all up in a couple of weeks.
With only seventeen days left to go in my self-imposed deadline, I just now figured out how to format the pages from jpeg to pdf and upload them properly to CreateSpace. I’ve been spoiled: for my traditional novels, I’ve used “Bookwrite” by Blurbb; a fantastic program, so long as you stay within its boundaries. As this is an illustrated children’s book, I needed those boundaries to be elastic, so after a few days, out that went.
Then it was a matter of re-scaling Claudia’s wonderful drawings. That took a couple of days to figure out… glad my wife told me to drink less: I was about ready to throw my computer out the window. I finally got a test of the cropped, resized, and split, pages successfully uploaded to CreateSpace. I’ll – hopefully – reformat the remaining images tomorrow, then add the little bit of text (this is a kids book, after all) the day after. Looks like the wife and daughters will be foraging for dinner the rest of this week!
Provisional cover is below the fold.
In other news, I’ve seen some huge character changes for my NaNoWriMo project this year; I’m quite pleased! Set in a part of MachCiv I’ve not really been to, yet, and something of a horror novel, this should be fun!
“… no such thing as; part X.”
Ran into this while at Spec’s flagship store on Smith Street, Houston. Of course I bought it. And no: unless an emergency*, I’m not drinking it.
*Out of other booze.
For the first time in just over two years, I’m on vacation. Even that’s qualified, as we’re in Houston/Galveston, but the reason we’re here is my wife’s 6 month post cancer-treatment checkup. Still, better than central Ohio.
Had I been home, I’d be working on “Henge’s Big Day;” I’m not, so I’m not. I did, however, see a vignette that I alluded to while writing “Defiant.” Some skinny-dipping at the PSU pool with my main characters. Was finally able to type it out, today.
This takes place halfway between Act II and Act III.
machciv 