Karen GoatKeeper's Blog, page 19
November 27, 2018
Values Must Be Carefully Taught
The Christmas season is in full swing here in the U.S. Merchandise and decorations and ads bombard you from every side. And there are those who insist we should keep Christ in Christmas.
No matter what your religion or lack of it, you should agree with this. Why? Because He preached against hate and for love. Something too many of us have forgotten.
Hate and fear must be carefully taught. We are working overtime at it.
Tolerance and consideration must also be carefully taught. Maybe we should practice the beliefs so many of us say we hold.
Three books I have been exposed to recently can open the door to an honest assessment of who we are and what we believe. And these are probably not ones you are thinking of.
First came “Lies My Teacher Told Me” by Loewen. I didn’t hear all of the audio so it’s not on my Read shelf. I heard enough to want to dig deeper into U.S. history. And that’s not using a textbook.
Second came “Sundown Towns” also by Loewen. I had known some of what he included in the first book. This one shook me. Again I didn’t hear all of it so it isn’t on my Read shelf.
What is a sundown town? A place blacks were told to be out of by sundown. Not just blacks were targeted. Orientals and Catholics and Jews were sometimes included.
What surprised me was finding out I grew up in a sundown neighborhood. I had never thought about the place being all white. It’s the way it was. This was not achieved by accident, I’m sure. Sundown places included neighborhoods, towns, even counties.
Fair warning on this book: If Loewen heard an anecdote about a place or event, it’s in the book. Many of these are interesting. The sheer number of them becomes overwhelming at times.
The third book is “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas. It can be hard to read emotionally. It can hit close to home. Fergusson, MO, is a little over a hundred miles away from me. Closer to home was a friend, now living elsewhere, from the Philippines who endured threats and more living in this Christian community. Her dark complexion evidently made many consider her to be black.
This is a great book.
The full quote is by the rapper Tupac: “The Hate U Give Little Infants F….s Everyone.”
May everyone find they want to keep Christ’s teachings of love in their holiday season and the years to come.
No matter what your religion or lack of it, you should agree with this. Why? Because He preached against hate and for love. Something too many of us have forgotten.
Hate and fear must be carefully taught. We are working overtime at it.
Tolerance and consideration must also be carefully taught. Maybe we should practice the beliefs so many of us say we hold.
Three books I have been exposed to recently can open the door to an honest assessment of who we are and what we believe. And these are probably not ones you are thinking of.
First came “Lies My Teacher Told Me” by Loewen. I didn’t hear all of the audio so it’s not on my Read shelf. I heard enough to want to dig deeper into U.S. history. And that’s not using a textbook.
Second came “Sundown Towns” also by Loewen. I had known some of what he included in the first book. This one shook me. Again I didn’t hear all of it so it isn’t on my Read shelf.
What is a sundown town? A place blacks were told to be out of by sundown. Not just blacks were targeted. Orientals and Catholics and Jews were sometimes included.
What surprised me was finding out I grew up in a sundown neighborhood. I had never thought about the place being all white. It’s the way it was. This was not achieved by accident, I’m sure. Sundown places included neighborhoods, towns, even counties.
Fair warning on this book: If Loewen heard an anecdote about a place or event, it’s in the book. Many of these are interesting. The sheer number of them becomes overwhelming at times.
The third book is “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas. It can be hard to read emotionally. It can hit close to home. Fergusson, MO, is a little over a hundred miles away from me. Closer to home was a friend, now living elsewhere, from the Philippines who endured threats and more living in this Christian community. Her dark complexion evidently made many consider her to be black.
This is a great book.
The full quote is by the rapper Tupac: “The Hate U Give Little Infants F….s Everyone.”
May everyone find they want to keep Christ’s teachings of love in their holiday season and the years to come.
November 7, 2018
November Madness Returns
Another year has flown by. It is again November and time for National Novel Writing Month.
This year is different for me. I’m trying to finish the draft I started last November, the one I planned to finish over this year. It got shoved aside.
That does not mean the year was bereft of writing. Indeed, I have completed two other books this year.
“My Ozark Home” is a coffee table book of photographs and haikus with several personal essays about living here in the Ozarks. Surely this is a nothing book to complete. All you do is slap a bunch of photographs in some order, write six or eight pages about whatever, devise a few poems and publish.
