Kyle Michel Sullivan's Blog: https://www.myirishnovel.com/, page 157

Technology sucks...

I spent most of today trying to save my Word doc of A65 to a PDF without the ICC color profiles, and it's not working. I even went to FedEx Kinko's to use one of their PCs and got nowhere. I'm going in to work for a while, tomorrow morning, and we have Adobe Acrobat there so if I have a chance I'll try that. Otherwise, I have no idea what the problem is and cannot get past it with the programs I have now...not and turn out a decent original for the print run.

Tomorrow before I go in, I'm contacting Tech Support at Ingram and asking them what to do. Maybe it's not something I even need to really worry about. It's just frustrating to not be able to do what I have to do to get A65 ready to go, all because a major company insists on using an archaic format.

I did do laundry and ironing, today, as well. Needed to. As I ironed, I watched Call Me By Your Name...and didn't believe a moment of it. The acting was good and it had pretty scenery, but it was a very idealistic vision of a coming of age gay story set in 1983, with no reference to the AIDS epidemic that was already sweeping through not only the US but Europe. The closest things to conflict were misunderstandings and misinterpretations between Elio and Oliver.

Part of my reaction to it might have to do with how it was a sexual relationship between an adult man and a 17 year-old boy who looked like he was 15. It was a bit creepy, especially since Oliver was a real jerk. Pretty, but obnoxious and controlling.

What's funny is, I started comparing moments in this movie to Weekend, an indie film set in Northern England about two gay men who hook up a few days before one of them is to leave, and how they affect and change each other. It had so many similar moments, it was like they'd seen that movie and decided to remake it in Italy...or steal ideas from it, right down to a good-bye at a train station.

I'm also reminded of a French film I saw, called Pauline at the Beach. It was made in 1983 and had a 15 year-old girl at its center who loses her virginity to a boy who's just a clueless as she is, if I remember right, but that was made by Eric Rhomer. He saw people's attitudes about sex and love as something absurd and silly, and had fun with it.

CMBYN acts like it thinks it's making an important statement about love, when it's just a meandering tale about a boy's first crush. To be brutal, at the goodbye in Weekend, I was in tears; at the goodbye in this movie, I gave a shrug and a nod. Timothee Chalamet's long take staring into the fire and letting himself feel was good (and probably the reason he got nominated for an Oscar), but compared to the long, long take of Garbo at the end of Queen Christina or Jean-Pierre Leaud's long run and haunting gaze back at the camera in The 400 Blows...it was pale.

I'm glad James Ivory finally got an Oscar, but I wish it'd been for one of his own far-better films.

The print file is done...

Did my last pass through The Alice '65 and a spell check, and now it's as tight and complete as it can be. So I shifted it to a PDF format, as required, and for some reason even though I'm saving it in black and white there's ICC color codes embedded in it. I tried a dozen different ways to remove them but got nowhere. When I check Ingram's PDF preview, very letter has a red background, so there could be ghosting of the letters when they print. NOT what I want.

I did a search through Google and tried a few more things, but nothing worked. So...I'm going to try removing the color crap in a PC, tomorrow, and see what happens. After that, I got no idea how to handle it...but I do NOT want to submit a file that may wind up being crappy when printed. I may have to wait till Monday to talk with someone at Ingram and find out another way to do it.

Thing is, I'm leaving for Louisville on Monday afternoon and really wanted to have the book started on its journey before I headed out on this next series of jobs. It's irritating that for all the snazzy crap my computer is capable of, every trick I'm told it can pull does not do what they say it will.

One of them was -- do a save as...but my MacBook pro doesn't offer that as an option in Preview; I have to duplicate then do a save to get to where I can change the Quartz filter. Then I tried B&W and Gray Tone and even Create Generic PDFX-3 Document...and none of them removed the ICC.

Damn, it's been a long day, and I am beat...but for all this crap, I'm happy with the book. Basically. I could easily spend the next 5 years honing it, but that would be ridiculous. Adam and Casey are ready to face the world, and I am ready to let them.

If only my fucking overpriced asshole of a laptop would let us.

100 pages to go...

I've been working late at the day job, all week, just to keep up with everything that needs to be done. I'm even going in Monday morning, to finalize a few things before heading to Louisville for a packing job...and then to New York for 2 more. This interfered with my schedule for putting out the book, but it's my own damn fault for taking so long to get it done, really, landing me in the middle of a series of book fairs that were very, very demanding.

Not that I'm really unhappy. The book I would have published 6 months ago was nowhere near as good as it is, now, so I'm glad I've taken my time, in a way. I whined and howled and snapped and snarled...but as I go through it one last time, I'm finding it flows nicely and is easy to read...I think. I hope. I never know, not really.

