Jean Jardine Miller's Blog: My time to write...

Anybody else uploaded pdfs for Kindle conversion only to find they might just as well have html-coded in the first place. It's frustrating - I've just spent the last couple of weeks correcting the code. Found some typos I hadn't caught before, which is frustrating insofar as my printed books are concerned, but nice that I was able to correct it for the Kindle editions. Having to correct "KIRSTIN'S STORY: no place to stand", the story of my late daughter's battle with social phobia was especially difficult of course, but I made it through.

I'm way behind my original schedule for the novel I'm currently writing (still got no name) which I'd hoped to publish this year. It's about some 'home children' coming to Canada in the 1870s and, since this is The Year of the Home Child, it would have been nice to have had it finished. The problem is, I thought retirement would give me all the time in world to write but I keep getting involved in other things - I volunteer for the SPCA, hike, swim, am playing the female lead in our next community theatre production, etc. etc. - and seem to have less time to write than when I was working full time.

Just spent most of the afternoon setting my books up everywhere that Booksurge distribution no longer IS. All very frustrating since I originally chose to go with an American, rather than a Canadian, POD publisher BECAUSE of the distribution channels that went with it. Now that Booksurge is CreateSpace all I get for my investment is copies printed and listings on Amazon.com. And that means .COM only, which is not a lot of use for selling Canadian books when Americans accuse one of poor editing unless spelling, punctuation and vernacular is American.
They didn't fully list my last book so I suppose the writing was on the wall at that point, only I didn't twig.
Well, best continue, I suppose.

Just had a good morning's work both re-writes and current chapter. Am spending far too much time on research, I know, but I just hate it when I read something that's entirely wrong in other people's novels and am so afraid of making similar mistakes.

Decided to put a Valentine's Day special on my last novel The Family History. Hey, doesn't have to be, though - you can buy it for yourself, too!

I didn't realise it was so long since I blogged here. I don't know where the time goes. Haven't done too much writing anyway because there have been so many interruptions - deaths in the family, father/son peacemaking attempts, thieves disguising themselves as volunteers at our SPCA thrift store, dogfights and subsequent trips to the vet... and all the rest of Life's little traumas. Still getting side-tracked with family history research - have clues on two more sets of 4x greats, as we speak - but have managed to grow the home children in my novel to their teenage years, not that there was any such thing in the 1870s. I supposed I should have made a New Year's resolution to manage my time better.

I'm back to the novel after having so much else to do during the last few weeks. A lot of it silly stuff - like getting addicted to searching for family history records... and coming up empty, anyway.

I'm not getting too much done on the book just now - time is just running away with me. I've been doing extra shifts at my volunteer job at Paws and Claws (SPCA thrift store) and, of course, the garden keeps crying out for care, as do the elders (my elderly aunt and uncle in a retirement residence 16 miles away).
My other problem with writing period fiction is that I tend to get carried away on the research - the world used to be so much more interesting than it is today!
I've been reading Hemingway's 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' which, predictably, has also sent me off on a tangent finding out more about the Spanish Civil War - info I really don't need taking up room in my mind at the moment. I usually try to limit myself to light fiction when I want to concentrate on my own writing but I got thoroughly frustrated with a couple of really badly written paperbacks I had the misfortune to pick up (at my thrift store, actually).
Anyway, after I finish the summer issue of the anxiety disorders newsletter I publish, I'll get down to some serious work this week.

There's nothing more maddening than writing half a chapter and finding you got something wrong. I had my nineteenth century immigrants landed in Quebec City only to discover (luckily!) that they landed them on the south side of the St. Lawrence at Pointe Levi, as it was known then. So now they can only look at the Heights of Abraham...

I've been checking continuity in the first twenty thousand words of my still untitled novel over the last couple of days. Writing a historical novels involves continually checking facts and you can easily end up going off on a tangent only to find it, well - doesn't really work...
Though I'd be through with that today and be ready to continue but the day's already mostly gone and my British home children are still safely landed in Quebec City waiting to embark on the next leg of their journey.