Stretched Out Before the Future

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about writers, its that we’re a stubborn, yet fearful, bunch.  We’ll get into a project and stick to it until the bitter end–and then, when the end is in sight, refuse to let go of the creature we’ve spawned.

Over the last year I’ve noticed that there are two things that seem to scare writers the most:  research and editing.  Research has always been a friend, and editing is slowly becoming a welcomed roommate.  But why do these fill our hearts with fear?

Editing is something that seems to get the better of us each time.  I read it a little today, when someone asked, “When do I know my novel is perfect?”  One might as well say, “When can I let my children go out into the world?”  For some people that answer is always, “Never,” and they hang onto their rugrats like they were bars of platinum–at least until they realize that they’re thirty-five and spend entirely too much time on the “Kawaii Crossplay” website, and maybe it’s time to throw their ass into the street.
Perfection is a will-o’-the-wisp:  you’ll never find it because it doesn’t exist.  Or, better yet, for my science fiction writer friends, it’s like getting to 1c, the speed of light.  You can get close, closer, closest; you can get to .999999c; you can push those engines all you want for decades, but you’ll never hit 1.0c.  Not gonna happen, at least not in this universe.

You can edit and rewrite and re-edit your story all you want, but in your own eyes, that sucker will never hit the level of perfection you’ve set for yourself.  You’ll drive yourself nuts trying to get it to where you’re finally convinced you can publish it–right after this last polish–

I look at editing like I look at action scenes:  I try to keep it as short as possible.  Try to get the story where you want it during the first draft, get rid of the typos in the first edit, clean up the story, plot holes and all, in the second, and go over it again to make sure you have things right.  Let someone else look at it, then edit again where needed.  After that, get it out to a house for a look-see, or start formatting it for self-publication.

It’s time to put it in the street.

Then there’s research . . . oh, my.  This seems to scare writers more than editing.  (If a sampling of a few ebooks is any indication, there are a lot of scared writers out there, ba-da-boom!)  I love research, because this is where you learn stuff.  Even if you think you know everything there is to know about a subject you’re going to weave a story around, you’ll find something new that’s gonna surprise you.  I had this happen when I was writing Her Demonic Majesty, and the bit of information I discovered when I was about seven chapters into the book helped change an important scene for me, and developed how the MagicPunk City of Chicago should feel.  What I found was completely unknown to me, but not anymore, since I have that information bookmarked in the Scrivener project.

Take all the time you want for research–up to a point, that is, because if you stretch research out for too long, you’re still looking for that level of perfection you’ll never find.  That final bit of data is keeping you from the real thing you’re suppose to do, and that’s write.

Wouldn’t want to be accused of shirking your duties now, would you?

Golden Week

The weekend is over, the week begins anew.  And this is a very particular week for me, because there is so much going on . . .

First off, today is the Second Anniversary of this blog.  Yes, it is true, I created my first point on 13 April, 2011, but that didn’t really count.  Two years ago today I scribbled some nonsense, and I was . . . well, sort of creeping along, because I had no idea what the hell I should do with this space.  You want to know something?  I’m still not sure.  But I keep coming back because it keeps getting funnier every time I’m here!  Not to mention, you’re talkin’ to a . . .

Sorry.  I must have mispronounced a star’s name three times.

Then we have 1 May, and that’s a time of celebration.  It’s May Day, it’s International Workers Day–something we in the U. S. used to celebrate until we got pissed off at the Commies and said we were taking our holiday and going home–and it’s Beltane.  Anyway you look at it, it’s the traditional start of summer, and time to enjoy the coming warmness.  It’s also the start of Golden Week in Japan, which is suppose to be the one week when people get time off from their jobs–about they only time they get a holiday, actually.  Golden Week is also the period where Japan sees its greatest number of suicides, and they put additional people on hotlines to handle the surge, so to speak.  Why does this happen?  Is it because the down time gives workers reason to reflect on their lives, and realize how their jobs turn it into a huge crap sack of nothingness?  Probably one of the reasons they don’t do something like that here . . .