I do meet people who believe this. They don’t write.
Choosing the photographs took weeks of sorting, comparing, replacing, reordering. Matching haikus with the photographs was a bit easier. Grouping the photographs and adding personal essays was a challenge. There were several ways to try until I found one that worked for me.
“Mistaken Promises” was a different challenge. It is the third in a series and completes a story line begun in the second book. This one was a NaNo draft novel that fell apart about 50,000 words in. The story was fine. The bully wasn’t the intended girl. So the book languished as the plot formed and reformed in my mind.
Once the plot was complete, the rewrites and edits began. This is another misconception non-writers have about writing. A book isn’t written in one shot. Many times the completed book bears little resemblance to the original draft.
A series book has other considerations. Characters from one book don’t change names or personalities between books unless there is a good reason given in the book.
Grammar and spelling, those bugaboos from school days are alive and well for the writer. I’ve tried to read books with grammatical and spelling errors in them. They ruin the book.
In researching about writing I keep coming across these admonitions to write a book in a few months. I can’t seem to get below six months and then have reservations.
Maybe this visit with the Carduans will complete the first book. I hope so as I already have notes on the second book. Captain Umbaque is right that nine people are not enough to start a viable colony, but additional people bring additional problems. At the moment finding a place to live is the important task, one complicated by their small size and vulnerability to predators, their unfamiliarity with so much of what the Ozarks has to offer and their own reactions to being stranded with no hope of going home.
This year is different for me. I’m trying to finish the draft I started last November, the one I planned to finish over this year. It got shoved aside.
That does not mean the year was bereft of writing. Indeed, I have completed two other books this year.
“My Ozark Home” is a coffee table book of photographs and haikus with several personal essays about living here in the Ozarks. Surely this is a nothing book to complete. All you do is slap a bunch of photographs in some order, write six or eight pages about whatever, devise a few poems and publish.
I do meet people who believe this. They don’t write.
Choosing the photographs took weeks of sorting, comparing, replacing, reordering. Matching haikus with the photographs was a bit easier. Grouping the photographs and adding personal essays was a challenge. There were several ways to try until I found one that worked for me.
“Mistaken Promises” was a different challenge. It is the third in a series and completes a story line begun in the second book. This one was a NaNo draft novel that fell apart about 50,000 words in. The story was fine. The bully wasn’t the intended girl. So the book languished as the plot formed and reformed in my mind.
Once the plot was complete, the rewrites and edits began. This is another misconception non-writers have about writing. A book isn’t written in one shot. Many times the completed book bears little resemblance to the original draft.
A series book has other considerations. Characters from one book don’t change names or personalities between books unless there is a good reason given in the book.
Grammar and spelling, those bugaboos from school days are alive and well for the writer. I’ve tried to read books with grammatical and spelling errors in them. They ruin the book.
In researching about writing I keep coming across these admonitions to write a book in a few months. I can’t seem to get below six months and then have reservations.
Maybe this visit with the Carduans will complete the first book. I hope so as I already have notes on the second book. Captain Umbaque is right that nine people are not enough to start a viable colony, but additional people bring additional problems. At the moment finding a place to live is the important task, one complicated by their small size and vulnerability to predators, their unfamiliarity with so much of what the Ozarks has to offer and their own reactions to being stranded with no hope of going home.
October 17, 2018
Mixing Real Life With Writing
The other day I finally baked a chocolate cake with icing to check the recipe for the third Hazel Whitmore book “Mistaken Promises.” Strangely enough this turned into a lesson on writing.
In preparation I had taken out all of my cookbooks containing cake and icing recipes. I compared the cake recipes, debated them and rejected them. In the end I used a familiar one with a couple of improvements.
Stay with what you know. Experimentation is fine, but stay rooted as your shortcomings will come through glaringly. Research alone does not make you an expert.
The icing recipes were frightening. I hadn’t made icing since I was in high school and that was a disaster. The temptation to say, “Buy a can of frosting.” was so inviting. Hazel wouldn’t do that. She loves to cook and would consider making the icing herself a challenge.
Know your characters. Having a character do something he or she would not do without explanation disrupts your story’s world.
Most of the recipes called for boiling the icing to something called a “soft ball stage” where a drop of icing in cold water forms a ball. This, I found out, is 234° on a candy thermometer, something I do have although I have never used it.
