Tosh McIntosh's Blog, page 12

The Time Has Finally Come . . .

In the Blogbook section of this site, I've likened blogging to having a shadow. Although at the time I thought about the popular 1927 song, "Me and My Shadow," the lyrics don't fit very well . . .

Me and my shadow/Strolling down the avenue

Me and my shadow/Not a soul to tell our troubles to . . .

And when it's twelve o'clock/We climb the stair,

We never knock/For nobody's there . . .

Just me and my shadow/All alone and feelin' blue . . .

. . . and the reason is simple: the blogging shadow is like having a friend who lifts my spirits and makes me smile. I enjoy the shadow's company and look forward to sitting down in my writing-desk chair for a conversation. I also feel a sense of obligation to the relationship. As with so many things in life, friendships seldom remain static. They either grow or wither on the vine. To prevent the latter result, I've been regularly nourishing the association with content. Until recently, that is, when something got in the way.

To borrow a couple of sports analogies, in basketball they call it a "full court press," and in football it's the "no huddle," "two minute," or "hurry up" offense, and it all began when I withdrew my novel from an agent's consideration and began final preparations for indie publishing my novel.

I've been preparing for this day since early May when I decided to tackle the task (sorry, but I do like to watch football, and rhyming and alliteration aren't always bad things) of teaching myself how to convert my manuscript to eBook format, design the interior layout for the print version and the covers for both. I've covered in this logbook some of the trials and tribulations of that effort over the past few months, and I intended to continue doing that. But as is so often the case, the last 5% of the work took far more time to accomplish than I ever would have imagined.

So, I have a lot of catching up to do on this blog, and it starts now with the announcement that as of this morning, Pilot Error went live on BooksOnBoard. Within the next few days, my novel will appear for sale as an eBook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the iBookstore, and Smashwords. The paperback version will also be available on Amazon.

The next task is to implement as many marketing strategies as I can to gain discoverability, gain exposure, and develop traction.

To publish my novel after all this time feels pretty good, even after going to the dentist this morning. And that's saying something.

 

Indie Publishing – Another Guy's Book

Okay, so if you've visited my blog in the past and peeked into the Writer's Desk Logbook, you probably have read all you care to know about my struggles in the Query Wars and the recent departure from the front lines to independently publish my novel Pilot Error. If that's the case, you can relax and continue reading. Please glance at the title again if that statement is confusing.

A good friend and fellow writer (I'll refer to him as Another Guy, or AG) is also an illustrator, which is where the fellowship stops. On second thought, that didn't come out quite right, because what I meant to say is that I have the artistic talents of a stump, and he is a creatively multi-talented individual.

AG and I are members of a writer's group, but over the past few months he's been AWOL from our meetings to concentrate on putting the finishing touches on his novel. (He does, however, find time to attend a smaller group with three beautiful women. Go figure.) It will be the second eBook he's published, the first being an illustrated children's book. I saw part of it on an iPad, and it's a delightful story for 3-to-8-year-olds. I can appreciate that, because at my age the world is taking on a decidedly confusing aura, just like it can sometimes be for children.

A few months ago, while I was neck deep in the turbulent waters of designing the covers and formatting Pilot Error for print and eBook editions, I offered to assist AG in preparing his novel. He kinda blew me off. Not impolitely, he's not like that, but I got the impression that he was firmly committed to doing the work himself.

Then last evening at our writer's group bi-monthly social gathering for adult beverages and food, I became aware that he hadn't yet begun to prepare his novel for an eBook because he was concentrating on the print version. So like a pestering gnat, I reminded him that I'd offered, and that I'd still be happy to help. "It won't take me more than a couple of hours," I predicted, "and you'll have two eBook formats done with a cover for both." AG finally gave in, and last night I received from him the JPEG cover and DOC file for the book.

As is typical of any Word manuscript formatted for submission to literary agents and edited, revised, copied-and-pasted into and out of during the struggle to get it just right, AG's novel had editing artifacts and non-printing commands like tabs, returns, and extra spaces that needed to be removed before conversion to eBook format.

Not especially sleepy at that moment, I began transferring his novel into a template I've built with the formatting that looks very professional in an eBook. As predicted, I got that done fairly quickly and converted the "scrubbed" DOC file into MOBI (Kindle) and EPUB (everything else).