And then we get to the end of the week, and it’s 3 May, and we all know what that means?  Yeah, Iron Man 3 opens.  I, for one, do so want to see Pepper Potts in the suit; just something about a woman in powered armor brings out the nasty in me.  Though I probably won’t see it right away, ’cause . . . aliens.

The mini-meltdown is over.  Saturday happened, I sulked, I recovered.  I finished up Her Demonic Majesty yesterday, compiled it, and sent it off for a look-see.  I’m hopeful that I don’t get a lot of, “This totally sucks,” and if I do, screw it:  it’s my novel.  I’ll publish it anyway.  I want it correct, but if they don’t care for it, so be it.  It’s ready:  I just don’t need typos to mess me up.

And I wrote an article.  One about mecha, one that involved me having to put out the math skills.  It was actually sort of fun to do, and I hope it is enjoyed.  It’s always a crap shoot when you send out something like that, but it’s just another way to keep the writing going–

Which reminds me:  I have nothing to do tonight.  Nothing.  It’s sort of sit and think time, I guess.

Or I can sit and do . . .

What a choice for Golden Week.

The Consequences of Truth

Well-made plans have a way of crashing around you when it’s least expected.  We’ve all had things we planed on doing, only to have life come up and smack us straight on in the face, leaving one a semi-bloody mess.

The measure of your personality is how you deal with the situation.

I didn’t deal with mine very well.

Allow me to explain.

I started out in a good mood.  I was writing, I was blogging, I was looking forward to the end of my novel.  I was looking forward to having a good time today, to maybe finishing an article and getting that out.  The path was clear, the way ahead was sunny.

I posted an excerpt from Chapter Six of Her Demonic Majesty, and was getting into my editing.  It was going to be a wonderful day–

Then Trusty Editor^tm came along.

They were reading the excerpt, going through it with the trained eye they have.  And just like that, I’m getting PMs on Facebook.  ”You have this wrong . . . this should be . . . I think you meant–”.  It wasn’t much, and my Trusty Editor^tm was only helping me as they have done in the past.

But it killed me, because this was what I feared all along:  that no matter how much work I put into getting my manuscript clean, it would never be clean enough.

I lost it.  I logged off from Facebook and just shook for a few minutes.  I cried.  I doubted my own abilities to do anything right.  I’ve spent so much time on this story that it really felt like a kick in the gut, and with everything that has happened to me this week, I felt like I couldn’t take it anymore.

I actually reached the point where I was ready to say, “Fuck it, I can’t take this anymore,” and just wander away from the scene for . . .well, who knows?  I feel alone, I feel that I get very little support, I feel like I’m working in a constant vacuum located inside a singularity of indifference.

So I stepped away from the story for most of the day, simply because I couldn’t stand to look at the manuscript any more.

I finally finished editing the chapter I was on when I had my meltdown, then I headed out for the night, something I haven’t done in over a month and a half.  I wasn’t in much of a mood to talk, though, but I manged to get though the night without being too much of a Debbie Downer.

It was only while I was driving home with the late night light drizzle falling around me that I found my center.  See, long ago, Trusty Editor^tm was going over another manuscript that was my then Work in Progress.  And they had issues with a few things in the first couple of paragraphs.  I freaked out, because I thought what I’d written was pretty good.

Their comment to me, after I’d expressed my fears, was, “You need to get your ego in check.  Do you want this to be good?  Or do you want this to be the best?”

That’s an easy one:

I’ve never wanted to put out shit.  I can’t stand the idea that I’ll put out a story that’s crappy, with things that will give haters reason to go, “Yo, you used an and not a, loozer! ”  If I can’t put it out right, I’m not going to bother putting it out, period.

After buying a pretty cover I don’t have the means of paying someone to edit a couple of hundred pages, but I did have a friend offer to look over the manuscript for errors.  I have a bit of fear here, because they told me they didn’t like the title, but beyond that I think they’ll find errors and not much else.  I hope.  And if all goes well I’ll be back on the original path I’d set, which is to have Her Demonic Majesty published at the end of May.