Still, the easy, no boiling frosting was preferable. And here came problems. It called for powdered milk, something I don’t have. So I substituted milk for this and sugar in place of the honey naively thinking this would solve the moisture problem.
And had chocolate soup.
How many times do we happily type along and end up with soup? The plot falls apart. The characters become ridiculous. The whole project seems disastrous.
And we have a choice to make. We can abandon the project relegating it to a forgotten file. We can decide what went wrong and how to fix it.
I stood looking at my chocolate soup. It definitely was not icing. Why not? It was liquid. How did other recipes solve this problem?
Boiled recipes used confectioner’s or powdered sugar. There are two differences between regular sugar and confectioner’s sugar.
One is the fineness of the sugar. Since the sugar is dissolved, this does not matter.
The second is corn starch. Corn starch is an interesting substance. Added to liquid and heated to boiling, it absorbs the liquid and thickens it.
I made boiled icing adding additional sugar and corn starch. Did I reach the soft ball stage? I’m not sure. I do know the icing boiled and thickened into a creamy chocolate substance that spread onto the cake very well.
“Mistaken Promises” too has had its problems. The plot fell apart. I took the time to find the problem, decide on a solution and fix the book.
I hope the book came out as good as my icing did.
In preparation I had taken out all of my cookbooks containing cake and icing recipes. I compared the cake recipes, debated them and rejected them. In the end I used a familiar one with a couple of improvements.
Stay with what you know. Experimentation is fine, but stay rooted as your shortcomings will come through glaringly. Research alone does not make you an expert.
The icing recipes were frightening. I hadn’t made icing since I was in high school and that was a disaster. The temptation to say, “Buy a can of frosting.” was so inviting. Hazel wouldn’t do that. She loves to cook and would consider making the icing herself a challenge.
Know your characters. Having a character do something he or she would not do without explanation disrupts your story’s world.
Most of the recipes called for boiling the icing to something called a “soft ball stage” where a drop of icing in cold water forms a ball. This, I found out, is 234° on a candy thermometer, something I do have although I have never used it.
Still, the easy, no boiling frosting was preferable. And here came problems. It called for powdered milk, something I don’t have. So I substituted milk for this and sugar in place of the honey naively thinking this would solve the moisture problem.
And had chocolate soup.
How many times do we happily type along and end up with soup? The plot falls apart. The characters become ridiculous. The whole project seems disastrous.
And we have a choice to make. We can abandon the project relegating it to a forgotten file. We can decide what went wrong and how to fix it.
I stood looking at my chocolate soup. It definitely was not icing. Why not? It was liquid. How did other recipes solve this problem?
Boiled recipes used confectioner’s or powdered sugar. There are two differences between regular sugar and confectioner’s sugar.
One is the fineness of the sugar. Since the sugar is dissolved, this does not matter.
The second is corn starch. Corn starch is an interesting substance. Added to liquid and heated to boiling, it absorbs the liquid and thickens it.
I made boiled icing adding additional sugar and corn starch. Did I reach the soft ball stage? I’m not sure. I do know the icing boiled and thickened into a creamy chocolate substance that spread onto the cake very well.
“Mistaken Promises” too has had its problems. The plot fell apart. I took the time to find the problem, decide on a solution and fix the book.
I hope the book came out as good as my icing did.
October 3, 2018
Making a Book Cover
There are so many details to take care of when finishing up a book. It’s so easy to get caught up in the editing and forget them.
I need to do one final edit of “Mistaken Promises,” the third Hazel Whitmore book. The last time through had more changes than I had anticipated. This is two or three days work.
In the meantime I am taking care of details. Hazel likes to cook and there are fourteen different recipes mentioned. I am trying to get all of them done. The pile of cookbooks around my computer gets in the way and one recipe still eludes me.
Then there are the special pages such as title, copyright, author’s notes etc.
And there is the cover. Books do have covers.
Where do I find a cover for “Mistaken Promises”?
This is an upper middle grade book. Most of these books have the main characters on the covers. I can’t draw people who look like people.
At the moment my budget will not allow me to hire an artist. The money is getting “My Ozark Home” printed plus more copies of “Exploring the Ozark Hills.”