I've formatted/converted about 20 novels so far. The first look at a new eBook is always a thrill, so I couldn't resist the temptation. Immediately I noticed a couple of things that needed attention (nothing major), and then I ran into something I've never seen before.

AG uses lots of "em-dashes" in his writing. For those of you who don't know, writers can talk (argue?) for hours about the difference between the kinds of dashes and where each one should be used. For my purposes here, let's restrict ourselves to this variation on the "normal" dash, the lower character typically on the second key to the left of the delete (backspace) key. It's the one you use to type a hyphen in a compound word, for example.

Used to be (and for some writers it's still true), two of these dashes close together were used to indicate the writer's use of an em-dash, which is a regular dash lengthened to the width of a lower-case "m" in the font being used.

For those writer dinosaurs whose brains aren't encased in Royal typewriter amber, modern word-processing programs can create a real em-dash. It's a "special" character inserted from a menu or keystroke combination. The following image illustrates the difference in appearance when viewed in a Word document:

But when drafting this post, I found that the text editor doesn't reproduce the old style double dash or the new style em-dash very effectively in the content area of the website. The relative length is not clearly shown. In the text that follows, I've used two of the new-style em-dashes as printed in this text editor to clearly indicate the extra length (like this ––).

The most common functions for the em-dash are to indicate:

a sudden change in the "direction" of a sentence like this: I wondered about that for a few––oh, never mind. No way she could be serious about shooting me; and
interrupted narrative or dialogue due to an external stimulus like this: "If you don't stop trying to––"
"You'll do what?"

Since AG had em-dashes sprinkled liberally all over the manuscript, it wasn't hard to notice the problem when I began previewing the eBook file. Some (but not all, which turns out to be the really strange part) had a fraction inserted in the place of where the em-dash should have gone. I can't re-create here the small fraction made by Word, but you'll get the idea from this:

Intended: He came to the conclusion––or was forced into it––that he'd made a mistake.

Appeared: He came to the conclusion3/4or was forced into it3/4that he'd made a mistake.

I emailed a mutual (and very knowledgeable) writer friend to ask if she'd ever seen that, and the answer was yes, when working with a professional designer on her novel. The supposed cause is when a manuscript is edited on both Macs and PCs, as if the special character is created differently in some small way.

I don't know if that's true or not. What I do know is that a scrub/conversion process that I can normally accomplish in a couple of hours or less took between 8-10. The majority of the effort was spent trying to understand why my corrective action kept producing different results. Confusion and frustration reigned at my writing desk.

Every attempt to find and replace the "bad" em-dashes with the "good" ones shifted where the bad ones and the good ones were. I got a different result each time. Under the assumption that our friend's experience reflected a Mac-to-PC compatibility problem in terms of creating the em-dash, I decided to find all the new style (and sometimes problematic) em-dashes and replace them with the old style using Word's Find/Replace function.

My reasoning was that the regular dash, not being a "special" character, had demonstrated compatibility between platforms. Once that was done, I'd at least have an eBook that worked, even if it had the old style em-dashes. Hopefully, however, I could then find and replace all the old style em-dashes with the new style. Good ones. From my computer, that had been creating em-dashes for eBooks reliably for months.

So I did that and immediately had another mess on my hands. Many of the new style em-dashes that were showing up as 3/4 in the eBook still remained. My only conclusion was that the find function wasn't recognizing all of the new style em-dashes so it could replace them. And since it didn't allow me to convert them in bulk, the only solution was to hunt for them line-by-line and replace them manually with the old style em-dash.

I finally got that done, made a copy, and used find/replace to convert all the old style to the new. Hallelujah. It was, at least as far as I'm concerned, a miracle. I converted this DOC file, checked both the EPUB and MOBI versions, emailed them to AG, and he owes me a dinner.

In the meantime, I'm proud of him for writing a wonderful novel and myself for helping bring it to life outside the confines of his computer hard drive. That's what a writer's community is all about. We're partners in bringing the results of our sweat, blood and tears into the light.

I can hardly wait to see AG's novel for sale and buy a copy.

