What Happened in August 2018--- A Retrospective Confession

I haven't updated this blog in a long time. Some of it is laziness, some of it is too much time watching 24/7 live kitten feeds on YouTube, and some of it has been, well, writing.

To continue the story from the last post, I published The Single Eye in ebook form on Amazon on August 24, 2018. That was the day it went on sale, at least; the upload deadline was the 20th of that month at 7:00 PM.

And wasn't that an ordeal.

It would have gone better if I'd spent the days between the 4th and the 20th making sure all the hyperlinks worked, publishing the website for Hendrick Hill Books, and, most importantly, proofreading the text to make sure it read exactly as I wanted it. But no, I had to go off on vacation for two weeks and save all this labor for the weekend before the deadline.

So there I was, swotting away at my laptop, not eating, not sleeping, not even getting out of my chair for hours. Around 3:00 in the afternoon I realized I had to revise my protagonists' big crisis point. Yeah, I'm glad I did it. It makes the story so much stronger.

But that meant I hadn't much time actually to put The Single Eye up on Amazon. Oh, gosh, that title font is way too big. Quick, fix the code, run the HTML through Calibre to convert it to ePub (or is it EPUB?), upload it to Amazon again. What's this? Those chapter titles are now too small? Tinker with the code again, run Calibre, upload, etc., etc. And so on, and so forth.

Just before the deadline I had a version that looked good. But blast it, I'd forgotten to add the back-matter paragraph crediting the designers of my open-source typefaces. Of course it was the right thing to do, but it could have waited till after the book went live on the Friday.

Because in all my fuss and hurry I overlooked one little thing: that there was a Publish button I had to find and click before I was done. To be fair to myself, on my dinky laptop screen it was hidden off to the right and I needed to scroll over to see it. But if I hadn't been in such an adrenaline-stoked muck sweat, I might have remembered to look for it.

Oh, I thought I'd gotten my final version published before my time ran out. So imagine my feelings when Amazon let me look at what was going on sale on launch day and it was the pre-revision August 4th version. Nooooooo!!!! And due to how Amazon works, I wouldn't be able to provide the real version for 48 to 72 hours after it went live.

So what did I do? I went on social media and told everyone I knew to stop buying the presale. And not to get The Single Eye the day of launch. Because it wasn't right. It wasn't the version I wanted readers to see.

Yeah, I did that. It was stupid, it was dumb, but I did that.

You wanna tank sales?  That'll do it.

And we won't even get into the fact that I rushed the August 24th publication date to be before school started, so my younger fans wouldn't purchase The Single Eye at launch and mess up my Also-Boughts. Guess what? That's the very time Amazon decided to get rid of Also-Boughts and replace them with sponsored ads. Grump.

It's May 2020 now, and book recommendations are back. So that's something. And the book is up. You can get your own copy of The Single Eye here.

(Next time, fun with print.)

Creeping through Amazon's Publication Maze

My novel The Single Eye is now up for presale on Amazon.  Goodie.  Am I celebrating?  Am I giddy with joy and relief?  No, and no.  My gut is in knots and I still feel about to cry because of all the confusion and mystery.  

Nobody told me that publishing your ebook on the 'Zon would be such a Byzantine process, or feel so much like creeping through a maze looking out for the Minotaur.

The website seems devoted to telling you what you can do, but you have to fight through the underbrush of unhelpful Help pages before you get to where you can actually do it.

The customer service people get back to you pretty fast by email, but, well . . . when I asked how I could discount the price during the presale period, why did the Amazon email help desk person ("Siri," if you'll believe that) tell me to run a Kindle Countdown Deal?  Of course I discovered I'm not eligible for that, not till I publish.

So not only was my price higher than I wanted for this period, but my book was listed with an ASIN, instead of the ISBN I put down for it.

Stressful as the experience is, the solutions I'm getting from fellow writers and the ones I'm blundering onto myself are working better than what I'm hearing out of Amazon customer service.  The strain of it has me looking around nervously for Horrible Things to jump on me around the next corner, but I guess I'm making progress.

