Meredith Bond's Blog, page 28

Merry Go Round

Emotion creates conflict. Conflict creates emotion. Round and round and round I go[image error] (get it? Couldn't help the play on my name — when you're name is Merry, you have to have fun with it!) Anyway, these are the two big take-aways I got from the Michael Hauge seminar I attended all day on Saturday.

The very first thing Hauge said, the very first thing in my notes, is "Successful stories, stories that sell, create a positive emotional response in the person who reads it." And then, "You must elicit emotion to be a successful writer."

Yeah, I get that. I read novels to escape from the world. I read to live someone else's life for a little while. I want to get emotionally involved in a story. If I don't, it wasn't worth my time. I also want the thrills and action, and the shiver of delight that comes with reading about serial killers or shape-shifters, but deep down, below the fun stuff, it is the emotion I read for. So, how do I get that emotional response in the readers of my work?

Hauge tells us. "Emotion grows out of conflict, not desire. It is the obstacles the hero must overcome that makes it emotionally involving. This is the hero's outer journey." So, it's not enough that my hero (or heroine, as the case may be) wants something. Not even that he needs something and will do whatever it takes to get it. That goal, while important, is not the be-all and end-all. It is the conflict that stops my hero from getting what he wants that creates that emotional response in my reader that I'm going for. So, there we are, conflict creates emotion. The conflict faced, endured and successfully dealt with by my hero creates in the reader a satisfying emotional experience.

But what about the opposite statement, where does that fit in? Emotion creates conflict. That's that inner journey that Hauge talks about. That's the inner longing or need that my hero has to deal with or realize that they have. This longing, according the Hauge, is created by a wound from the hero's life (usually childhood). This wound creates in the hero a belief about how the world works that, while logical, is completely wrong — that Shrek is completely unlovable because he's an ogre, that because of his stammer, Bertie (King George VI by the end of the movie) is not capable of being a strong king when his country needs him to be so. This emotion, this wound, creates conflict for the hero, a conflict that must be overcome by the end of the story.

So here I am, not feeling quite so dizzy as I did at the beginning. In my story, I need to find out what my hero's emotional wound is in order to create conflict in order to create emotion in the reader. Ha! Straight forward and in one sentence. Now I've got to get to work!

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Who Will Protect Us?

On this day, when they say that the barrier between worlds is at its thinnest, who will bar the windows and bolt the doors and protect us from the scariest of all creatures? It is not the barrier between the spirit world, or a paranormal world, and ours that I'm talking about, and the barrier is not only thin, it is completely gone.

Yes, I'm talking about the traditional publishing world and the world of self-publishing — to many, it's even more terrifying than ghosts, ghouls and goblins. The barrier is that which used to stop people who are… literately challenged? from getting published.  They are scariest being to any author — those who don't care about their craft or whether their work is grammatically correct. These are the people who just want to be published any way, right now. That is the monster I'm hiding from this Halloween. And who is going to protect me?

Who is going to bar the publishing doors from these people? Who is going to ensure that only good writers — those who work at their craft, those who care that they have not only written a good story, but a great one — are going to be the ones who get published? Well, clearly, the door has been opened so that just anybody can walk through. The problem is that they're not walking, they're running. A huge crowd of writers are jostling, pushing and shoving their way through that publishing door and there is no one to stop them. There are no agents or editors to tell them that they need to improve their writing, or fix their grammar.

There are, however, readers. And there are reviewers. Many, many reviewers. Blogs of reviewers, individual reviewers, reviewers on Goodreads and Amazon and too many other places to name. It is these reviewers and these readers who, by default, have become our gatekeepers. That elusive "Market" that economists love to talk about.

If your book is well reviewed, readers may take a chance on it. If they like it, they'll post a review where they bought it. If enough people read the reviews and buy your book, they will push it up the top-sellers lists and from there your good sales will compound themselves. There is no one else we can count on today — there is only the Market.

All we — those writers who care, who work hard, who edit and re-edit and send out work to others to tear it apart so that we can put it back together better and then edit it some more — we have no choice to put our work out there amidst the swarming Others and hope that the Market will recognize our hard work and reward us for it. We can only hope that we don't get eaten alive.

Who will protect us?

[image error]On this day, when they say that the barrier between worlds is at its thinnest, who will bar the windows and bolt the doors and protect us from the scariest of all creatures? It is not the barrier between the spirit world, or a paranormal world, and ours that I'm talking about, and the barrier is not only thin, it is completely gone.