It’s okay to freak out.  It’s okay to think you are worthless, that you are alone, that you even suck.  It’s happen to the best writers, sometimes to the point where they decided to end it all because they were told their novel sucked.

But you need to listen to people and know when they are helping.

Because it’s never okay to kill your dream.

Never.

The First Ember of Regret

Last night I reached a point that I didn’t think I’d ever reach in my writing.  Was it perfection?  Hardly.  I’ll never be a perfect writer, no matter how many millions of words I string together over the next twenty-five years.  Was it a feeling of ineptitude?  Nope.  I’m not an inept writer; I’m learning the craft every day, understanding what can and can’t be done.  Was it hopelessness?  Naw.  I start feeling hopeless enough on things that aren’t writer related that I don’t need it for my writing life.

No, what I felt was regret–over a character I had to kill.

It’s like this:  there is a chapter in Part Three where Jeannette–she who has been chased all over the city so that someone can mount her head on a pike and laugh about it–has finally gotten the upper hand, and has decided the only way to keep people from screwing with her is to lay down her own Hammer of the Goddess.  With that she figures out a way to find the people who’ve been making her life hell–a word only she uses–she goes after them . . .

With no let up, and no mercy.

This means turning her forces loose, and engaging in the magical version of The Chicago Way:  ”They bring a wand, you bring a gargoyle.  They blow off one of your arms, you consume them all in black fire and smile as they die screaming.”  She knows it’s the only way to make the best of a bad situation, and she knows there comes a point where she has to get her own hands dirty in order to make a point.

In the end she decides to take out this guy–

Only . . . he’s not that bad.

Yes, he’s on the wrong side of the line here.  Yes, he’s giving counsel to the bad witch, but for the most part he’s seen a someone standing on the sideline, marginalized by one too many egos in his group.  So in terms of being a bad guy, he’s not that bad.

Still, he’s on the other side of that line, so when the time came for him to die, I smoked him.  I at least gave him a clean death, a warrior’s death, and not the “Imma Cat and I’m gonna make you die horribly” death I gave another character.  But dead is dead, and the dude went down for the count pretty fast.

Right after I edited the scene, that was when the feeling hit:  where I go, “You know, I really feel bad killing this guy.”  The character even admits he escaped death once before, so he knew how not to pee in the wrong pool.  Still . . . it was part of the plan to have him die, and he did.

Case close, even if I did feel a little bad about it.

Maybe I’d have felt better if I’d had a dragon burn his face off.  At least then I could say it wasn’t my fault, blame the dragon–

Naw.  That’s been done.

Though dragons in the story would be cool . . .

Imagination Chainsaw

Some people may say I’m crazy, but that’s just talk.  Do I get a bit obsessive?  Not that much, but it does happen?  Do I worry?  As much as anyone else–okay, maybe a little more in some places.

Is the fear starting to hit me over this novel release?  You betcha.

I’m into the final set of chapters, and by the end of the week I’ll find myself with two or three left to edit and format.  This means that by Sunday Her Demonic Majesty will be ready for the ebook meat grinder, and by May 4^th there should be a new entry in my bibliography.  But the end isn’t here yet, and as I go through the story, I’m seeing sentences here and there that . . . well, they don’t set well with me.

Yes, I know what’s going on:  my mind is in Issac Asimov mode, where I’m editing the story, and I see a different way of doing things, and so while I’m here I’m going to change things just a little bit, and when this is over everything will be hunky dory.  Or so it should, but the Dear Doctor had a problem when it came to editing–namely, he had trouble finding a point at which to stop with some of work.  It has been said that John Campbell once took a story from him, telling Asimov it was fine, and that writers have trouble when it comes to deciding when their stories are “perfect’.