So I stumbled onto the fact that if I go into the right publication details page in my Bookshelf, I can "revise" my list price.  Nobody who visits the Amazon book page will know it's special, but I can let my tribe (sorry, writer marketing jargon) know it's a good deal.

And I saw that the form had somehow stripped the hyphens out of my ISBN.  That may be why Amazon didn't list it along with their ASIN, which, I learn, they give to every ebook they sell.  I resubmitted the form, with the hyphens in, and hope the sales numbers will accrue to the right number.

I wish I felt better about this.  There seems to be so much to get wrong, from sheer inexperience.  I'll survive, sure.  But for tonight, I just needed to vent.

Learning from My Mistakes, or Professional Book Formatting for Amateurs. Sort Of.

I need to be more regular on this blog, and I've told myself I can't read the latest Business Musings post from Kristine Kathryn Rusch over at Kriswrites.com (a high point of my week) until I've produced something of my own.

So, take this as a glorified apology for not having blogged since last autumn.  My only excuse is that I am doing the formatting on my book myself.  Which is why it's mid-way through April and I haven't yet published The Single Eye.

Yes, I know there are lovely professional services and remarkable tools out there that will do the job for me.  But I can't afford them, and besides, I know what I want and I haven't seen it available commercially. 

I've been working steadily.  Just being aware of the pitfalls in doing things myself brings out the rabid perfectionist streak in me.  I want my book, both versions of it, to look as professional as it can.

But that doesn't mean I've been working efficiently.  Oh, my, no.  Which is why it's mid-April and, despite a good three to five hours spent on this per weekday, I'm only now scenting the end of the trail.

What I've learned in the process.

• If you're working to format a big file, split it up into sections.  There's less of a chance of corruption, and if the inner coding on one page is the issue, it won't drag your whole ms down with it.

The Single Eye, at around 145,000 words, is not a short book, and the formatted-for-print version made for a pretty hefty file.  In December I started to have issues with saving it, and in mid-January it crashed altogether.  Thank heaven I was able to remember the edits I made when the latest version of my manuscript refused to open, but several days worth of reconstruction was required.  That could have been averted by breaking the file up.

• If you're working in Dropbox, save a copy of your latest working copy on a thumbdrive or at least in another directory on your computer.  

When my Dropbox file took a nosedive on my laptop, the desktop version went down at the same time.  And thanks to the efficiency of the Internet (she says ironically), the copy on my cloud backup service was toast as well.  Not only that, but the corruption spread somehow to other recent versions that were in the same Dropbox folder.

Thank heaven I was able to find an earlier version that wasn't messed up and restore the edits out of my memory and the ebook version.  But having to do it really slowed things down.

Which brings me to something else:

• Assuming you're doing a print book, format it first.

Gosh, I wish I'd tumbled to that last autumn!

Why do it first?  Because you'll pick up on a lot of typos, grammatical errors, and plain old writing that needs to be revised when you're going through your print version page by page making sure your hyphens are in the right place and your bottom margins line up.  Get that done first, then when your ms is nice and clean and edited, start playing with your ebook file.  Do you really want to be like me and correct your ebook file (with all its wonderful html entities) every time you make a change?

No, you don't.

• If you don't know how to already, learn to use Styles in your word processing program when you first compose your text.  

Doing that from the beginning would have saved me hours of work updating and correcting features like chapter titles and opening paragraphs one at a time.

What else?  

• The best way to get your quotation marks, apostrophes, em-dashes, ellipses, and so on to look right in the ebook version is to convert them to html entities yourself. 

I've learned some effective ways to do that, but it's been another long day, and yes, I want to see what Kris has said on her blog.  If I'd been blogging about this last fall when I learned it . . .

Well, never mind.  Next time we can talk about something more cheerful, like DIY typography.

Cheers!

More Haste, Less Speed

A while back I came across the blog post series “Take Pride in Your eBook Formatting,” by  Guido Henkel. It made sense:  What comes out of your word processing program can be undependable, and you can’t assume that Kindle or whomever will make your book all pretty and error-free for you.  You know how it should look, and if you take the time to learn some basic HTML, you can guarantee it’s published online looking that way. 

