Mary Sisson's Blog, page 69

Progress report

Back at work on Trials--it's hard to do a word count because I revised and expanded the first two chapters (which used to be chapters 3 & 4, so there's a lot of exposition to put in). I'm actually feeling pretty happy right now with the way chapter 1 is turning out--it's funny, which wasn't the approach I took with the opening of Trust, but I think it works.

Progress report

Wrote 500 words on Trials--whoo! That's not much, I know, and some of it was even repurposed from the cut chapters, but the important thing is getting started, you know?

Uf, fonts

I got the second set of proofs back from CreateSpace today--everything looks much better, BUT the jacket copy is still a problem. Now that it's in focus, I can see that the font itself is just really hard to read as white text on a black background (and it's one of those things that looks fine on a screen). I wanted a serif font, but the font I picked has too much contrast between the thick and thin parts of the letters, so it looks like parts of the letters are missing. Back to the drawing board....

I am trying to get back into the saddle here....

There was some plain ole procrastinating going on, and then some family stuff came up. Tomorrow will be bad, but I'm hoping Tuesday I can actually get writing. I had some ideas about changing the opening after reading through some of Trials earlier, so with any luck I'll get on that soon.

Audiobooks are back!

This is a neat article in the Wall Street Journal about how digitization is affecting how audiobooks are produced and consumed. Note how people will switch back and forth between the audio and e-book edition of the same book--cool!

Cover notes

So, I rejiggered all the covers and sent Trang and Trust back to CreateSpace--I'll know for sure when I get the new proofs back, but hopefully I took care of all the problems.

The main thing that I have to remember for Trials and Tribulations is that when I do the jacket copy, I need to adjust the font and the font box itself to get the text block to fit. If I treat it like an art element and scale it up and down to fit, the text gets really blurry.

The other interesting bit is that the bar code on the back of Trang and the bar code on the back of Trust were substantially different sizes! So that little hole I left in the cover design of Trials? It ain't there now....

You may have noticed that....

There's a few random things going on.

Thing #1: The paperback books are gone!

Exciting, isn't that? That's because I redid the covers--CreateSpace now takes your books off the market until the new covers are OK'd.

They didn't used to do that. Changing covers is free with them, and I think they got tired of indecisive people changing their covers a gazillion times. So now you have to go on a time out so that you can think about what you've done.

I also got my first payment for paper books, like, ever. So I do occasionally sell paper books--I even sold a large-print copy! But it doesn't happen enough for the time out to bother me. The other impact is that if you search for Trang on Amazon, the large-print cover shows up. Eh--still don't care.

Thing #2: The paperback books are still gone!

I got the proofs back from CreateSpace today, and Oy. It's a bunch of piddly getting-the-hang-of-GIMP stuff that needs to be fixed on all the covers. It's all crap like, if you scale the jacket copy to make it the right size, it's going to be blurry.

So, that will be tomorrow's task. Believe it or not, I was actually reading through Trials today in preparation to (gasp!) start writing again, but that will have to wait until after the covers are sorted. Still, what I read today didn't suck, so that was nice....

Thing #3: There's a new tag!

I went ahead and made a tag for the posts on music. I'm not trying to turn this into a music blog, but from an industry perspective, there are a lot of similarities--musicians basically went through what writers are going through now a decade ago, so their experiences can be instructive. (The "audio" tag will still be used for audiobook-related entries. Presumably I'll start making those again, someday.)

Thing #4: Speaking of covers....

OK, this isn't a thing of mine, but Isobel Carr has a nice post up about making a cover for a historical romance. That's a genre where cover expectations are fairly rigid and potentially expensive, but although Carr hired people to do her cover, she approached it as a learning experience (imagine!) and wound up with some good pointers for those who can't afford to do much more than jazz up stock photos.

Progress report

Tribulations' cover is mostly done, I think.

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I'll add that I know the "HELP ME" isn't particularly visible, but I think the cover works even if you don't notice it, so I'm going to leave it as it is as a little reward for the sharp of eye.

Emotional decision making

Lily White LeFevre posted a nice little take-down of Star Trek Into Darkness. I wasn't able to truly enjoy that movie either, but for me the big, glaring problem was the same big, glaring problem that plagues 90% of J.J. Abrams' output: Things happen because they are convenient.

For Abrams, it's always about ginning up some drama, logic be damned. So there's no safety system to prevent space ships from crashing into major population centers, and Khan gets free because Scotty decided--for no reason in particular--to stop paying attention to him.

When LeFevre complains:

[W]hat we’re given [in Abrams' Kirk, who she calls Emo Kirk] is someone who does not think the same way Kirk thinks, rather than someone who weighs his thought process against different life experiences. I didn’t mind his emotion-based decisions in the first movie, because he was so young and untried, but I felt like he learned nothing from that experience. Throughout this film he makes his decisions based on his feelings, NOT on his instincts. Huge difference. Kirk sometimes followed a path that seemed illogical, but was actually highly logical – it just relied on data that Spock did not have at his disposal, and that was Jim’s sense of tactics and knowledge of human nature, which is driven by irrationality, so it sometimes seemed illogical.

I think that she has a totally valid point, but I also think that Emo Kirk is really "Emo" Kirk, whose supposed emotionalism and irrationality is just a convenient excuse to have him go gin up some drama.

I'm seeing that again now because I'm watching The Vampire Diaries, which at this point is rapidly devolving into a soap opera about super-powered bloodsuckers. It turns out that vampires, conveniently enough, are really, REALLY, REALLY emotional and irrational, so they can be relied upon to do all kind of stupid, self-destructive crap for no other reason than to--you guessed it--gin up some drama.

This never works. NEVER. It's obvious string-pulling.

Does this mean that characters should never make impulsive or emotional decisions? Of course not. People make these kinds of decisions all the time. Recently I made an impulsive and emotional decision to pull my books from Barnes & Noble, despite having long claimed that it's important to make your books easy to buy and that it's important to diversify your retail base.

Guess what? One book was never actually pulled, because it's on B&N through Smashwords. And I realized that I could do the same with the other book, so I checked a box and it should be back up on B&N soon.

Even when people are emotional, they tend to be consistent.

Being emotional and impulsive doesn't mean that people just do whatever. Even crazy people have particular triggers and patterns of behavior--what they are doing may not make much sense to you, and they may not understand why they do what they do, but there is a logic to it. Inconsistency is often a highly consistent trait, something The Larry Sanders Show understood very well. Writing emotional and impulsive characters is like writing a book where the characters can use magic: Have rules, and it can be very engaging. Use it as a crutch, and suddenly all interest drains from a story.

Real people have patterns that can be really stubborn. Fictional characters need to have that core as well, otherwise they just aren't believable. If I can't believe, I can't care. And if the only thing I can believe is that the writer is desperately attempting to generate drama, then I really can't care.

Progress report

Today has been a day of taking care of little things, like all the itty-bitty changes people want when you upload new covers. Yes, what was OK before is sometimes less OK now--or it's totally OK now, and they just think it's less OK. It depends.

Anyway, I also decided to start the Tribulations cover because I've got a lot of the design elements for the series in my head at the moment, so I figured it would make sense to do most of it now. It shouldn't take too terribly long, and then I can get back to either writing or procrastinating about writing.