 

PILOT ERROR – CHAPTER ONE

Wilson didn't want to kill the guard. That would leave a mess behind. Someone might get curious, nose around, ask questions. No, the job tonight required stealth.

He loved that word. And the synonyms, like furtiveness. That just sounded right, especially when whispered. It slid off the tongue. He'd prolong the "s" and think of himself as a viper in the night, coiled like a spring, silent and deadly.

From his hiding place near the edge of the dark, woody greenbelt, he peered through the airport perimeter chain-link fence at the hangar thirty yards away. Raindrops slapped on the hood of his parka and the blanket of leaves around him. Cold wind rustled the branches above his head. He preferred working with nature's white noise as an ally, but tonight it favored the guard, all the more reason for caution.

Wilson had initially accepted this assignment on contingency because he'd never tried to penetrate the secure area of an airport. Especially after 9/11, it seemed far too risky. But his concern proved to be groundless. Of the 19,000 airports in the US, only a small percentage received the security upgrades designed to prevent aircraft from being used as weapons of terror, and for good reason. To fly the largest airplane based here into a skyscraper would be like a suicidal bug smashing into the windshield of a Mack truck.

Earlier that day, he had masqueraded as a salesman for an alarm company and offered the owner of the hangar a security survey. The man laughed him out of the office. Said he couldn't afford it, especially to prevent something that had never happened. Besides, the airport authority paid for a night watchman. Didn't cost him a penny. Now, Wilson understood why.

The guard, a typical rent-a-cop "door rattler," sang country music while walking his rounds. The fool announced he was coming. And he never varied his routine. Every half-hour since midnight, he'd stood under the awning above a door on the back side of the hangar for a smoke break. Atomic-clock predictable.

Wilson peeled back the cuff of his parka and glanced at his watch: 2:47. The guard was taking his nicotine hit fifteen minutes early. Wilson needed less than ten minutes and could still do this without bloodshed unless the idiot started chain-smoking.

He pulled the pistol from his waistband through an opening in the outer pocket liner of his parka and screwed the silencer into the barrel. Then he checked for a round in the chamber, a full magazine, and slipped the weapon in his parka's belt. Eyes on the guard, he waited.

Two minutes later, the guard dropped the butt on the ramp, ground it out with his boot and began walking toward the far end of the hangar. Wilson stepped up to the fence, reached above his head and shoved his fingers through the links. Lucky for him, it had no topping of razor wire and served primarily to keep deer off the runway. Just like his airport at home. He'd seen what colliding with a full-grown Bambi could do to an airplane on takeoff or landing, and it wasn't pretty.

As the guard turned the corner, Wilson climbed over the fence, ran across the ramp, unlocked the door with a battery-powered pick gun and stepped inside. A row of ceiling lights bathed the cavernous interior in ghostly white. Airplanes, portable worktables, and wheeled tool boxes were jammed together like a jigsaw puzzle. Faint odors of aviation maintenance lingered: fuel, oil, paint, heavy-duty cleaning chemicals. Comforting, in a way. Reminded him of his hangar.

Weaving through the maze, he made his way to a cabinet mounted on the opposite wall. Aircraft tail numbers identified the open, partitioned sections in the cabinet as distribution boxes for each of the airplanes based at Schiller Aviation. The section labeled N924DP held two tattered cardboard containers sitting side by side on a shelf.

He removed the one marked IN, knelt, and placed it on the concrete floor. In the beam of a small flashlight held in a nylon pouch sewn on his watch cap, he thumbed through the contents: two eight-by-ten-inch envelopes imprinted with the logo of a navigation chart provider and addressed to Larchmont Enterprises, LLC, one business envelope from the Golden Aircraft Company, and a small electrical part in a plastic baggie with a green SERVICEABLE tag. The innocuous, everyday items of aviation on their way to an airplane.

And inside his parka, an addition. He lifted out a padded mailing envelope and took one final look at the postage, address, and return labels. No one would ever guess it hadn't gone through the US mail. He placed the mailer in the container, returned it to the shelf and retraced his route across the hangar.

With his face close to the glass, he peered through the small window set into the door. No sign of the guard. Wilson eased the door open and looked to his left where the guard had always appeared from around the corner of the hangar, then to the right. Nothing. He took one step outside and froze.