Not only that, but you’ll have an ebook file you can use on any platform, instead of having to come up with a separate format (and a separate ISBN) for Kindle, Kobo, etc.

So I bookmarked the whole series and went on to buy the extended version of Mr. Henkel’s blog series, his book The Zen of eBook Formatting.  

It hasn’t exactly been Zen for me, unless Zen entails hard work and struggle.  Instructions for Word don’t necessarily work for WordPerfect, and in several cases I’ve had to research out a work-around.  And even as I’ve inquired and probed about the best way to get my HTML conversion done, I’ve had colleagues online, both in the WordPerfect and the writing communities, tell me not to bother: WP’s HTML conversion facility is good enough, Kindle’s conversion is good enough, etc., etc.

But I want my debut novel to look a certain way, and I’m taking responsibility for it.

And I’m making progress.  

Or else, I thought I was.

Why the ambiguity?

Because I am an idiot. A week or two ago I figured out how to use find-and-replace within WordPerfect to substitute html entities for the WP code, and I was like a skier on a downhill run. Wheeeee!!! The only place I really got slowed down was with the curly apostrophes and quotation marks. I have a lot of dialogue, but what could I do?  I couldn’t find any way to do a find-and-replace that would understand which marks were right hand and which were left.  Not in WordPerfect, not in my text editor.  So there I was, putting them in, first the left single quotes, then the right, then starting on the doubles in the Prologue, left, right, soldiering, soldiering on.

And then it hit me:

Kid, you’re doing content edits while you’re doing the formatting. And you can’t remember, can you, what those edits were. Meaning the only “final” version of the text you have is this one with code all over it for the ebook.

Ohhhhhhhh, joy.

So I had to plug my entire, massively-coded manuscript into an online reverse converter and get it decoded.  Then run a comparison between the reconverted doc and the last WYSIWYG file I had saved on my computer, to bring the edits to the surface.

I got the review done a couple of days ago and saved it as the Master novel doc, in a separate directory. No, I won’t be able to resist making changes in the formatting copy; I’ll be correcting any typos I find, at the least. But I’m resolved that whatever edits I make, I will immediately make them in the master file as well. And so far I have.

For what it’s worth, most of the changes have been eliminating lines where I tell and then show. And I changed the first sentence of one chapter that began with an ellipse, because how are ya gonna do a drop cap on that?

I have learned a lot, no doubt about it.  The Zen book has been useful.  So has the copy of Murach’s HTML5 and CSS3 someone lent me.

But in the end, the most important thing I’ve learned might be that I don’t want to do it by hand.  Maybe the most efficient thing would be to plug the whole manuscript into a conversion program and get the quotation marks and diacriticals put into HTML that way. I’d have to go back and put in the italics by hand because those don’t convert, but oh, well.

(And please don’t point out that I spent all day Thursday putting the small caps back in at the chapter beginnings, and the online app won’t convert those either and I’ll have to do them all over . . . )

I’ll get this under my belt. I will. And it’s going to look pretty, yes, it will. So there.

Book Cover as Poem

Subsequent to my last post where I said my cover design for The Single Eye was finished, I decided it was too dark and spent the next week lightening it up.

I now have a GIMP file marked "FINAL."  I've even layer-merged and flattened it and exported it as a .jpg.  But . . . I also saved a version with all the layers available for further manipulation.  If I have to.

Yeah, I'm hopeless.  Especially because I'm still not sure I have the exact shade of blue right, and I keep feeling I have to get it perfect.

And my only hope for escaping perfectionism is to think how book cover design is like writing a poem.

Think about it.

A poem uses figures of speech, allusion, wordplay, and so on to evoke ideas and sensations in the reader.  Its meaning enters through the heart and the gut and makes its way up to the brain.  Poetry is not propositional or literal, and its communication of truth is all the more powerful because of that.

A good book cover does the same.  It appeals to the subconscious and invites you without words to click on it or to take it in your hand and open it up.  You think "That's intriguing" without precisely knowing why.