Yes, I'm talking about the traditional publishing world and the world of self-publishing — to many, even more terrifying than ghosts and ghouls and goblins. The barrier is that which used to stop people who are… literately challenged? from getting published.  They are scariest being to any author — those who don't care about their craft or whether their work is grammatically correct, they just want to be published. That is the monster I'm hiding from this Halloween. And who is going to protect me?

Who is going to bar the publishing doors from these people? Who is going to ensure that only good writers — those who work at their craft, those who care that they have not only written a good story, but a great one — are going to be the ones who get published? Well, clearly, the door has been opened so that just anybody can walk through. The problem is that they're not walking, they're running. A huge crowd of writers are jostling, pushing and shoving their way through that publishing door and there is no one to stop them. There are no agents or editors to tell them that they need to improve their writing, or fix their grammar.

There are, however, readers. And there are reviewers. Many, many reviewers. Blogs of reviewers, individual reviewers, reviewers on Goodreads and Amazon and too many other places to name. It is these reviewers and these readers who, by default, have become our gatekeepers. That elusive "Market" that economists love to talk about.

If your book is well reviewed, readers may take a chance on it. If they like it, they'll post a review where they bought it. If enough people read the reviews and buy your book, they will push it up the top-sellers lists and from there your good sales will compound themselves. There is no one else we can count on today — there is only the Market.

All we — those writers who care, who work hard, who edit and re-edit and send out work to others to tear it apart so that we can put it back together better and then edit it some more — we have no choice to put our work out there amidst the swarming Others and hope that the Market will recognize our hard work and reward us for it. We can only hope that we don't get eaten alive.

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It's Done!

[image error]I just can't believe it. I seemed to happen so fast. This time last week I was facing HTML, trying to figure out how to deal with picture formatting. But I buried myself in my formatting, surfacing only to "reboot" my brain with an hour and a half of much needed yoga Tuesday afternoon. And then dove back down again into the formatting swamp.

But it paid off. By Wednesday evening I had uploaded my .mobi formatted file to Amazon and the following morning I uploaded the epub format to PubIt. By Friday afternoon they were both for sale.

Wednesday I realized I'd forgotten to press that final "check my file" button in CreateSpace, pressed that and got a message the next day that my book was ready for a hard proof. They told me to expect it next Friday and yet it was sitting on my kitchen table waiting for me when I came home from teaching Saturday afternoon! My head is spinning!

But I can tell you this — if I even look at the wonderful proof CreateSpace sent me, my stomach begins to churn. I have looked at this manuscript so many times in the past week, I would see a mistake if it slapped my head. I'm going to wait and have the wonderful, always supportive and eagle eyed man I call husband look at it when he gets home from his business trip on Friday. Until then, it's just going to sit and taunt me from the corner of my desk.

A very happy Diwali to those who celebrate! I'll be putting out my 14 candles on Wednesday night![image error]

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Epic Fail

… as my fifteen-year-old would say.[image error]

Well, perhaps I should moderate that. It wasn't an Epic Fail, just a minor one. I was so thrilled to have finished my textbook to go along with the beginning writing course I teach at Frederick Community College. I've been trying to get this book done for Ages. Now, finally, it's done!  Yay!

The class I teach is a continuing education class, which means I've students from age 22 through 75. Naturally, some are more tech-savvy than others, so, I wanted to be sure that the textbook would be available to everyone in whatever form they wanted it.  I decided I would sell it as an Amazon Kindle ebook (since the majority of ebook owners own a Kindle) and make it available through CreateSpace, Amazon's POD arm for those who prefer to have a physical copy in their hand.

Knowing how tedious it was going to be code the book (with its tables, pictures, outlines and bullet points — this is non-fiction, after all) into HTML, I decided to do the POD formatting first. Not a problem! I followed the directions at CreateSpace — they have handy Microsoft Word templates for you to plop your manuscript into, all formatted to the size you want your final book to be. It's really nice, really easy. I put in the jpg pictures, aligned them with the text just as I was directed. No problem. And then I filled out all of their happy little forms, figuring out how much to price the book, writing the description for the Amazon sales page and even a little blurb about me. Easy-ish. I saved my Word document as a pdf as they directed and then set to work on the cover.

Well, that was a little more difficult and I spent an hour or so trying to figure out how to save the picture as a high-quality pdf. I'm thrilled that I finally figured out to download "cutepdf" (freeware, easily available on the internet) so that I could "print" my picture directly to a pdf format. It didn't let me specify that I wanted high-quality pdf, but it's a pdf, I was happy.