Embedded within the sounds of rain and wind, something foreign drifted on the gusts. He closed his eyes and tuned out the background. After a few seconds, he retreated into the hangar and let the door close gently. Way early, the karaoke guard had suddenly turned even more unpredictable. Wilson pulled out the pistol, heavy in his hand, comforting. Like an addiction. The anticipation ratcheted up his heart rate just enough to heighten his senses and add another layer of alert. He sidestepped left past the hinge edge of the door.

After a moment the guard appeared in the window and stopped under the awning, two feet from the door and facing the forest. Wilson leaned to his right, took a quick peek down, noted the guard's duty belt with a radio and a flashlight carrier. No weapon. He relaxed a bit. All he had to do was wait a few minutes, watch the door handle for any movement to warn him—damn it! The door rested against the latch bolt and hadn't closed all the way. If the guy turned around and saw that . . .

Wilson flattened himself against the hangar wall, raised the pistol to the level of the guard's head and took up the tiny bit of slack in the double-action trigger. One step inside, he'd have to put the guy down. So much for an easy in and out.

After a few seconds, barely audible over the wind and rain, a click, a rasping snap, pause, another click. A Zippo lighter. Cigarette smoke drifted through the slim crack between the door and jamb. Wilson eased his pressure on the trigger and took a deep breath. The smoke awakened a familiar hunger that had never really left him.

He'd quit over twenty years ago. For his health, although fear of cancer had nothing to do with it. On that night, two steps from the mark, Wilson's knife poised to strike home, the guy had ducked, swiveled, come in low, hard, and fast. Wilson almost died, and the man's last words remained with him still: I smelled you.

He enjoyed a second-hand smoke until a boot wet-grated on concrete, stubbing out the cigarette. The guard began singing a recent country hit, something about being unlucky in love. Not bad, actually. He ought to turn in his flashlight for a microphone. The voice faded away as the guard continued his rounds.

Wilson lowered the pistol. Jesus. That was close.

Over the years, in spite of all the planning and preparation for countless jobs, it so often came down to something as simple as this. One small coincidence either passes into history as a freebie or changes the complexion of future events. Tonight, he gladly accepted the gift.

Wilson opened the door and checked both ways. He slipped the pistol in a jacket pocket, stepped out, closed the door, and sprinted for the fence. Ten minutes in the greenbelt at a fast walk put him at the edge of the woods along a deserted street. On the other side in a motel parking lot sat his rental car, inconspicuous among many. Just the way he liked it. He closed his eyes to listen and zone in on the night. Nothing. He strode to the car and climbed in.

With the heater on high, he poured a cup of coffee from a thermos, wrapped his hands around the cup, and after a moment drained it in a few swallows. He shook the empty thermos, wishing for more. It felt like he'd never warm up. Getting too old for this field work.

He yanked off his gloves and blew into his hands, then took a small piece of notepaper from an outer pocket on his cargo pants and set it between his legs on the seat. He removed the flashlight from the pouch on his watch cap, held it close to the paper to shield it and focused the beam.

Holding his cell phone in the other hand, he entered the ten-digit sequence with his thumb, pausing after each number to concentrate before pressing the next one. When the complete phone number was displayed, he carefully compared each digit on the paper with the screen before he pressed TALK. After three rings and a beep, he said to the silence, "Operator Forty-One, activate, one hour," and turned off the phone.

So much for the groundwork. The time had come to watch and wait, to be there just in case. The anonymous voice would soon begin calling on the secure line, pestering Wilson about when it would happen. He would ignore the inquiries as he always did. Contact with clients occurred at his convenience. The next time they spoke, the topic would be money. Lots of it. Enough to call it quits.

And he was so ready. Ready to abandon the double life. Ready to live in the light. And maybe one day he'd be able to stop looking over his shoulder. No more nightmares with the eyes of the dead staring at him. Put his head on a pillow and leave it all behind for longer than a few hours.

A check in the rearview, both side mirrors, and all around the parking lot found nothing but dark rooms, sleeping cars, wet asphalt, and pale shafts of rain under yellow streetlights. He pulled the pistol out of his jacket and laid it in the seat by his leg, then eased the car out of the lot and accelerated into the night toward a rendezvous with someone else's death.