And book covers are like poems in that with each there are any number of ways that inner pull can be produced.

The way I've been fretting over my cover design since early May you'd think I believed there is Only One Perfect Cover for any one book.  I'm not the only one who labors under this burden.  I've been under a lot of pressure from some fellow-authors (it's always fellow-authors) who tell me I have to hire a pro for this, as if any one person could, just by virtue of their being a professional, generate the cover I need.  This is ridiculous on the face of it.  Books are rebranded and covers redesigned over and over as new editions are published.  Are we supposed to believe that only one of those is the foreordained right one and woe to the rest?

Absurd.

No, the challenge is to get this particular cover to evoke the book, just as a poet crafts this particular poem to express the subject he's writing his verses on.  Is there only one poem that can be written on love?  How about war?  How about the futility of this earthly existence (cue violins)?  Of course not.  All these things can have an infinite number of poems written on them.

They need to fit the subject, of course.  But within that framework the poet strives to make her poem as internally-consistent and as perfect an expression of love or war or futility-of-human-existence it possibly can be.

A book cover is the same.  Yes, you want to follow genre conventions.  Put pink frills and flowing script on a noir murder mystery and you'll end up with some pretty annoyed readers.  But once overall genre expectations are met, your cover has no need to be uniquely perfect, only to be well-proportioned, expressive, and consistent within itself.  

And thanks to advent of the ebook, if I should think up a new design that is even more that than what I have now, I can easily switch the new cover out.

Back Again

It's been two months and more since I resolved to step back from the keyboard, and a lot has happened--- and has not.

First, what hasn't happened.

As promised, I did not touch my draft of The Single Eye.  In fact, I didn't open it till the 20th of this month of March.

The other thing that hasn't happened is that I didn't hear from either of my Last Two Beta Readers.  That isn't to say I was never in touch with them; I just got nothing back on the novel.

Now, I could take that as a very bad sign.  Yes, the one has been through severe health issues involving herself and a close family member.  The other has a very full, not to say harried, schedule.  But there's a nagging voice that says, "If your book was any good, they'd be compelled to read it anyway.  They'd find it a solace in their affliction!"

But as much as The Single Eye involves themes that go to the heart of the human condition, as much as I hope the reader will come away having learned something about him or herself, as much as I'd love it to be the kind of book a reader will pick up again and again, it's still a novel.  It's entertainment.  And when your newborn has to be rushed to the ER because she can't clear her lungs, Mama ain't got time to beta read no novel.

So I'm going ahead and doing a last copy edit out of my own eye--- if that makes sense.  More on that later.

Step Away from the Keyboard!

This day and evening, by dint of neglecting ten other things I should have been taking care of, I finished the last of the major edits I've been sweating through on my novel The Single Eye.  In other words, this revised draft is done.

To mark the occasion I've sent it off to two beta readers.  Until I hear back from them, I solemnly swear to leave this manuscript the heck alone.  I'll pretend these readers have the only copies and I can't look at it or lay my hands on it at all.  I'll keep up that fiction for the next two months, after which I might be able to regard it with more objectivity.

If either of these readers uncovers some major structural issue no one else has caught before, that's another story.  But I'm hoping it will be just little things like typos that I can deal with when I do my final read-throughs in March.

We'll see.

In other news, it looks like I and two others from our Pennwriters area will be starting a new critique group on the 28th of this month.  Did that sound tentative?  Yeah.  That's because I've wanted to be part of a face to face writers' group for so long that it's hard to grasp that it's finally coming together.  I'll be workshopping my second novel, and it'll be an experiment in psychology to see how well I shift my head from the world of novel No. 1 to that of novel No. 2.  I mean, when the interaction between your protagonists is so much more fun than anything you're involved in in real life . . .

Home Stretch

I just may be in the home stretch of this last set of major revisions to The Single Eye.

I've done some minor rejiggering to make my female protagonist's motivations clearer as she convinces herself to do what she does at the novel's climax. A lot of that involved taking scenes out of the male protagonist's point of view and putting them into hers. All this is good for the book in general because it highlights her character arc. And I'd wondered if that was getting obscured.