All I can say is, I did my best to let Adam and Casey be rich, complex characters who are true to themselves in any way they want to be. I've tried to make their character arcs honest and believable, and I busted my butt to keep their individuality precise and human. I don't think I can put out an error-free book, no matter how hard I try or how much help I get...but I think this one will be close.

Anyway, if all goes well, tomorrow, I'll set it up with Ingram and ask for a physical proof. It's not till you actually see it in your hand that you know it's done right. Then comes prepping the ebook and then...

Hell, I don't know what'll happen then. Watch some movies? Read some of my library on the history of Derry and the Troubles? No idea.

I'll deal with that, then.

Subconscious and unconscious and all that...

There's much to be said for not thinking as you write. And by that I mean over-thinking, which I'm far too prone to do. But sometimes I let my characters do their things in whatever manner they want...and when I do, happy moments occur. Like Adam getting the face of a wolf painted onto his left hand in henna dye. Its symbolism works so perfectly in the story, it seems deliberate --

Whether portrayed as good or evil, wolves are always powerful, and the same can be said about a wolf tattoo. Native Americans viewed the wolf as a totem animal or spirit sent to help guide us through life, symbolizing loyalty and perseverance. In legends, the wolf had great powers given by the Great Spirit.

I just thought having a wolf instead of some mass of Sanskrit or Hindu symbols on his hand would look cool and different. No other reason...consciously. He snuck it in on me through my subconscious. Hell, if I'd just shut my brain up and let things flow, I'd have more of this happen...as it has on previous occasions.

Like happening onto The Banks of Claudy, as sung by the Johnstons. I liked how it fit with Brendan's walk in the middle of the night to try and meet up with his brother, who's on the People's March that's about to end in disaster and is spending the night in Claudy, not far from Derry...how it also connected him to Joanna, a girl he'd only seen but not spoken to, yet...but it wasn't till I worked it in that I paid attention to how perfectly the lyrics fit the whole of the story.

The song's about a woman weeping for her lover, who's gone across the ocean to America, and how she longs for his return...which he does, and she doesn't recognize him. Again, not something I deliberately chose but was brought to me by Brendan...one of the characters asking me to tell his story in the clearest way possible.

It even happened with the first script I wrote for a guy in graduate school -- The Phantom of the Capitol. It wound up having a character as its protagonist who's feeding information about a bribery scandal in the Texas State Capitol Building to a reporter he likes but who's paying him little attention...in short, he's bribing her to like him. I didn't plan that subtext; it just came together that way.

I need to shut up and listen to me.

Oh, my fur and whiskers...

The Alice '65 is an official 190 pages long, with 16 pages of title and info and blanks and such...for a grand total of 206 pages. My eyes hate me, right now, and my back is weary from sitting...but I've done as much as I can with the book. I'm shifting it to PDF format, tomorrow, and checking it over, again, just to see...and that will be that.

I almost don't believe it. I halfway think something's going to pop up showing me I've screwed it up in some massive way and I'll have to postpone, again...but as it currently stands, I may well make my date of 24 March for publication.

Now comes the glorious task of making it into an ebook, with no blank sections and all my spacing between chapters undone. Just as I'm about to embark on a job in Louisville, KY. Nothing major, just a couple days. Still it's a disruption...and at the same time, it's not. I like to travel. I'm working up a quote for another job in DC for week after next and I'm pushing to drive because it would be so much easier to coordinate.

But that's for after the launch of the book. Louisville, I'm flying to so can work on the plane. It's better, sometimes.

Oh, shit, I just remembered something I meant to change in the book.

Detailing...the hardest part...

Back to the grind of working out the little things in The Alice '65.  Specifically, making sure the quotation marks are consistent and there aren't any unwanted spaces anywhere. I've found that Word likes to mess with you when it comes to quotation marks in dialogue. If you have someone cut off in the middle of a sentence and use an em-dash to indicate that, Word puts the wrong direction quotation mark after it. At least, it does in Times New Roman font.

And sometimes, when you do a copy-paste within a dialogue section, it adds a space between a quotation mark and the beginning of the sentence. So that entails going through line by line and correcting it all. I'm sure there's a better way to do it, like by off-set printing, but this also needs to be done for the ebook, so...it gets done.

There's also making sure I don't wind up with a single word at the top of a page, in place of a sentence. I'm not doing widow-orphan control so the number of lines per page is consistent...but sometimes  that means a single 2-letter word winds up at the very top of a page. What's interesting is, by working it so this doesn't happen, I'm coming up with slightly better sentence structure and continuity. I've found spots where just shifting a word here and eliminating or adding a word there makes the whole paragraph easier to read.

It's putting me further behind, but I want this book to be as perfect as it can be, and that means taking my time. When I rush, I screw up.