I know the story isn’t perfect, and this is why I’m doing an edit and formatting, and not a simple formatting.  I’m not altering plot, or cutting the hell out of chapters–in fact, I ended up adding about one hundred words to a chapter the other night, because something was in need of a bit of elaboration.

What I really need to do is take a chainsaw to my imagination, and stop seeing problems where they don’t exist.

Sure, there are things that need a bit of polish.  As a writer you should see that, and fix it where it’s needed.  But this morning, as I was on the Trek to the Paycheck, I started wondering if a line at the end of the chapter I was editing last night should exist, or if it should be excised.  This is where I get into trouble:  I see a problem, only it isn’t a problem, it’s a phantom that’s come to shake it’s bootie at me, and giggle the whole while, ’cause it’s only gonna tease, it ain’t ever going to give me a hug and tell me everything is great . . .

I’m close on this.  The novel publication is only a couple of weeks away, and as much as I want to get it right, I don’t want to fall into an obsessive hole where I’m constantly thinking that the novel isn’t perfect, and I’m setting myself up for a big fall.

No problems.  I know what must be done, and I’m doing it.

If I only looked as good as Juliet Starling, though . . .

On Beyond Completion

Let me tell you, this weekend has been one of the busiest I’ve known since NaNoWriMo.  I sat down on Saturday morning determined to burn through the chapters remaining in Part Two of Her Demonic Majesty, and late in the afternoon yesterday, that goal became a reality.  Four chapters, about eleven thousand words, one part:  it’s all good now.  I’m on the home stretch, and the end is very near.

Not that the work didn’t leave me feeling a bit out of it.  I was so burnt by five-thirty Sunday afternoon that I actually checked to see if there was something on TV to way, and discovered the movie Prometheus was going to play.  While I knew of the movie, I’d never seen it, and decided to take a couple of hours out of my life and give it a watch.  What it did was confirm was that spending a trillion or so dollars to send Extremely Stupid People Into Space is a Bad Idea.  Next time just give me the money and I’ll figure out a better way of getting you a return on your investment.

Though I can see the set up for another movie, but I’m not giving up anything.  Not that anyone in Hollywood is interested–they’re too busy turning Ninja Turtles into aliens.

After letting my mind drip, I headed back to the story and did some playing.  With the big of formatting I’m performed I tried another .mobi compile, but I came up with a four thousand page story, so The Phantom Pages are still there, and I’d rather not deal with that crap.  I can convert it to a .doc and run it up for formatting, so no worry.

I also ran the story off to a Word .doc, just to see what I was going to have in terms of page count.  I was surprised to find something messed up with the title page right away, which is why being able to look at your story in several different formats is always a cool thing.  That was fixed, and the it was a look-see at the page count.

The great thing is Scrivener can give you an estimation on your page count.  I could look at that, or bring the story up in Word and zip to the end . . . which after I did told me there were two hundred and thirty-five pages.  Now, I know there are seven pages which really don’t add to the story:  title, Table of Contents, copyright and dedication pages, and the Part Headings, so what I’m left with is two hundred and twenty-eight pages of story.  Which is a nice little chunk of entertainment when it comes time to do the reading.

Unless there is a massive rewrite somewhere in one of the chapters of Part Three, I don’t anticipate the page count for Her Demonic Majesty changing that much.  I know what it’s going to run, I know what I’m going to charge.  All that remains is to finish out my work this week, set up a couple of things, and upload.

Before you know it, I’ll be looking for something else to do.

The Words From Hell

Consistency.  If there’s one thing you need in writing, it’s consistency.  Loose it and you may find your characters stripping off all their clothes, swimming out to a sinking ship, and filling their pockets with items once they arrive.  Or you’ll make pancakes for breakfast, give food to all seated, and when daddy shows up some time later, he sits and begins eating off a plate that appeared before him.