One of my latest beta readers complained about the way I switch the POV back and forth between my two main characters in the course of a single chapter. She's pretty sure, she said, that that's not something an author should do. I paid no attention to this. Good and great authors do it all the time, and it's particularly kosher if you put a line/scene break between the POVs. Which I've done.

But as I communicated further with this beta, I learned the POV shifts that bothered her particularly came at the novel's climax. Far from speeding up the action, the switches between the female main character's point of view and that of the male MC only slowed things down. My reader kept having to stop and wonder, "Whose head are we in anyway?"

No other beta has mentioned that, but I think this one is right. So I've rewritten that bit so it's entirely in the FMC's point of view. This has enabled me to cut out a chunk of business from the MMC that wasn't really material, making the scene tighter and more dramatic. (Besides, the more I can cut out, the happier I am.)

I've also cut out a plot wrinkle I put in about a year ago. About that same time I got into listening to the Writing Excuses podcasts, and more than once they've emphasized that it doesn't really work to throw in one more challenge after the climax. Your reader's reached the big climactic high, they want to release their tension, and it's not fair to make them ratchet their emotions up yet again. More than that, it's hard to make them care enough to try. This point was reiterated in an episode I was playing this past week, and the penny finally dropped. I edited that plot wrinkle out today. I'd only put it in to keep knowledgeable readers from picking holes, but I'll deal with that another way.

The last challenge has to do with my FMC's character arc. To get that right involves rethinking the personality of a minor character, a county sheriff. I have to transform him from a generic intelligent nice guy into a by-the-book hardass who'll grudgingly concede a point when the facts tell him he has to. My FMC has to come out of the conversation struggling with herself over whether she did the right thing in the climactic scene or not--- and come to terms with the fact that everything in life is not cut-and-dried and under her control.

. . . Just writing that last line has got me clearer on what her arc is about. Which I hope makes this really long post worthwhile.

Escaping the Morass of Stupid Tropes

So I'm lying in the dentist's chair this afternoon getting my teeth cleaned, when it hits me that I may be on the verge of committing an authorial sin I've always condemned in others. That's the trespass of having the plot depend on one of a loving couple, who have always communicated closely and openly, suddenly refraining from giving her lover a crucial piece of information, which lack of candor results in trouble, grief, mayhem, misunderstandings, and maybe even dandruff and the Heartbreak of Psoriasis.

What am I gonna do? It won't be a matter of letting him misinterpret something she's already done; rather, she wants to keep him in the dark about something she plans to do, something dangerous and daring and more than a little foolhardy. And she has to do it for my plot to reach its climax. How can I escape unspotted from the morass of stupid tropes?

Hmmm. I've been thinking about this the past couple of hours (happily, no longer in the dentist's chair). And I believe I can make it work by having her reason that she's keeping him in the dark for his own good because she loves him so much. She's got a strong protective streak in her . . . And she'll keep her mouth shut about her dangerous plans because she knows he wants to protect her, and if he knew he'd probably stop her. "Leave it to the police," he'd say, and ordinarily, he'd be right. But my FMC doesn't trust the police to handle it.

Ah, nothing like clarifying character motivations to get you out of Stupid Trope Prison. At least, I hope so.

Goals and Deadlines

A quick reflection or two, here on New Year's Eve:

I want to get my debut novel, The Single Eye, published as soon as possible. Yes, I need to finish my current edits. Yes, I ought to and shall let it rest for a month or two before I go over it one last time and then launch it out into the fearsome sea of readership. But I've decided that late March to mid-April is my farthest-out deadline for publication. 

Why? Because I'm an egomaniac. 

*Pauses while she hits herself upside the head and calls herself a silly goose*

Sorry. Correction: I need to get it published by then so I can take advantage of a sure-fire opportunity to do some face-to-face marketing. I've won a free ride to the annual Pennwriters' conference the third weekend in May, and I'd be an idiot not to have my book there ready to show my colleagues. Heck, maybe I could even get a little space at the Saturday afternoon authors' fair (though that may be open only to those who are trad published). Imagine it: Me handing out swag and selling (I hope!) my very own book!

