Kyle Michel Sullivan's Blog: https://www.myirishnovel.com/, page 57

I love LA but not the Valley...

I only have to drive 3.7 miles to where I'm packing up this collection, but the San Fernando Valley drivers are so insane it takes me 25 minutes to get there. Hi, I'm getting ahead of you and if you don't let me I'll hit the side of your car. And the everlovin', HONK! You waited till your car did a restart to start moving? WTF for? Or...You have 2/3 of a car length in front of you; MOVE UP!

My LA attitude is more attuned to the Basin, where it's fast and furious and pay fucking attention, even in standstill traffic on La Cienega. I can handle aggression on the road; what drives me nuts is the Do what I fucking want you to do, even though I haven't told you what it is because I'm too busy being an asshole and not paying attention to you even though I want you to pay attention to me kind of shit.

There's also a lot of how can I not help you at grocery stores and restaurants, but that's not surprising, after Covid. People don't give a shit, anymore, and I can't blame them. Corporations are buying everything up and doubling prices but cutting back on wages. Small wonder so many are pushing to start up unions. It's the only way to make the bastards listen and reconsider not fucking you over, not completely.

SAG/AFTRA passed its new deal with the studios. Now comes the fun of watching executives find new and more creative ways of fucking people out of the money they should be paid. Seems like nearly everyone in the upper echelon of executives are taking their cues from that orange bastard and just blowing off contracts, when they feel like it.

I'm close to hating capitalism and the greed of too goddamn many people.

Rant over. Now I can keep reading through APoS-New World For Old...and think of how much crazier I can make it. Ah, Houston in the 70s...

Getting busy...

Today was checking books off against the list I had, and it was not easy. But I got it down to where only 5 books could not be found on the list and a half-dozen were listed but not in the stacks. I've let the powers that be know and they will have final word. Tomorrow comes printed matter that will be a bit easier, since it's numbered. For the most part.

I've found the WiFi in my hotel is too prone to letting others link to my laptop so I'm using my phone's hotspot. It's good, here. It's nearly non-existent at the job, but if I work it right I can do it there, too.

The photo is the view from my downstairs window. Not bad. Be better if i could see the ocean.

Got through more of APoS-New World For Old and hit a spot where Brendan starts to wonder about the arbitrariness of the world. He almost joined Elmer Wayne Henley and David Brooks in going to Dean Corll's party, but because he had a fan he wants to repair in hand (one he'd found in a trash can) he doesn't go. And two weeks later it comes out that those three were raping and killing boys.

It gets Brendan to thinking about this insane need for control so many people have. He's wondering if it's a way to stave off accepting that shit just happens in life, without rhyme or reason. If you can control someone else, that means you can control your circumstances and the world is no longer arbitrary...or something like that. It's a bit juvenile of a concept, but Bren is just 17. He thinks older, in many ways, but is naive in others.

I just don't want his slowly emerging awareness of life and its cruelty and beauty to be dismissed as childish prattle.

Catching up...

I've begun re-reading what I did with APoS-New World For Old, to re-familiarize myself with it and note where I need to make corrections to tie it in properly with Derry. Nothing serious, yet. The first chapters deal with Brendan coming out of his shock at seeing the bomb go off and people killed...including Joanna. I've already been told by one editor that ending traumatized her.

I'm not completely happy with the explanation of how Brendan was brought into the US, but I'll deal with then when I start a real re-write. This will actually be #5, if I go by how my files are numbered. Only 477 more drafts to go.

I'm currently in LA and had a decent flight that was actually on time. I'm still recovering from that infection that still causes a tickle in my throat that makes me hack like a 40-year smoker. But I can feel it's getting better in little bitty steps.

Tomorrow is the first job up in the Hollywood Hills. I took a drive up, just to see what it looked like...and it's one of those scary roads that has room for one car at a time. And I've got a Ford Bronco that's like a barge. And I don't know what it is about Fords, but I have a hell of a time seeing over the hood. It's like the damn thing is bulging up in front of me. It was the same way in that Mustang. Makes me very uncomfortable.

Especially when the damn road is so twisty-turny.

Corrected...

There's a certain numbness that comes to me when I've finished a full scale edit like this. And I mean one this precise. I didn't just correct typos and misspellings and set the proper tenses of words throughout the story, but also cut and reworked sentences and moments to be clearer. Page by page, going backwards to keep myself from getting caught up in the reading of it.