All was uploaded to CreateSpace. All was right with the world — until I got an email from them the following day which told me that my jpgs were only 72dpi and needed to be 300dpi in order not to be blurry on the page. What? How do you change the dpi of a jpg? I searched everywhere on the internet and everyone said the same thing — you can't!

Argh! Hours later of trying everything anyone possibly suggested and saving my pictures as jps, as gifs, as png and as bmp, nothing worked. It was still the same dpi. Finally, I found an article that told me that in Power Point 2003, you can save a picture as a TIFF and it will come out in 300 dpi. That's terrific. I have Power Point 2007. It doesn't do that anymore. But I did find out that, even in Paint, you can save a picture as a TIFF and you get 96dpi. So, I substituted my lower resolution pictures for slightly higher ones and re-uploaded the files. I guess anyone who buys my book will just have to deal with slightly blurry pictures.

If anyone knows of another way to increase the dpi on a picture, please, please tell me!

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One Big Scary Monster — defeated!

[image error]I faced a big scary monster this week, and I'm happy to say it's gone. Reduced to a pile of simple solutions and a list of instructions (well, I've still got to make that list, but it's in my head and in a bunch of little notes on a few different pieces of paper scattered around my desk).

So, what was the monster I needed to face? HTML.

Yup. It was, to me, a big hairy monster, which I had no idea how to tackle. However, with the help of three wonderful, incredibly helpful blogs, I defeated that monster and I now have a beautiful, publishable e-book all ready to uploaded.

First, I consulted Guido Henkel's amazing blog (in seven parts!) on how to format an ebook in HTML: http://guidohenkel.com/2010/12/take-pride-in-your-ebook-formatting/. It's terrific and got me started on the right foot and reduced the monster into a much smaller monster.

For help in doing the actual coding into HTML of my manuscript, I referred to Paul Salvette's fabulous blog, http://www.paulsalvette.com/2011/08/turning-manuscript-into-clean-xhtml.html#c1. He took me from laboriously going through my manuscript putting in little

s and

s at the beginning and end of every single paragraph (which, I am so embarrassed to say I did for about 100 pages). In a few short strokes, I had all of those nasty little paragraph markers in there. Thank you, thank you, Paul! I, then, followed his simple directions to format my title page and put in a table of contents — so easy with his clear directions. That monster was now rat size.

And finally, I looked at Natasha Fondren's blog, http://www.natashafondren.com/writing/category/kindle-formatting/,  which gives lots of great tips on getting that professional polish to your ebook formatting. I think I'll be using her blog alot more when I start coding my non-fiction text book (I hope to get started on that next week — as soon as I get it back from my editor) because I've got all sorts of funky stuff in there — bullet points and subheadings and sub-[image error]subheadings, etc.

But for right now, I'm thrilled. My monster is now an adorable little mouse and I've got the first book in my YA series ready to go. I've got a beautiful cover and all is set. I've got the second book with my editor and the third… well, I think that'll be next week's blog post.

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One Big Scary Monster — Defeated!

I faced a big scary monster this week, and I'm happy to say it's gone. Reduced to a pile of simple solutions and a list of instructions (well, I've still got to make that list, but it's in my head and in a bunch of little notes on a few different pieces of paper scattered around my desk).

So, what was the monster I needed to face? HTML.

Yup. It was, to me, a big hairy monster which I had no idea how to tackle. However, with the help of three wonderful, incredibly helpful blogs, I defeated that monster and I now have a beautiful, publishable e-book all ready to uploaded.

First, I consulted Guido Henkel's amazing blog (in seven parts!) on how to format an ebook in HTML: http://guidohenkel.com/2010/12/take-pride-in-your-ebook-formatting/. It's terrific and got me started on the right foot. For help in doing the actual coding into HTML of my manuscript, I referred to Paul Salvette's fabulous blog, http://www.paulsalvette.com/2011/08/turning-manuscript-into-clean-xhtml.html#c1. He took me from laboriously going through my manuscript putting in little

s and

s at the beginning and end of every single paragraph (which, I am so embarrassed to say I did for about 100 pages) and in a few short strokes, I had all of those nasty little paragraph markers in there. Thank you, thank you, Paul! I then followed his simple directions to format my title page and put in a table of contents — so easy with his clear directions. And finally, I looked at Natasha Fondren's blog which gives lots of great tips on getting that professional polish to your ebook formatting. I think I'll be using her blog a little bit more than the others when it comes to coding my non-fiction text book (I hope to get started on that next week — as soon as I get it back from my editor) because I've got all sorts of funky stuff in there — bullet points and subheadings and sub-subheadings, etc.