So how much more pre-letting-it-rest editing will I do? First, I'll finishing evaluating my beta readers' comments and incorporating their perspectives as appropriate. Second, I'll finish redoing the places I myself know need redoing, whether anyone else has told me so or not. Third, I'll get rid of those passages where up to now I've told myself, "Yeah, that's a little cheesy and even kind of narrator-intrudery, but I'll leave it in because Ms. X the Famous Writer gets away with prose like that, and besides, I'm a first-time author and no one expects me to be that good." No. If I find myself looking around guiltily hoping nobody will notice What I Did There, the word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, whatever, needs to be excised and sent to the Outtakes File.

I'm setting the end of January to complete all that. Or the third week in, preferably.

Not as Bad as I Used to Be

Is it obnoxious to claim you're a better writer than you were two years ago?

The question arises because this morning I got to thinking, "Maybe I'm using the wrong scene(s) from my heroine's past as my prologue." So, despite my mortal need of sleep, I've just opened an earlier version of my novel and read over the incident I had in mind.

Oh, dear, no. That version was too early.

Hmm.  Let me try again with a rendition dated maybe nine months later, just before I cut that scene and the extensive flashback before and after it.

. . . Sorry, no. Though somewhat improved, it's nowhere close to usable. It would need so much labor to lick into shape; it wouldn't be worth it.

How can this be? I've always liked those chapters detailing my FMC's backstory! I'd even considered releasing them all as bonus material with the ebook. But now I'd just as soon parade around outside in my underwear. In the dead of winter. No, no, nodiddy-no-no-no!

I'm nothing to brag about as a writer, but at least I'm not as bad as I used to be.

Note to Myself

Putting myself on notice:

It's good to pay attention to critique and feedback. But I have to watch out against changing my characters and their reactions according to some generic concept of "what people do." More than once in this editing process I've nearly tumbled into the pit of gutting my characters of their individuality, just to satisfy typical expectations. Yes, in a perfect, logical world people would do or not do certain things. But my world is not perfect, and my characters are not always logical, nor sensible, nor are they omniscient, nor do they always do what's in their best interests.

Slaughter in a Good Cause

I'm almost done with my rewrite of the scene where my antagonist/villain meets with my male protagonist and tries to hook him in.  I'm fighting a cold and the revision isn't going as fast as I'd like. But it's getting there.

In this the principle of "killing your darlings" is really coming into play. Now that I've made my villain less obvious, my female MC can no longer lash out with some zingers she used against him in the previous version. Those lines I've had to delete, or rather, I've sent them into cyber exile. In fact, now she doesn't have any one thing she can put her finger on when trying to convince the hero not to accept the antagonist's business proposition; it's more a lot of different things put together. It's hard work replacing those chunks of dialogue while maintaining the arc of the scene. Which is why I'm fooling around here instead of pushing through and getting the rewrite done.

I think it's helped believability, putting part of the chapter in the male protag's point of view. But it has sure increased the word count. Bleh.

In the Villain's Head

I'm not happy with my rewrite of the scene where my antagonist tries to get my male protag to work for him (in more ways than he realizes).

I made an attempt to improve the scene and got some feedback. Ack, it still wasn't working. Try again.

Best approach? Redraft the middle of the scene to be from the male protag's point of view. This way, the reader can witness how he rationalizes away the odd things the villain is proposing, and, I hope, agree that he isn't being gullible, he's just going on the information and experience he has. Getting inside his head at the time will make it easier for the reader than waiting to hear him tell the female protag all about it.

But this requires that I do something I've said categorically that I don't want to do: Get inside the villain's head as well. Too bad, gotta do it. How can I show how my hero normalizes the bad guy's demands, unless I know how the villain works to make his demands seem normal?