That's not easy to do. Most of the pages started with half of a sentence in half of a paragraph. Then you jump to the page immediately prior and it's a completely different sentence and thought and time in the story. It's a bit jolting. But that's what I needed. Next comes inputting the changes into the text of the hardcover copy of the story.

I know I still missed some. I went back into chapter 4 to check on something and found, without even trying to, a sentence beginning with a lower-case letter instead of upper-case. And that led me to run through the entire alphabet, using the "find" tool looking for any others. I'd input ". a" and see what it came up with, which was usually nothing. I did find one instance where I'd put a space after an ellipses, which I don't do, so corrected that, too. But nothing else popped up.

Of course, that still led me to rethinking a word I was using for a couple of women gossiping in their kitchen. The word for that in Derry is craic -- so changed that...which led to me splitting another sentence in two, since it made better sense that way.

Swear to God, I could work on this another 10 years and find issues that need to be addressed or bits that needed to be adjusted for clarity. But I can't keep doing that. I promised Brendan his books will come out, next year, and so they shall. I think I once mentioned a schedule of January, July and December. I'm going to keep to that...

...if the fates will let me.

Meaning next is New World for Old in Houston. I have editors wanting to read it, already.

Oh, well...the text will be right in the book...

I heard from BookLife that they cannot update my submission for reviews, but swear that the typos won't matter in the review. We shall see. My one real consolation is, this book will be tight once it's in print. I may miss one or two, but I remember books coming out from major publishers that had notes added to them to state "this line on page 225 should read..."

Erratum was not unheard of, before. I think this is my favorite reference to it:

Of course, even the first time I saw this I knew Ben Hur wasn't published in 1860, but the duplicated line might be correct. Mistakes are not uncommon.
The Alice '65 is based on the first edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland being withdrawn because the illustrator hated how his work was printed in it. Which wasn't so much an error, really, but the artist just being difficult. Still...the fact that only 24 are known to exist makes it very valuable. Which fits.
Maybe that's what'll happen with APoS. Early versions have an unseen error and I find it and change it and the first ones become collectors items. Maybe.
It's good to have dreams.

Weary...

I'm not feeling good; some kind of upper-respiratory infection is going around and I got it. Not Covid; I've run 3 tests and all are negative. But I've coughed myself into a headache, and the only thing that seems to remove the ticking in my throat is drinking Dr Pepper, since it's carbonated and is like scratching that fucking itch. Gargling with Listerine diluted in half does help, but not all that much. However, doing that I don't need to pee every hour on the hour.

I managed to get through more of APoS-Derry's backward proofing, and it seems the closer I get to the beginning the fewer typos I find. Probably due to all the times I reworked the first chapters to work with the last. I have 9 left. I've been inputting any corrections I make on the ebook format of the novel, so it will be ready to upload to BookLife to replace the one that's currently there. 

That's such an embarrassment. I should have waited till I did this before sending it in for reviews.

This shows why I'm a bust when it comes to fixing and promoting my work. I should hire someone professional to do not only the proofing but also some editing. Someone to point out when I get repetitious or inconsistent in the story.

It's said that Hemingway didn't become a great writer until he worked with Maxwell Perkins. Same for Thomas Wolfe, who was known to love his own writing, unlike me. Perkins was an amazing editor who could catch the gist of the stories and would argue with his writers and fight to help them make their work even better. Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wolfe...all their greatest books had his fingerprints all over them.

I need a Maxwell Perkins.

Jobs, jobs, jobs...

I'm off to LA on Saturday and another job came through today, out there. So I'm jammed with work, Monday-Friday, with my flight returning to Buffalo on Friday night. One is on Mulholland and damn near impossible to get to, easily; one is in Sierra Madre, which is really more of a pickup and single pack; one is just making sure boxes go into bins properly for transport.

Wonderful. I would be recuperating for the rest of the month except I'm flying to San Antonio on the 20th and dealing with family till the 26th. Glorious. I'll need till March to get back in gear.

I learned, today, that Direct2Digital POD will be just as obnoxious about erotica as Ingram. They definitely refused to set How to Rape a Straight Guy up for print and distribution and sent me this explanation in response to my query. None of which is in their Terms of Service. Fucking asswipes.
I mean, WTF does mainstream erotica mean? Danielle Steele romances with a couple of bad words in them and intimations of sex?

I can still get HTRASG printed up for me, if I want. And I can sell it, myself. But I'm not set up for that. It's irritating, but there it is. I guess I can think about it...but not right now. I need to finish APoS-Derry.