The one thing I learned so many years ago when I started reading in the 1960′s, and had reinforced in the 1970′s, is you have to keep your rules consistent.  This is especially true in science fiction, where you are creating new universes, and if your notes aren’t straight, you’ll find yourself crashing your spaceship into a planet that wasn’t suppose to be in your way.  Or, as David Gerrold–the World’s Oldest Redshirt–once stated, if you set up your rules so that no one can use their left hand, you can’t have the hero win in the last chapter by using their left hand.  It’s not only bad writing, it’s lazy.

Yesterday I’m on a editing burn.  I wanted to get through at least two chapters, and three if it where possible, because I’m in Part Two of Her Demonic Majesty, and if I were to finish the last two chapters today, then all that would remain of formatting is Part Three, and by next weekend I could get my Table of Contents in order, kick back, and get ready to meat grinder the story.

So I’m going through the story, looking for strange characters and misspellings, and correcting things that need correcting, and I discover one of my characters saying the word “hell”, and I realize it isn’t the only character who is suppose to say that word . . .

Allow me to explain.

Her Demonic Majesty takes place in an alternate universe difference from ours.  The main character, Jeannette, finds herself in this universe, and as she learns about the world, she begins picking up on all the little things that set it apart from her home.

One of her partners in crime, so to speak, is a demoness.  This demoness comes from another realm–an alternate universe, if you will.  The realm has another name, and because the realm has a certain notoriety  people of this new universe often use that name when cursing–

It should be noted that this realm isn’t named Hell.  Which means within this world you’d never hear people saying “What the hell?” or “The hell with it.”  Hell is an unknown name:  it’s not part of the lexicon.  If there is any character who would use the word, it’s Jeannette, because it is part of her lexicon.

But here I was, having someone in this new universe making a comment that has the word “hell” in it, and I’m scratching my head, because that goes against my rules for the world.

What can one do, you say?  You get to fixing.

I threw my story in Scrivener Mode and did a search for “hell”, and once I found it, I checked to see if Jeannette was speaking, or if someone else was.  And what do you know?  I’d screwed up:  I had characters from this new world using the word “hell”.  The one who was using it the most?  The demoness–the one person who wouldn’t use it, because . . . well, I think you know by now.

Keep in mind I’ve put this story through a couple of edits, and this is something that I missed each time.  I might have missed it this time, too, if I weren’t hyperfocused on getting the novel in pristine shape.  I caught it, and I know my other two rules have been adhered to, so I should be good as far as my rules are concerned.

If anything, I’m happy I didn’t say the hell with it.

See what I did there?

The Great Gig on the Side

Last night was a time for editing, but never once did I bring up my work.  Say what?

I was chatting last night.  I was chatting with a friend who writes as well, for it seems that I’ve made a lot of writing friends over the last two years–almost three since I restarted everything with a class in the fall of 2010.  I was in the mood to chat after driving for over any hour through a torrential downpour that is still going on this morning.  So the brain wasn’t doing what it was suppose to do, and I was relaxing until it could.

As I chatted with my friend, the discussion turned to a story she’s writing.  She’s been inspired of late, and has pushed her tale into Novelette County, which is only slightly less sleazy than the Country of Novella, where I find myself hanging out a lot.  (If you know your Stephen King, you’ll get the joke.)  After a few minutes of talking about it, the question came:  if I was sent a copy of the first few chapters, would I be interested in looking it over and giving my opinion?

This has been happening to me a lot of late.  In the past month I’ve done a bit of beta reading for some friends, and from time to time I’ve been asked to look a story over and see if it needs some polish.  Now, I’m not an editor by trade.  If anything, I’ve developed my skills, such as they are, over the last couple of years, since it became obvious that if I needed to get my stories polished, I’d learn how to do it myself, or start paying people a considerable amount of money to do it instead.

But I’m a nice person, so I do what I can to help those who want to get ahead.  The people I know aren’t vampires thriving on drama and attention:  they are writers.  Beside, the vampires have all defriended and blocked me, so it make the selection process easier . . . anyway, I looked the story over, and did my little turn on the catwalk, marking up a few things, and leaving a comment or two where needed.

In doing this act I helped my friend a bit, which is always a good thing because we need that karma boost in our lives.  But wait!  There’s more . . .