What's more, I have to tone the villain down and stop making him so obviously villainous.  For why would he be, at this stage?  He'd want to lure the hero in step by step by enticements that sound innocent at first.  He'd reveal how dangerous they are only when his victim is entangled and it's too late.

I'm not giving the villain a point of view. It'd make the book too much longer and too much more complicated and it'd spoil the suspense if the reader knows for sure what he's up to. But for awhile I'll have to climb into my antagonist's devious little psyche. My hero must have something "real" to react against.

BookFest

This afternoon I walked into town to check out my county's annual BookFest. The goofy thing is that I totally forgot it was this weekend until yesterday evening when, as I was driving to work, I spied the writers' pavilion being set up in the middle of the street that bisects the park in the town center. 

This year I remembered to bring a tote bag for all the bookmarks, postcards, pens, candy, and other swag my fellow authors were handing out. What I forgot to do, way last winter, was to start a book-buying fund. So frustrating and embarrassing to have all these local writers making their books available for purchase at a discount, and I couldn't afford a single one. 

I collected a lot of author business cards and passed out a few of my own. One writer was kind enough to say she'd be willing to read over my manuscript of The Single Eye once I incorporate the last of my beta readers' suggestions, and she suggested I attend the monthly lectures sponsored by the local chapter of Romance Writers of America, which meets in a town not overly far from me. And on a Saturday, too, so my work schedule wouldn't get in the way.

And, what fun, I got to talk to an ATF agent who'd written a nonfiction book about his career. He had a lot of interesting things to say about the Waco and Ruby Ridge standoffs and about the Atlanta Olympics and Oklahoma City bombings, and he was able to assure me that I'd gotten the events surrounding the explosions, etc., at the end of my novel right. (There's one place where I'm probably stretching reality, but I didn't ask him about that. Sorry, I need it for the plot.)

Unlike last year's BookFest, it did not pour down rain; instead, it was bloody hot and more than once I thought I was going to keel over from heatstroke. Never mind, it's a great event and maybe next year I'll have the funds to take better advantage of it.

Two Steps Back, Three Steps Forward Equals Progress

Thinking how I wanted to get The Single Eye published last winter.  Then by the end of August.  You mind if I fall over myself laughing?

Boy, do I have a lot of rewriting left to do. As much as some of my latest beta reader's comments bug me, three or four of them make me go, "Hmmm, what about it?" Does my villain come on too strong at the beginning? Given that he behaves like a consistent jerk from the get-go, isn't my male protagonist sliding into Too-Stupid-to-Live territory by not immediately seeing through him?  I've gone through a period of insisting that I can't make him more than minimally proactive, given his position in life. But is that really true? Aren't there things he would do to deal with the trash the villain is throwing at him? Then at the end, after the female protag saves the day with her "heroics," would she still feel like an idiot after law enforcement praised her for her bravery?

I've come to the conclusion that all these things call for revision, not because I want the approval of my latest beta reader or because I feel I have to change my work to fit her views, but because I believe that once rewritten, my characters will be more true to who I already claim them to be.

I'm starting at the beginning and working my way through. This past Wednesday I got to the point in Chapter 5 (now Chapter 4) just short of the scene when the antagonist (soon to be villain) makes his pitch. This is progress.

On the Other Hand

I've had time to think, and I've remembered that I can't make my hero too proactive. There must be a time in the middle when he decides things have gone back to normal, even though the reader can pick up evidence that the villain is still active behind the scenes. Why? Because the hero's single-minded focus on his work, in this plot, will be his potential ruin. It has to end up putting him and those he most cares about in danger, because, as he admits at the end, "I just didn't want to know."

Actually, my heroine is the more proactive of the pair. So proactive, in fact, that my latest beta reader accused her of superheroics at the story's point of crisis. No, sorry, that's staying in. Her issue is wanting to be in control and thinking everything is up to her. Yeah, she'd do what I have her do . . . but it worries me that that beta didn't see it that way.

More rethinking, more rewriting!

All Those ISBNs

And something else. Am I trying to do too much in this novel? There's a lot in there about my male protag's resentment against his missionary father . . . and his brother's confronting him about how he's living out the same pattern in his own work . . . Are those really necessary to what's supposed to be a romantic suspense novel?