In the book Hazel finally gets her Buff Orpington chickens. This is her big foray into rural living. The chickens do play a part in the book’s plot.
More important: I can draw a chicken. I even have a Buff Orpington hen to use as a model. She doesn’t agree, but I can be persistent.
So, the cover will have a chicken on the cover. Except no one knows why the chicken is there unless they read the book.
Another recurring aspect of the plot is the notes Hazel finds in her school locker and on Facebook. “You will pay. I promise you, YOU will pay.” The words change; the menace doesn't.
The hen can be holding a note in her beak. Maybe she can be standing on another note.
And, maybe, if I am lucky, this cover will pique a reader’s interest enough to read my book.
I need to do one final edit of “Mistaken Promises,” the third Hazel Whitmore book. The last time through had more changes than I had anticipated. This is two or three days work.
In the meantime I am taking care of details. Hazel likes to cook and there are fourteen different recipes mentioned. I am trying to get all of them done. The pile of cookbooks around my computer gets in the way and one recipe still eludes me.
Then there are the special pages such as title, copyright, author’s notes etc.
And there is the cover. Books do have covers.
Where do I find a cover for “Mistaken Promises”?
This is an upper middle grade book. Most of these books have the main characters on the covers. I can’t draw people who look like people.
At the moment my budget will not allow me to hire an artist. The money is getting “My Ozark Home” printed plus more copies of “Exploring the Ozark Hills.”
In the book Hazel finally gets her Buff Orpington chickens. This is her big foray into rural living. The chickens do play a part in the book’s plot.
More important: I can draw a chicken. I even have a Buff Orpington hen to use as a model. She doesn’t agree, but I can be persistent.
So, the cover will have a chicken on the cover. Except no one knows why the chicken is there unless they read the book.
Another recurring aspect of the plot is the notes Hazel finds in her school locker and on Facebook. “You will pay. I promise you, YOU will pay.” The words change; the menace doesn't.
The hen can be holding a note in her beak. Maybe she can be standing on another note.
And, maybe, if I am lucky, this cover will pique a reader’s interest enough to read my book.
September 19, 2018
Delving Into the Past
All writers delve into the past. Our characters are experiencing some deep emotion. Off we go into the past to explore a time when we felt something similar.
This enriches our writing. We can add those little nuances that make the emotion seem real to the reader. I’ve done this a lot while working on “Mistaken Promises”, the third book in the Hazel Whitmore series.
There is another way for a writer to delve into the past. This has occupied my last week.
One of the first books I completed, “Exploring the Ozark Hills,” needed some attention. I hadn’t intended to do this. The nature essays are as valid today as the day I wrote them. The photographs are still suitable. But…
I needed more copies of this book. Before I printed them on my home laser printer. This takes time. And the local newspaper has gone into the printing business doing a much better job on the covers than my printer. Why can’t they print the entire book?
There is the original file on my computer, the enormous file, nearly 300,000Kb file. The size is ridiculous. Why is it so big?
I thought back. When I assembled the original file, I happily inserted original photograph files into the text and adjusted them to fit. The original files are huge.
“Expl0ring the Ozark Hills” is 187 pages long with around 100 pages of pictures. That might be a large part of the size problem. This matters because the last time I tried to print some copies, my computer locked until the printer was done.
My journey into the past began on the title page. I go page by page, stopping at each picture. Each picture is put through my photoshop program and resized to fit using the desired dpi. Each picture in the manuscript is replaced with the resized picture.
The file size is shrinking. However I’ve come to another aspect of delving into the past. It is the past. I’ve learned and seen things since then.
Not all of the pictures in “Exploring the Ozark Hills” are now the original ones. I even found one essay needing extensive rewrite to correct a mistake.
The same is true when I delve into the past to recreate emotions for my writing. For “Mistaken Promises” these range from boredom to annoyance to despair to anger to panic. I can remember these from when I was a young teen as Hazel is in the book. But I can add to them from times since as emotions don’t stop when you become an adult, only how we react to them changes.
This enriches our writing. We can add those little nuances that make the emotion seem real to the reader. I’ve done this a lot while working on “Mistaken Promises”, the third book in the Hazel Whitmore series.
There is another way for a writer to delve into the past. This has occupied my last week.