A week back I was contacted by another writer and asked if I’d do a big favor:  would I help them edit their books.  They’re making a push to get their old stuff cleaned up and their new stuff in similar shape, and asked if I’d join in the band and help them out.  Naturally I said yes, because I’m good.  And I believe I can help get their stories whipped into the shape they desire.

What about your own work, Cassie? I hear you say.  Nothing is going to fall behind there:  Demonic Majesty is coming along, I’ll get back into it tonight, but I will help others where I can.

Who knows–maybe there’s something here I can turn into a worth-while vocation.

It beats slinging code, let me tell ya.

Coolness Factoring

There can be much joy in editing, though, as a writer, it’s one thing that we all seem to hate with white-hot passion.  For the longest time I avoided editing, thinking my first drafts were so good that I never needed to worry about editing.

While I will say that I seemed to get the story write on the first draft–you know, characters names are right, the plot flows as I want and doesn’t have huge holes in it–there are still a lot of errors popping up here and there.  Can’t be helped:  we are imperfect creatures creating imperfect creations.  Really, if I were producing tremendously fantastic stories that were nearly perfect, I’d stop driving sixty miles to work each day and live Neil Gaiman’s life.  Until then, I work at this writing craft until something come in the way of sales.

But I was struck by something interesting last night.  Shale I share it?  Am I writing here?

I was editing the last chapter of Part One for Her Demonic Majesty.  It’s a long chapter, a bit over fifty-eight hundred words, and it’s at the point in the story where I start turning up the drama a bit.  It’s a good chapter, it sets the mood for what’s to come, but . . . as I’m editing, I run into a few lines spoken by my lovely but dangerous succubus character, and there’s something about what she’s saying–

No, it more than that.  It’s how she’s saying the words that is making me feel a little strange.  As I’m setting up the format, what she’s saying just doesn’t feel right.  It doesn’t feel like here.  Someone is speaking, but when I imagine her in my mind, and she says those words, they sound like they’re coming from another person.

This is where you look at the line, think about what a character should be saying, and then have them speak the words.  It sounds easy, but it’s getting those words right that’s tricky.  So I looked at the lines, and imagined the sentences changing, rearranging, and I did  a little cut and paste here, added something there, and deleted a couple of things that didn’t fit my succubus.

When it was finished, the paragraph was far cleaner than before.  It hadn’t actually been reduced or expanded in size:  if I remember correctly, I believe it became one word longer after the edit.  The thing was . . . when it was finished, I was taken by how what she was saying now was far cooler than before.

Do I mean she ended up sounding like a character from a Tarantino movie?  Far from it.  Her words now seemed to flow from her effortlessly, as if this is how she would handle this particular emergency, how she would express her displeasure, and how she’d get the attention of the other two people in the room, and let them know that, right now, shit is deep and extraction is necessary.

I did this a few times last night, and while it is not my intention to try and create some “coolness factor” for each of my characters when they speak, the editing did prove one thing:

I can still be surprised by this craft.  And that’s a good thing.

Storytime Three Way

You can get your mind out of the gutter, because you’re not reading smut here today–that’s next Wednesday, because we know we need a little something to get us through the middle of the work week.  No, today I’m going to show off, because I’m in the mood, you know?

Talking about the editing and formatting process of Her Demonic Majesty, I’ve talked up how I’m using Scrivener, and in yesterday’s post I discussed how I was using all three views to find a problem, flipping from the Cork Board  to Outline to Scrivener views.

I understand, though, that a lot of people I know are visual, and they just can’t get their minds to see something they don’t know.  I make shit up in my head all the time, but I have known a few people who don’t see what I’m seeing when I describe what’s in my mind.  Sometimes I have to draw a floor plan–not that I mind, ’cause something even I need that.

Lets look at the story, and see how it presents itself to me.