Most of the day was working up my new schedule, ordering materials and making sure I had everything I needed as well as contacting the clients to verify next week's business. I still got through more of my backwards proofing of APoS...and found two more typos. Again, easy ones to miss. One word was in singular when it should have been plural, and the other was the wrong tense.

I also found I'd inadvertently identified a tea shop with the same wording, as if it was a new place for Brendan and Joanna, twice. They were separated by a chapter so again, easy not to notice. Cut the second one that's in the story.

Dear God, I'm suck a fuck up when it comes to typos and mistakes.

Backwards is good

I'm going backwards through APoS-Derry, one page at a time, of course, and have found three more typos. This time it's two words jammed together without a space between them, two words conjugated without an apostrophe, and a missing period. All very easy to overlook. At least it's getting better.

The problem with doing this is I've decided to cut a bit more. In and of itself, that's not a big deal since I've yet to set it up for print. But I have submitted it for reviews and now may need to update the file I sent in. Don't want reviewers whining about typos and the book seeming unedited.

I know I should have done this before I did that. Such is life. One of these years I'll learn how to do things right the first time. Or not.

Got an email from D2D POD saying they didn't want to offer HTRASG in their catalogue. I've asked them why, since it doesn't violate any of their stated limitations and am waiting on an answer. I pointed out Amazon still offered aftermarket copies of the book, so it's not banned by them. They have that as a deal-breaker; if Amazon says no, it's no way in hell.

I'm just so fucking tired of this puritanical bullshit happening all over the US. I don't like what you write so I won't let anyone read it. Fascist fucks. I get that D2D is a private company and it can decide for itself what it will and will not offer in its catalogue, but you should be up front that your so-called erotica section is very limited in what is and is not acceptable.

I went through a lot of trouble to set the book up in their system, and would much rather not have done so if they're going to be dicks about it. And you can rest assured, I will make damn sure, if they still say no everyone in the writers groups I belong to on Facebook will know about it.

Dunno if that'll work to change their minds, but I got Amazon to back down the first time they banned HTRASG. Maybe again?

Got a cold...

I think. I took, a covid test and it came up negative. Taken another one and waiting for it to finish. My feeling is, I stirred up some dust and it's messing with my sinuses and given me a touch of bronchitis. But we'll see.

Today, I set How to Rape a Straight Guy up with D2D POD. Seems if you use a PDF for the text instead of Word, it maintains its formatting. I'm waiting for the proof...and word as to whether or not they will offer it; they might not...then I'm ordering a physical copy to see, before I allow it to be offered. It's going to be limited in who will carry it due to the sexual content. If I had Curt just killing people, that'd be fine. Any library or book store would be happy to offer it. But two men having sex? No can do.

Doesn't matter that it's rape, in the book. Books with women being raped and with incest are available on library shelves and carried in B&N and the like. It's insulting, but it's how we are, today. I ran into that when Amazon did its first ban of the book, back in 2010. They carried the Flowers in the Attic series, which has incest and a baby born from it, and Wild Orchid and such, but those were offered by major publishers who could fight back.

I think they were surprised at how hard I fought them on HTRASG. And that I refused to give up. They finally agreed to offer it in paperback but not Kindle, mainly because they were too lazy to do an adults only section, back then.

I also worked up an ad for Rape in Holding Cell 6. I've rather neglected pushing that book. That's inappropriate. It's got a wide-ranging story and is the prelude to The Vanishing of Owen Taylor, so needs to be done up right.

Another negative reading. One might be false but not two. Cool.

Full dust jacket...

I worked on this, today. Getting it as close to done as I can. I'm leaving space for  reviews that might come in by the end of the year. Of course, if they're really bad I may make something up. We'll see how it goes.

I like the general look of the dust jacket. Normally, publishers full-justify the synopsis on the flaps but I think the left-justify fits better with the book, overall. What I'm showing here is the third version. The first two were okay enough but this one is it, I think.

The good thing is, I won't need to finalize it till the end of December, so I might still make changes.

Now I can get started on my backwards proofing of APoS. After realizing my version of Word might be part of the reason for so many typos, I especially need to verify everything is in order. Again, I have time...though not all that much. Next Saturday is leaving for a week-long set of jobs in LA and then I'm going to Texas for Christmas. Oh...my...

I'd rather stay home.

I almost got a job in London from someone I've done work for on a few occasions, but it got to be sounding sketchy. Hand carry a small work of art to a university. That can be really tricky since universities usually have their own brokers to handle imports. Plus, duty is due on art, not to mention Customs fees...and I got the feeling it was being sent undervalued, which is a very big deal if Customs catches you.

So backed away. Dammit.