One of the first books I completed, “Exploring the Ozark Hills,” needed some attention. I hadn’t intended to do this. The nature essays are as valid today as the day I wrote them. The photographs are still suitable. But…
I needed more copies of this book. Before I printed them on my home laser printer. This takes time. And the local newspaper has gone into the printing business doing a much better job on the covers than my printer. Why can’t they print the entire book?
There is the original file on my computer, the enormous file, nearly 300,000Kb file. The size is ridiculous. Why is it so big?
I thought back. When I assembled the original file, I happily inserted original photograph files into the text and adjusted them to fit. The original files are huge.
“Expl0ring the Ozark Hills” is 187 pages long with around 100 pages of pictures. That might be a large part of the size problem. This matters because the last time I tried to print some copies, my computer locked until the printer was done.
My journey into the past began on the title page. I go page by page, stopping at each picture. Each picture is put through my photoshop program and resized to fit using the desired dpi. Each picture in the manuscript is replaced with the resized picture.
The file size is shrinking. However I’ve come to another aspect of delving into the past. It is the past. I’ve learned and seen things since then.
Not all of the pictures in “Exploring the Ozark Hills” are now the original ones. I even found one essay needing extensive rewrite to correct a mistake.
The same is true when I delve into the past to recreate emotions for my writing. For “Mistaken Promises” these range from boredom to annoyance to despair to anger to panic. I can remember these from when I was a young teen as Hazel is in the book. But I can add to them from times since as emotions don’t stop when you become an adult, only how we react to them changes.
August 29, 2018
The Value of Antecedents
They walked to the neighborhood park. Maybe walk is too sedate of a word. They jogged, skipped or ran in circles on their way. Once in the park, they scattered, each to their favorite spot.
She watched them. Some cavorted in the water sprays. Others pumped their legs driving their swings ever higher. A few chased each other through the tangle of the bars of the jungle gym.
Who are they? Perhaps they is a group of children. Perhaps they are a group of teenagers. They could even be a group of young adults out for a fun evening.
Who is she? She could be a mother. She could be a child usually ignored by the other children. She could be a terrorist.
Each choice of who they and she are changes the entire passage. Why do so many writers assume mentioning a name at the beginning of a scene or chapter is enough?
Pronouns require an antecedent, a name to define who or what the pronoun refers to. This keeps the reader reading a particular story instead of wandering mentally off into another one. It keeps readers from getting confused reading dialog.
For the last few weeks I’ve been doing some editing for other writers. It’s taught me one thing for sure: I don’t want to be an editor for others except in special circumstances.
Editing is showing me so many little things I could work on. One is using antecedents. Another is improving the use of dialog. An unexpected aspect of this is how, sometimes, dialog is not separated from a paragraph, but is part of it.
Why, since editing is teaching me so much about writing, do I not want to do it? Simple. When I edit a piece of writing for someone else, that is all I work on. I am supposed to be editing “Mistaken Promises.” It languishes on my computer waiting for me to find the time to return to it.
For me the definition of a writer is: someone who writes. That is the definition I want to apply to me.
She watched them. Some cavorted in the water sprays. Others pumped their legs driving their swings ever higher. A few chased each other through the tangle of the bars of the jungle gym.
Who are they? Perhaps they is a group of children. Perhaps they are a group of teenagers. They could even be a group of young adults out for a fun evening.
Who is she? She could be a mother. She could be a child usually ignored by the other children. She could be a terrorist.
Each choice of who they and she are changes the entire passage. Why do so many writers assume mentioning a name at the beginning of a scene or chapter is enough?
Pronouns require an antecedent, a name to define who or what the pronoun refers to. This keeps the reader reading a particular story instead of wandering mentally off into another one. It keeps readers from getting confused reading dialog.
For the last few weeks I’ve been doing some editing for other writers. It’s taught me one thing for sure: I don’t want to be an editor for others except in special circumstances.
Editing is showing me so many little things I could work on. One is using antecedents. Another is improving the use of dialog. An unexpected aspect of this is how, sometimes, dialog is not separated from a paragraph, but is part of it.
Why, since editing is teaching me so much about writing, do I not want to do it? Simple. When I edit a piece of writing for someone else, that is all I work on. I am supposed to be editing “Mistaken Promises.” It languishes on my computer waiting for me to find the time to return to it.