Author's note: It won't be long before I can add links at the bottom of this page and in the sidebar that offer the opportunity for you to purchase my novel in EPUB or MOBI eBook format and as a paperback.  I hope you will visit again soon and take advantage of the opportunity for a good read. Thanks in advance for your interest in and support of an indie author.

Bye-Bye Legacy, Hello Indie

When I first began the task of writing a novel, I didn't think much about the kind of ending I wanted. A tragedy would be too depressing. Fairy tales didn't interest me. Somewhere in between those extremes lay a far more satisfying possibility, best described as bittersweet: adjective: (of food, drink, or flavor) sweet with a bitter aftertaste; (of memories) arousing pleasure tinged with sadness or pain.

Neither of these definitions apply directly to storytelling, but writers borrow words and re-define them to suit their purposes because they are wordsmiths. See? I did it again with blacksmith: noun: a person who makes and repairs things in iron by hand; a farrier.

Whatever the story ending turned out to be, I knew exactly where I wanted readers to experience it: in hardcover, bought in a bookstore. That's where legitimate authors sell their stories. On the shelves, not from the trunks of their cars traveling from town to town begging bookstore managers for the opportunity to set up an easel on a table and do their best to lure passersby with a smile and proffered handshake.

For a very long time, that's been the dream. Get an agent and a contract from a major publisher. Many writers who have made it will tell you that failure to accomplish this goal is proof enough of unworthiness. Those struggling to join the exalted few could only accept that as reality and persevere. If you don't succeed, it's because you don't deserve it.

The problem with that attitude, of course, is that it isn't true. The old guard collaboration between agents and the Big 6 publishing houses has a dismal track record predicting what readers want. Less than 20% of books published earn out the initial author advance, and 40% end up as "remainders" to be sold on the bargain tables or fed into the maw of pulping machines. How legacy publishing can be proud of that is beyond comprehension.

Over the past seven months, I've been giving the legacy option one last valiant effort. And for only the second time in years of struggle, I've received requests from agents for full manuscripts. Rewarding as that is, subsequent "No thank you's" contain a heavy dose of discouragement. To be told that it's not a reflection on my writing or the story, but that my novel doesn't fit with what the agent is looking for at the moment, or the agent couldn't generate the necessary excitement to place it with a publisher, none of that helps ease the sting of rejection. That, obviously, is the bitter.

For the past couple of months, I've been waiting for response from the last agent with a full manuscript who replied to a "nudge" by saying that she remains "very interested" in my novel. Fueled by the possibility, however slim, of receiving an offer of representation, my patience has remained steadfast until a few weeks ago when the "sweet" finally convinced me to withdraw my novel from consideration.

No longer the realm of vanity, self-publishing has earned it's rightful place in the sun because in ever-increasing numbers, established authors with substantial success in the world of legacy are taking personal control of their futures. That they are joining hordes of unwashed masses is of no concern, because in spite of what legacy publishing has long maintained, passing through the agent/publisher filter is no guarantee of quality, nor is it a reliable indicator of what readers will buy.

Readers do that by voting with their pocketbooks, and it may well be that few will cast such a vote for my novel. I have no illusions about my chances for success, however I may define it, only that whatever happens isn't dependent on anyone else. As always, it begins with a good story well told that will appeal to a potential audience. If I haven't fulfilled those requirements, I don't deserve their votes.

And the harsh reality is that whether legacy or indie published, many books worth reading languish in obscurity because the first criteria is so hard to satisfy. Without discoverability, a novel can't gain exposure. Without exposure, traction remains an elusive condition.

The novel is almost ready to publish. I need a few final readers to help scour the pages for those pesky little errors that so easily escape detection when you can almost recite the story from memory.

In previous Writer's Desk posts, I've compared the journey to legacy success as climbing a ten-step ladder. I just abandoned the effort at step number eight, and now face a stairwell of a different sort.

It's far from sufficient to offer a novel for sale on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iBooks. Few readers visit their cellars, and the only way out of the pit is to achieve sales and receive some complimentary reviews. The next big unknown awaits. Marketing.

Photo credit: www.pxleyes.com