First, I have Part One of Demonic Majesty up on the cork board.  I use the cork board a lot:  this is usually how I plot out a story, with each text card representing a chapter.  I set up my chapter numbers, enter my metadata, set up when the scene is happening–I’ve done this for a number of stories–and then I define what each part is, and the status of each section.  The little bit of color in the upper right hand corner tells me what the section is, and I have the status plastered across the the card itself.

As you can see, I have one “Novel Part”, which is the Part One title card, two chapters are “Formatted”, and the remainder of the part is “Done”.  Sure, I know this, but when I’m back into a story I haven’t played with in six months, I might need a little mental refreshing.

Every little bit helps, right?

Now we roll over to the Outline, which is something I’ve only played with and not used much until this point.  There are two things I like about this display, however.  One, you see the story in a top-to-bottom representation, so if you have your metadata set up correctly, it should be easier to see if your chapters are following you plot.  Also, if you need to insert a chapter, it’s a bit easier to see where it should go.

There’s another nice feature in this mode:  you can customize your metadata.  Here, I’m showing my total word count, and that is being displayed for not only each chapters, but each part.  I knew Part Two was big, but I didn’t realize the words differences between Part One and the other novel parts.

The other thing I can view here is a word count goal, and how much of that goal I’ve completed.  This can be a good thing for someone who’s broken their story into scenes, and they’re trying to reach specific word counts.  Pull up the Outline and you’ll see where you’re at in seconds.

Now, onto the last . . .

The Scrivener view gives you the whole story in one big bunch.  In this picture I’m showing the beginning of my novel:  the end of the Table of Contents, the blank space that is the folder for Part One, the Part One title card, and Chapter One.  I used this mode to do group searches for words and phrases, so I could change them all somewhat quickly.

If you look closely you’ll see I’m showing the hidden characters, so I can see carriage returns and spaces between words.  It was by staring at the story in this format that I realized that having a few returns before “Part One” was the thing that was screwing up my page break on a compile of the story to Word.  Now it’s much better.

That’s my journey up to now.  I may actually run this story through the Smashwords meat grinder in a few weeks, and see what pops out.  If it comes out clean, then I can upload the cover, and send the same document up to Kindle Direct.

It’s so close, I can almost smell it.

Which is a neat trick, you have to admit.

 

Station to Variable Station

Saturday morning, having my coffee at the local Panera, listening to Station to Station, an album that I enjoyed in my youth, and which continued to set me apart from those friends who were still into Top 40 AM pop.  I know I have some work ahead of me today:  a bit of editing, maybe some article writing, a little beta reading . . . we’ll see.  I also have somewhere I need to be at noon, and that’s going to keep me busy for a couple of hours.

Oh, I also have my final cover for Her Demonic Majesty.  Yeah, it’s a good day, even if it is rainy.

While I haven’t figured out my Phantom Pages issue for mobi and epub compiles, Scrivener reveled itself to me while I was trying to figure out why some of my text files wouldn’t page break when I was compiling my novel into a Word document.  After some playing with the document, I went into Scrivener mode . . .

Let me explain.

Within Scrivener, you can examine your story in one of three ways.  There is the Corkboard, which is my favorite.  The visual for this is as you’d expect:  it’s like a corkboard you hang on the wall and tack up note cards.  As you can see on the right, the corkboard is an easy way to lay out your story, tell you where you are as far as what you’re doing with each section, and give you a little metadata so when you look at Chapter Ten, you know that’s the chapter where your characters get together and flog each other with chicken legs they bought an hour before at KFC.

Then there’s the Outline, which gives you a top to bottom review of each section you’ve created, and you can show as little or as much meta data as you’d like.  One of the nice things you can show in Outline mode is the word count for each chapter, as well as target word counts, and your progress towards reaching those counts.  If you have your metadata set up correctly, you can see if your story is progressing as you expect, or if you’re way the hell off the rails.

Lastly, we have Scrivener mode, which lets you see the whole store in one long scrolling document that also shows you where each section starts and end.  If you’ve set your metadata to break for each new text file, then those dashed lines indicate where your story is going to start at the top of another page, just as it would in a novel.  Also, if you show the hidden characters, you’ll see where every space is, and each carriage return, aka your Return/Enter key.