For me the definition of a writer is: someone who writes. That is the definition I want to apply to me.
August 15, 2018
Reading To Writing
Writers need to read not only their own genre but others as well. No matter how much a writer practices their writing skills, seeing how other writers handle a story helps.
So the reading list should be award winning books, right? After all, these are the ones writers and readers praise. They must be the best examples of writing around.
And, although a writer can learn a lot from reading such books, a writer can learn even more from a book that doesn’t measure up to these ideals. I am reading such a book now: “The Mutiny of the Elsinore” by Jack London.
Sea stories are a favorite read for me from the time I discovered Howard Pease and his Todd Moran series. No one mentions him now. His books are rarely seen now. They were stories of the Captain and his mate on a tramp steamer going to many exotic ports of call.
This present novel was touted as a great novel of the sea. I’m not a big Jack London fan, but that got me to pick the book up at a used book sale. It worked its way to the top of a stack and I opened the cover.
I don’t like this book. I don’t like the main character. I don’t like the minor characters. I don’t like the way the story drags along. There is temptation to shut the cover and put it on my incomplete shelf.
I persevere. Why?
The book isn’t intolerable. It is cluing me in to things I look forward to in characters and plot, things not found in this book.
What is in this book is setting. London’s descriptions of the sea are so well drawn I can see them. I’ve never been and will never go south of the equator, yet I can now picture a ship under sail on the high seas, a sunset that surrounds such a ship with a different look toward each point of the compass, even a torrential storm turning day into night so black lamps must be lit to see.
I may not finish this book for reasons of character and plot. But I very well may just to see how setting is done by a master writer of setting. I hope some of his magic rubs off on my writing.
So the reading list should be award winning books, right? After all, these are the ones writers and readers praise. They must be the best examples of writing around.
And, although a writer can learn a lot from reading such books, a writer can learn even more from a book that doesn’t measure up to these ideals. I am reading such a book now: “The Mutiny of the Elsinore” by Jack London.
Sea stories are a favorite read for me from the time I discovered Howard Pease and his Todd Moran series. No one mentions him now. His books are rarely seen now. They were stories of the Captain and his mate on a tramp steamer going to many exotic ports of call.
This present novel was touted as a great novel of the sea. I’m not a big Jack London fan, but that got me to pick the book up at a used book sale. It worked its way to the top of a stack and I opened the cover.
I don’t like this book. I don’t like the main character. I don’t like the minor characters. I don’t like the way the story drags along. There is temptation to shut the cover and put it on my incomplete shelf.
I persevere. Why?
The book isn’t intolerable. It is cluing me in to things I look forward to in characters and plot, things not found in this book.
What is in this book is setting. London’s descriptions of the sea are so well drawn I can see them. I’ve never been and will never go south of the equator, yet I can now picture a ship under sail on the high seas, a sunset that surrounds such a ship with a different look toward each point of the compass, even a torrential storm turning day into night so black lamps must be lit to see.
I may not finish this book for reasons of character and plot. But I very well may just to see how setting is done by a master writer of setting. I hope some of his magic rubs off on my writing.
August 1, 2018
Printed Book or Ebook?
I love to read. GR has this Read bookshelf. My tally on the shelf is so paltry and a fraction of what it should be.
More of the books I’ve read in the past could be added to the shelf. That would take days or weeks, if I can remember them all.
These books were printed books. The feel of a printed book is special to me. Settling into a spot and flipping open the cover of a printed book is so satisfying.
When I publish a book, I want to hold it in my hand and flip open the cover. This is a book to me.
Times have changed. Books come in so many forms now. Many readers prefer reading books as ebooks or listening to them as audiobooks. These formats suit their lives in the same ways a printed books suits mine.
As an author, I want to present my books in formats to suit readers of these formats as well as my favorite printed books. I know my books won’t appeal to everyone, but I want them available to all those who will enjoy them.
Novels are no problem. These are easy to present as print or ebook. Audiobook is not possible for me right now.
Nonfiction books, at least mine, present challenges. I now have completed four of these. All four are filled with images, both drawings and photographs. They are set up for print, not ebook.
An ebook has several differences from a print book. The absence of page numbers and addition of hyperlinks are a couple of them. Images present challenges too. In an ebook an image needs to be centered, in line with the text and not surrounded by text. The ebook goes text, image, text, image etc.