But wait a minute. Didn't I put those scenes in there to show (not tell) how he came to be prejudiced against a certain ethnicity? That flaw is key to the villain's obsession with him. And didn't his brother's words give him a big push towards being willing to love the heroine and let her into his personal life?

The novella this book grew from was about 40,000 words. It trotted along right smartly and the thriller plot was pretty exciting. But it was full of holes and the love story was a wet wish-fulfillment mess. Do I really want to go back to that? No . . . not really. But . . .

Do you get the feeling I'm having serious doubts about whether I can pull this off? Yeah. Well, too bad. I can't give up now: I have all those ISBNs to use.

Postponed

I really hoped and planned to get this novel onto Kindle and CreateSpace by the end of this month. It isn't going to happen, and not just because I've been too busy renovating my front room to design my cover and format my text.

It's not even that I've heard back from another beta reader, and it's clear that I'll have to make my main characters' basic motivations more convincing. And clean up some typos. And decide how much internal dialogue to put into third person indirect speech, or to cut altogether.

It's rather that, having allowed the manuscript to sit for several weeks, I'm seeing that the first part drags for sure and for real. My hero, especially, needs to be more proactive. It's true that at that stage his primary motivation is not to Defeat the Villain and Bring Down His Evil Plot for National Domination; he doesn't even know the villain has a plot for national domination.  He just wants the creep to go away and let him do his work (architecture) in peace. But as I've written him now, too many times he deliberately ignores acts that all my betas saw as the villain's dirty deeds, regarding them instead as accident or coincidence. I thought this was signalling how dedicated he is to his work. "See what he'll put up with if he can just go on designing!" But it's only making him look like a thickheaded fool.

I've been wrestling with this problem for awhile, and to some extent, this "Hear no evil, see no evil" attitude truly reflects who my MMC is.  For example, he'd definitely go out of his way to convince himself that the threatening note he receives isn't from the villain because he doesn't have time to deal with it. But after his apartment is burned out . . . is he really going to believe it was just a faulty space heater?  All logic dictates that he'll decide the bad guy is behind it after all, and he'll have to try to do something about it and fail.

This will mean some major rewriting in some places. I think I can do it without messing up my story's timeline or major plot points. But it will take more than the next nine days.

An Announcement: I Am Now a Publisher

Last January, I made a resolution to post at least once a week on this blog.  I have no shame about failing to do so during the school year: with three or four jobs demanding my time, I was lucky to get three or four hours of sleep per night, let alone do any blogging.

But now it's summer, and here's what I've accomplished:

No, my novel The Single Eye is not quite ready for publication.  I'm still waiting on my final two beta readers, and I have a one last editing pass to make, myself.

I also need to learn GIMP, so I can put together a cover.  Yes, it would be better if I could hire someone to design it.  But financially, that's out of the question.  I'm going to draw on my graphic arts background and do it myself, and if the cover's no good, that's my fault.

So the book itself is on a kind of tremulous hold.  But that doesn't mean I haven't been busy otherwise.  After months of research and consideration, I've decided to self-publish under my own imprint.  As of this past Thursday the 14th, when I heard from my state's Secretary of State's office, I am in business as a publisher under the name HENDRICK HILL BOOKS.

I'll only be doing my own work, of course.  But I've got my first block of ten ISBNs from Bowker, I've obtained my Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the federal government, I've purchased domain names associated with Hendrick Hill Books and with my pen name, Catrin Lewis, and--- well, it looks like I'm serious about this.

I''m planning to release The Single Eye for Kindle and as an POD paperback by the end of August.  At least, I was.  But I'm hearing that it's never good for a new self-publisher to put out only one book at a time.  Should I hurry up and finish the psychological horror novel I have half-done?  Ought I to make an effort and crank out a sequel to The Single Eye (I have an idea for one, but haven't yet found the key to make the plot work)?

We'll see.  Hendrick Hill Books exists, it's not going away, and I have plenty to do before school starts again.