I'm still messed up by Daylight Savings Time and this massively rushed trip. But it was worth it. This photo is of my niece, Krista, with her husband, Micah, to her right and my sister, Jerilynn, to his right. To her left are her three brothers -- Andrew and Daniel (my nephews) and Steven (by my brother-in-law's first wife) -- then my brother-in-law, Steve. A very California-style family.

Except, I heard more country music on that day than I'd heard in the previous 10 years...and I'm still reeling.

Quickie...

Almost home from Austin after a nice wedding that was on a very hot day, which wore me out. Right now I'm at JFK waiting for my flight to board. I got a whole 45 minutes between planes, going from gate 23 to gate 2. Not cool.

Here's a shot of the wedding photo session, with the photographer and a groomsman flanking the newlyweds, with their dog insisting on being part of it all. It was 88 degrees and not a cloud in the sky, with me in a sports coat and tramping through backwoods worthy of a Grizzly Adams set.

I've got a lot of A65 checked, and still finding typos. But it's better.

I hope.

Flight's being called, so ciao...

Quick trip to Austin...

My youngest niece is getting married so I have to be there. Bad timing with the NY Book Fair happening now and me trying to get A65 ready to go for publishing...but it's working out. I'm making the plane trip on points, used points to halve the price of my hotel up north of town, away from the South by Southwest Music Festival, and will be back on the job Monday morning, probably in need of sleep. My credit cards will love me, too. Dammit.

I can work on A65 on the plane heading down. Apparently I'm doing a bunch of short-hops and changing flights in Dallas, but that's how Southwest's been going. If the weather holds out, it shouldn't be too bad. Same for coming back, which will be a lot faster but get me in late.

My hope is to get some decent BBQ and Mexican food. Buffalo's got adequate places but once in a while you yearn for the real thing...even Bill Miller's.

No luck from my librarian; they still use Dewey Decimal for cataloguing instead of Library of Congress. But I did learn I need a cutter, which is an author specific letter and numeric code used for cataloging. Maybe this will help me find out what mine is. I know all but the last 5 numbers in it...but of course those are the most important. Can't put it in the book till I have it.

Maybe I'll have it by the time I get back, Sunday...or Monday, after work...

The cover is done...

It's now in PDF format and ready to upload when I have the text ready to go. I found a typo in the synopsis and did a bit more evening out of the lines in it. I also mussed up the copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on its cover.

After that I ran a spelling & grammar check of A65 and found a couple more typos -- mainly words that should or should not be capitalized and a couple of words repeated in error. What's fun about doing this is checking out the grammatical corrections suggested by Word. Suggestions that are totally wrong. They wanted me to substitute they're for there when I was referencing a location, and thought an staircase was correct. Jesus, if people are relying on Word for their grammar, no wonder everything's so screwy online.

I'm still trying to find out the exact right way to list the Library of Congress catalogue info on the copyright page of the book. The LCCN number takes me to the listing, but gives me only half the information I need...and there are merely 5000 directions to go when trying to find out anything. So I've sent off a plea for help to a woman who's helped me before, at the LoC. Maybe she can say. I also know a librarian in Lexington, KY. Maybe he can find out what my PS number is.

This weekend is a bust for doing anything on the story except on the plane going down and back. And I have to be back in the office on Monday to help with the shipments home from the NY Book Antiquarian Book Fair. Nearly a hundred dealers returning to the UK, Europe, Japan, Australia and one and on. All in the middle of Storm Quinn.

I think Mother Nature is pissed off.

Dust jacket for A65 is 95% done

There are spaces around it for cropping and folding, but it's pretty much done. I need to do a bit of work on the copy of the Alice that's on the front; it needs to be grunged up a little to reflect the condition of the book in the story...but I'll do that tomorrow night. I like how it turned out...but let's see how the rest of it goes.

The story really is about 90% set. Just one more pass for typos and missing words; I think I've got all the inconsistencies gone, and I've dug as deep as I can into Adam and Casey without turning this into a novelized Bergman film. I like his work but even his attempt at comedy was bleak and depressing.

I've been ignoring the news and such while working on this, and it's been helping my attitude, a lot. I've finally accepted that if Czar Snowflake doesn't die from a heart attack or stroke, thanks to the crap he eats and his ludicrous attitudes, he'll be in office for a full 4 years because the Democratic leadership is too politically motivated to kick his ass out. If he doesn't crash us into a depression, we'll be damned lucky.

The positive thing is, I'm feeling Brendan's attitude begin to filter into me. In Place of Safety, all he wants is to be left alone to live his life, marry a girl he loves, raise a family and provide for them. But the bastards around him won't let that happen. This book will be close to Bergman...

...But I'm still aiming for Tolstoy...