None of my nonfiction books really work this way. “My Ozark Home” is the closest. It has an additional problem with one essay.
Frost flowers are a favorite photography subject in the fall. They are delicate, fleeting ice sculptures and each is unique. In choosing a picture for the book, I couldn’t narrow down to one.
A horseshoe of photographs surround a short commentary on finding these fragile flowers. These images float or can be moved around the text. This works for print, not ebook. I had to turn the entire page into an image.
Another factor comes with the ereaders themselves. Photographs do not show up well on some of them. Landscape photographs don’t show well as thumbnail size images.
The final factor is the size of the ebook. My nonfiction books are around 68MB in the print versions. “My Ozark Home” finally made it down below the 15MB limit for an ebook and is available as a pdf only. You can find out more on my website.
More of the books I’ve read in the past could be added to the shelf. That would take days or weeks, if I can remember them all.
These books were printed books. The feel of a printed book is special to me. Settling into a spot and flipping open the cover of a printed book is so satisfying.
When I publish a book, I want to hold it in my hand and flip open the cover. This is a book to me.
Times have changed. Books come in so many forms now. Many readers prefer reading books as ebooks or listening to them as audiobooks. These formats suit their lives in the same ways a printed books suits mine.
As an author, I want to present my books in formats to suit readers of these formats as well as my favorite printed books. I know my books won’t appeal to everyone, but I want them available to all those who will enjoy them.
Novels are no problem. These are easy to present as print or ebook. Audiobook is not possible for me right now.
Nonfiction books, at least mine, present challenges. I now have completed four of these. All four are filled with images, both drawings and photographs. They are set up for print, not ebook.
An ebook has several differences from a print book. The absence of page numbers and addition of hyperlinks are a couple of them. Images present challenges too. In an ebook an image needs to be centered, in line with the text and not surrounded by text. The ebook goes text, image, text, image etc.
None of my nonfiction books really work this way. “My Ozark Home” is the closest. It has an additional problem with one essay.
Frost flowers are a favorite photography subject in the fall. They are delicate, fleeting ice sculptures and each is unique. In choosing a picture for the book, I couldn’t narrow down to one.
A horseshoe of photographs surround a short commentary on finding these fragile flowers. These images float or can be moved around the text. This works for print, not ebook. I had to turn the entire page into an image.
Another factor comes with the ereaders themselves. Photographs do not show up well on some of them. Landscape photographs don’t show well as thumbnail size images.
The final factor is the size of the ebook. My nonfiction books are around 68MB in the print versions. “My Ozark Home” finally made it down below the 15MB limit for an ebook and is available as a pdf only. You can find out more on my website.
July 18, 2018
Details, Endless Details
“My Ozark Home” is essentially finished awaiting publishing. I’ve gone on to another project: Mistaken Promises, the third Hazel Whitmore book.
Hazel Whitmore is now a teenager trying to adjust to living miles from town with no cell service. She does have internet now, although, as is typical in rural Missouri, it is slow, maddeningly slow.
Life should be settling down. That would be a boring book. Books need excitement, things happening. Hazel’s life flares up, target of someone with a grudge in “Mistaken Promises.”.
Once the question of who this someone is was settled, the book draft got written. Now the rewriting and editing are in full swing. Now all the details need attention.
Hazel loves to cook. She started cooking in “Broken Promises” as a way of coping with her hidden grief. Focusing on cooking let her mind relax. Cooking still relaxes her.
Hazel now has cookbooks, her grandmother’s recipe box and new foods to experiment with. These recipes are based on ones I use. I’m a casual cook, liking the process, but rarely having the time for special recipes. I have dietary restrictions and habits so I change recipes to suit these.
This will not work very well for recipes included in “Mistaken Promises.” I will have to follow the recipes – mostly – to make sure they are right before putting them in the book’s recipe section. At present there are fourteen foods Hazel makes. Some are repeats from previous books.
Hazel and Lily will take pictures for the local paper over the summer using their DSLR camera, a lucky find. That is, they will once they decipher the instructions.
My camera is not a DSLR. Luckily I do have access to the proper instruction book. Study time followed by rewrite time is on the agenda.