I went into Scrivener mode and started looking for hidden characters that could be causing my “not page breaking” problems in Word.  Didn’t see anything, so I went back into the corkboard and started moving cards around–which are, in reality, my chapters and part titles–and ran off another compile to check.  I didn’t see anything, at least not right away . . . but an idea started to form, because the more I looked at my troublesome sections, the more I saw they were different than my chapters–

I was using two carriage returns to drop the “Part” titles from the top of the page.  I removed those returns, and–ta da!  Problem solved!  Really, it was that simple.  After I figured that out, I went into the compile formatting, told the compile to drop the titles six lines from the top of a page break–and just like that, when I looked at the word document, everything was as I wanted.

With that out of the way, I looked for the “very” word, because it’s a weak word, and it looks stupid when you see it in the story.  Still in Scrivener mode, I set up the Find, located all my verys, then hit the Replace to remove them from the story.  When I was finished I’d removed sixty-eight “very” from the story, either deleting them, or putting another adverb or adjective in its place.  In an eighty-six thousand word novel, finding the word “very” sixty-eight times may not sound like a big deal, but in the year and a half since I wrote Demonic Majesty I’ve learned a bit, and using “very” is one of the things I’ve learned not to do.

Today I’ll look for my “suddenly” words, and superscript those suffixes that require the format, then start on a read through, because I believe the story is formatted well, and all I’m checking for are errors right now.  This may take a couple of weeks, but with everything else in place, there’s no need to hurry.

It’s all coming together faster than I thought.

And you know what they say about a plan coming together . . .

 

Publisher Row

It was a rough day yesterday.  It was raining, it was cold, it was windy, there were assholes on the road, three whom nearly wrecked me, and one guy who felt that driving over 75 mph in a hard rain was completely legit, and nearly took himself and a few other cars out when he almost lost control.  When I am allowed to mount heavy weapons on my car, idiots like that will vanish quickly . . .

Thus it was that when I sat down to continue my conquest of my current novel formatting so that I can transform it into the epic story that folks will line up to by.  The way it’s suppose to look is good:  I’ve figure out the ways that compile time formatting should work, and I’ve begun employing that process.  I also tried a epub creation, then converted that to mobi, but the phantom pages issue remained.  Hummm . . . phantom pages.  I could use that as a movie title.

One question that I received this morning was, “Why is this Scrivener so great?”  What I did last night is a prime example.  I have a story that I’m trying to convert to different formats, all three which are nowhere comparable to each other.  And yet, I’d make one change in the Scrivener compiler, and off I went, creating a .doc, then a few seconds later creating a .epub, then trying a .mobi format a few seconds after that.  Nothing else was required; information I’d used for formatting on one format was good for information on another, and where I had formatting styles particular to .epub and .mobi, that information was retained when I switched over to .doc.

I could call Scrivener “Out of One Comes Many,” but that is stretching things just a little.

Though I’ve not gotten to the very root of my phantom page problems, I’m learning a great deal about the creation of an ebook without having to do a lot of extra work.  Trust me, though:  I will work this out, one way or the other.  Part of the issue could be that the Windows version of Scrivener is not quite as powerful as the Mac OS version of Scrivener, but it’s getting there.  I’m a programmer, which means I not only understand this concept of “getting your software up to speed,” but I know work arounds.  I’ve created an ebook before, and I’ll do it again using my work around.

I will not be found wanting.

It’s back into cleaning up the chapters tonight.  I think I’ll throw Scrivener into Outline view and just pick chapters and go through them, so that I get a feel for how that part works.  I love my Corkboard, but trying the Outline view is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and tonight is just as good a time to play as any.  Besides, with the change I’m going to try with my story, the Outline will work better than the Corkboard.  At least that’s how I see it at the moment.

Editing is boring?  Are you kidding?

I’m having a blast.