Naomi Kramer's Blog, page 3

Oh the Agony of Ebooks…

I’m feeling a mite frustrated.

I’ve been trying to find the simplest, least-likely-to-fuck-up solution to creating .epub and .mobi files. They’re the files you download when you buy one of my ebooks. And the formats have been around for years, so you’d think it’d be simple. The retailers try to make it easy by letting us author types upload Word files. Problem is, Word files are complicated beasts, and they contain a lot of formatting under the hood where no one ever sees. Automatically turning one into an ebook is fraught with danger of weird formatting, like line-heights of 0.4mm, making everything all squished up and unreadable.

So, Word files are out.

I decided to try LaTeX. It’s very, very popular as a back-to-basics text editor. The concept is: write your text, add in tags as you go to let the program know where  headers, italics and the like are supposed to go, then publish to whatever format you need, with whatever formatting choices you desire. Yup, great in theory. In practice, the formatting choices aren’t actually getting through to the end .epub file, which makes being able to set them mildly ridiculous.

Right now, I’m aiming at HTML. Plain, simple, HTML. If this screws up on conversion to .epub as well, I think I might just give up and join a monastery. That’s the one with all the sex-starved men, right?

It's Not All Lazing About

The phrase ‘working from home’ often makes people think of lazing about on a lounge chair with the TV on and a laptop on one’s lap for appearances’ sake.

Me, I’m slightly workaholic. I do take breaks to play Guild Wars 2 or wander onto Facebook to see what’s happening in the world, but I get a fair amount of work done whenever I sit down to it. Especially now that I’m otherwise unemployed, I’ve been working my arse off. But I’ve gotta find some balance, I think. I’m used to sitting down at a desk and working from 9 to 5. So when I sit down on my lounge in the morning and slide my laptop onto my lap, I start working. Three hours later, I realise that breakfast would be a good idea.

I’m sure I’ll be whining soon enough about needing to find my motivation (hint: check under the lounge cushions) and not having any inspiration, and the lack. But in the meantime, I’m having a ball. AND working. Who’da thunk it?

It’s Not All Lazing About

The phrase ‘working from home’ often makes people think of lazing about on a lounge chair with the TV on and a laptop on one’s lap for appearances’ sake.

Me, I’m slightly workaholic. I do take breaks to play Guild Wars 2 or wander onto Facebook to see what’s happening in the world, but I get a fair amount of work done whenever I sit down to it. Especially now that I’m otherwise unemployed, I’ve been working my arse off. But I’ve gotta find some balance, I think. I’m used to sitting down at a desk and working from 9 to 5. So when I sit down on my lounge in the morning and slide my laptop onto my lap, I start working. Three hours later, I realise that breakfast would be a good idea.

I’m sure I’ll be whining soon enough about needing to find my motivation (hint: check under the lounge cushions) and not having any inspiration, and the lack. But in the meantime, I’m having a ball. AND working. Who’da thunk it?

OMG, So Much Time!

You might’ve noticed that I seem to’ve rejoined the world over the last month or so. Well, apart from having worked through some stuff that kept my head busy for a couple of years… I also have time galore to be sociable because I was made redundant from my job.

I’m happy about the redundancy – things were getting too hard, trying to work plus have a bit of a life. Even cutting down to 4 days a week had only made things survivable, not enjoyable. I’d lost my passion for the work. Plus, I had a feeling last year that this one would be my last year in this job. To be honest, as the year drew to a close I’d been scratching my head a little and thinking I must’ve gotten it wrong this time (prescience is never an exact science – it’s more of an art, with very spare brush strokes). Then the announcements of redundancies were made, and I cheered.

It simply feels like the right time for me to be cast adrift in the ocean of possibility. Not that it isn’t scary, but it’s also very exciting. For once in my life, I have money to stop and concentrate on my fiction writing for a while. Not for long – about 3 months – but enough for now. If I can push myself up to the next level of being a fiction writer and not just earn money, but earn a living… now would be an awesome time to do it. Do I feel ready? Nope. But I’m going to jump in and do it anyway. Life’s not for the faint-hearted, it’s for those of us willing to take the leap and land on our faces in the gravel. *grin*

Cover!!

I love book covers. Love them to bits. Except when I get sick of them, and decide that they’re boring and need renovation. I guess they’re a bit like bathrooms that way.

Anyhow, here’s the latest:

On Writing, and Rewriting

Rewriting large swathes of a book is something I’ve never really had to worry about. My process is different to many authors. I usually don’t sit down to work on a book unless I’ve already figured out what I want to do – in other words, I wait for inspiration to hit, then use it. Since I generally have inspiration galore, if not about the book I want it to be about, this process works pretty well. Unfortunately – or maybe fortunately, because it’s probably helping me develop as a writer – this time’s different.

This time I cant afford to just work on something else until the snarl in the current book magically works itself out in my subconscious. This time I tangled myself up good and proper. How? I’m so glad you want to know what an idiot I am.

I started writing (imminently) DEAD about 18 months ago. I ran into some troubles at about 80%. The book just wasn’t hanging together properly, and it didn’t feel right. So I dumped it into my ‘background processing’ mental drawer, and went on to other projects. I pulled it out occasionally and poked it, but it would just emit a puff of nasty-smelling gas and lie there, mute. Riiiight. So, I’d move on to something else. Fast forward to a couple of months ago. September or October. Suddenly, inspiration struck!! For… a different DEAD(ish) book. Within two weeks, I had a draft of DEAD (and hellbent) that I was very happy with. Errr… except when I realised that I’d written book five before finishing book four. And that I couldn’t just swap them around. Oh dear God, the HORRORS.

So, I got my arse into gear and finished book four, with a couple of bursts of inspiration to help me along. I sent it out to a select (and lovely) bunch of people, and they told me categorically that the ending sucked big hairy donkey balls. Oh, crap and a pile of it! So, I’m rewriting. And I really don’t like it. This book better be worth all the pain.

Buy Ebooks Direct

I’ve finally gotten my arse into gear (it’s usually stuck in park) and done a bit of work on the site. As well as some more-regular-than-never updates, it’ll soon also feature a store where you can buy my ebooks and pay via Paypal. W000t! I’m only a few years late on the whole ecommerce front.

New DEAD(ish) Book Coming Soon!

(imminently) DEAD brings back Geordie and Lazarus… and they have a problem. Someone’s been sending death threats to Geordie, and he’s pretty sure he’ll be as dead as Linda within the week. Can anyone save Geordie from his fate?

Maisy May 2 is finally here!

It's been 3 years since Maisy May book 1 was published. And now, she's back... bigger than ever (because, y'know, she's preggers).

Buy Maisy May 2 from:

Amazon US, Amazon UK or Amazon Canada

Smashwords

It will be coming to the Nook store, Apple iBookstore, Kobo and other stores over the next couple of months.

Chuh – Chuh – Chuh – Changes…

It’s been a long time.

I haven’t published. I haven’t posted. I wouldn’t blame y’all for thinking I was dead.

On the bright side, I’m not. I’ve just been working through some pretty major upheavals in my personal life, and trying to realign myself with the world in general. No promises that I’ve succeeded, but I’m feeling a bit more stable now. And I have some ideas on what I can do with this website. Like sharing works-in-progress so y’all can tell me what you think as I go – if you like that sort of thing. See, personally, I hate reading anything but a near-finished product. But not everyone’s like me (listen to the huge sigh of relief from all who know me! ). Sound interesting? I’ll put up some links soon. If you like the idea, have a look. If you’d prefer to wait until I actually get around to publishing stuff, I completely understand.

Anyhow… I hope this post heralds better communication from me to you. *fingers crossed*