A county fair is part of the action. I’ve been to county fairs years ago. Still, I plan to check out the local version this year. More details.
At times ignoring these details is tempting. Write it so it sounds right. No one will notice. Wrong.
I remember an old story about the original Star Trek series. A new director wanted Sulu to reach up across his console to do some maneuver. He protested. Yes, the reach would be dramatic, except the button the director wanted pushed was the self destruct button. And the fans would point this out loudly.
Back to researching and fixing all those details.
Hazel Whitmore is now a teenager trying to adjust to living miles from town with no cell service. She does have internet now, although, as is typical in rural Missouri, it is slow, maddeningly slow.
Life should be settling down. That would be a boring book. Books need excitement, things happening. Hazel’s life flares up, target of someone with a grudge in “Mistaken Promises.”.
Once the question of who this someone is was settled, the book draft got written. Now the rewriting and editing are in full swing. Now all the details need attention.
Hazel loves to cook. She started cooking in “Broken Promises” as a way of coping with her hidden grief. Focusing on cooking let her mind relax. Cooking still relaxes her.
Hazel now has cookbooks, her grandmother’s recipe box and new foods to experiment with. These recipes are based on ones I use. I’m a casual cook, liking the process, but rarely having the time for special recipes. I have dietary restrictions and habits so I change recipes to suit these.
This will not work very well for recipes included in “Mistaken Promises.” I will have to follow the recipes – mostly – to make sure they are right before putting them in the book’s recipe section. At present there are fourteen foods Hazel makes. Some are repeats from previous books.
Hazel and Lily will take pictures for the local paper over the summer using their DSLR camera, a lucky find. That is, they will once they decipher the instructions.
My camera is not a DSLR. Luckily I do have access to the proper instruction book. Study time followed by rewrite time is on the agenda.
A county fair is part of the action. I’ve been to county fairs years ago. Still, I plan to check out the local version this year. More details.
At times ignoring these details is tempting. Write it so it sounds right. No one will notice. Wrong.
I remember an old story about the original Star Trek series. A new director wanted Sulu to reach up across his console to do some maneuver. He protested. Yes, the reach would be dramatic, except the button the director wanted pushed was the self destruct button. And the fans would point this out loudly.
Back to researching and fixing all those details.
June 27, 2018
Writing My Haikus
Every school English class seems to have a section on poetry. The teacher talks about rhyme and meter. Then students read poems. And hate it.
Even worse are the free verse poems. Students struggle through these.
Then comes the dreaded assignment: Write your own poem.
One year my English teacher introduced a different kind of poem – the haiku. This was challenging and interesting. Even better: it was short.
A traditional haiku has three lines. The first and third have five syllables. The second has seven syllables.
The first two lines are often used to set up a picture, a mood, a happening. The last line is at odds with the first two.
The lines often speak of a season. Nature is a popular subject.
Walking my Ozark hills often evokes a mood or feeling or something happens. Putting this into an haiku becomes a mental challenge. Words must be chosen carefully to not only create the situation, but stay within the required number of syllables. The words must dig deep into the feeling or mood of the time.
“My Ozark Home” has haikus to go with each of the almost one hundred photographs. Do all of them live up to an ideal haiku? Probably not.
What I can say is that I tried.
Sample pages of “My Ozark Home” can be viewed on my website. The book will be available in print or as a pdf July 7.
Even worse are the free verse poems. Students struggle through these.
Then comes the dreaded assignment: Write your own poem.
One year my English teacher introduced a different kind of poem – the haiku. This was challenging and interesting. Even better: it was short.
A traditional haiku has three lines. The first and third have five syllables. The second has seven syllables.
The first two lines are often used to set up a picture, a mood, a happening. The last line is at odds with the first two.
The lines often speak of a season. Nature is a popular subject.
Walking my Ozark hills often evokes a mood or feeling or something happens. Putting this into an haiku becomes a mental challenge. Words must be chosen carefully to not only create the situation, but stay within the required number of syllables. The words must dig deep into the feeling or mood of the time.
“My Ozark Home” has haikus to go with each of the almost one hundred photographs. Do all of them live up to an ideal haiku? Probably not.
What I can say is that I tried.
Sample pages of “My Ozark Home” can be viewed on my website. The book will be available in print or as a pdf July 7.