But for right now, I'm thrilled. I've got the first book in my YA series ready to go. I've got a beautiful cover (see picture!) and all is set. I've got the second book with my editor and the third… well, I think that'll be next week's blog post. J

I'd rather be reading

I really want to be reading my book. Isn't that awful? I want to be reading, not writing. Well, technically, I'm in-between writing books.

I've finished editing the second in my YA series and have sent it off to my editor (if anyone needs a professional editor, tell me and I'll pass on her name, she's terrific!!). And I've finished going through her edits of the first book in my series.

So, I've been working on the grunt work of self-publishing: formatting my manuscript so that the Smashwords meatgrinder won't spit my work back at me when it tries to do its thing. It's not hard work, just boring — going through the manuscript and making sure all of my dashes are 'm' dashes, all the ellipses are ellipses and have the right spacing before and after, making sure all the styles are correct, etc., etc. It's totally mindless work.

Once that's done, I'll see what I need to do to format it for Kindle and then PubIt, since I've heard that it's better to upload directly to Amazon and B&N and not use Smashwords for that — apparently it's easier and quicker to do it yourself and makes getting paid for sales easier too. But Smashwords is terrific for all the other outlets: ibooks, Kobo, Sony, etc. And all of this work is going to pay off in a number of different ways — not only will I get my books published (always a good thing since I haven't managed to find the right traditional publishing house for my work), but after it's out there and I've done the whole thing, I will be able to teach others how I did it. I'm already signed up to teach self-publishing at Frederick Community College next semester. I'm very excited to do that! I love teaching and now I'll have something new to teach.

So back to the grunt work, even though I'd rather be reading.

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Review: Storyteller

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[image error]Storyteller by Lisa T. Cresswell

A fun middle-grade book. This is the story of a girl's attempt to find her mother and discover who she truly is. This is always a terrific theme for this age group, but Cresswell takes it one step further and put it into a wonderful world where, in an alternate universe connected to ours, live fairies, elves and all sorts of magical creatures, both wonderful and nasty. Characters are almost always more than they appear to be and relationships are intricate with a twist that makes the whole story interesting.

Although the pacing is a little slow, I kept coming back to read more, wanting to know what happens to the heroine, Lily. The story of her mother, Eleanor, which Lily reads about in a books she finds, is even more compelling than Lily's own story. Cresswell has a few problems with point of view (giving odd  points of view here and there for a paragraph at a time), it wasn't a big enough problem to jolt me out of the story completely. Less savvy readers may not even notice.

This is definitely a book into which any kid, and many adults, would be happy to disappear.

This is an e-book available at Smashwords.

[image error]

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Cleaning Out

This weekend I cleaned out my attic, just as I have been cleaning out my writing. For the past few weeks, and probably for the next two, I'm editing the second book of my YA series. You wouldn't believe all the garbage I've found as I cleaned.

In the attic was twelve years of junk; in my manuscript, pages and pages of it. I got rid of a lot of empty boxes which I'd kept to mail gifts to friends and family members. In my writing there were so many empty words like "suddenly" and "finally". I had empty boxes which were way too big to fill and send; and internalizations which took up a lot of space but slowed down the pace of my story and did nothing to advance the plot.

And the junk! Oh my goodness, there was so much junk! Packing peanuts, old clothes, and wrapping paper out the wazoo — from when my kids sold it to raise money for their school. In my writing there were words like "just" and "that" which just shouldn't be there. I needed to throw them all out,  recycling what I could. The old clothes will go to India next summer, the wrapping paper in the recycling bin. The words get tossed — there is nothing anyone could do with so many useless words.

I do have to admit, though, I shed a few tears as I looked through my memory box, which I keep up in the attic. I found my baby book, which my mother carefully kept for about the first month of my life and then only periodically filled in when something momentous happened — this is the way it is when you're the youngest child. But in the back of the book was a letter she had written to a close friend of hers. It was written over a month and detailed all that I did as a newborn and how my two older brothers reacted to this new invader in their house. It was beautiful and fascinating. And so, too, in my manuscript, did I find a few gems in my own writing, bits which I hope will make my readers feel good for having read them.

My attic is now clean, reorganized, and I even put in some insulation where there was none. And soon, too, will my manuscript be cleaned out of the garbage, reorganized to flow better and, well, there is no analogy of insulation in a manuscript is there? It's not well padded. It's even a little short. Is there heat in it? Well, no, it's written for children. But, on the other hand, someday, in the not too distant future, I'm going to show my manuscript to the world by self-publishing it. I don't expect anyone to see my attic. But it does make me feel good now that it's cleaned out.

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