Author: Bob

I am starting to see a pattern. Fall of 2017 was almost as bad. In my day job, I teach software development and databases. This fall, one of my courses, the technology changed while I was teaching it. All of my preparations, my examples and so forth were invalid. This really cut into my writing time.

As I struggle to get back to my passions, I find a barrier. It is as though the busy beavers of my day-to-day have built a dam of daily responsibilities and mundane tasks. The creative flow, now blocked, built up behind it, building pressure at the same time.

Now I have to carefully disassemble the dam, piece by piece, to let the pressure out in a controlled manner until a healthy balance has been restored. My fear, though, is that I will pull out some important structural member, allowing a flash flood of creativity that displaces my daily tasks and the ability to pay bills they provide.

Hopefully, I will be able to get back into the swing of things and create some stuff. I also need to get back to promoting my novel, Cordell’s Rebellion.

One of my former students has asked if she can provide cover art for my next novel. She is a good illustrator, so I am excited to see what she comes up with. As a matter of propriety, I had to insist that I pay her for the work (she wanted to give it as a gift) because she is a former student. I will also make sure that she gets proper credit for the cover art.

The other side of that is the imperative to complete the second novel. The first draft is about four-fifths done. I need to finish the first draft, diagram the crap out of it to look for structural flaws, do all the grammar and spelling checks, and complete a few more drafts. That shouldn’t take too many more lifetimes. If I really crack down, it should be easy. I just need to do it. I also need to keep up with daily responsibilities.

I’ve always heard it said that good writers don’t find time to write, they make time to write. That is going to have to be my way of doing things. I have to shoehorn time to write and be generally creative. If I don’t the rest of life will take it over.

Walked I willy-nilly     on winding way when
I saw something settled      in the silt at the side
a beverage bottle      blindly be-thrown
by littering lout      with no love for the land
a wastrel without      the wisdom of the world
blighting the beauty      of my beloved byways
earning the enchantment      the elves can employ
to punish this person      polluting the paths
a curse coming to condemn      the un-cautious culprit
to terrors and tremors      and ingrown toenails

The changes to the layout of the novel seemed to work, at least as far as the title page and the other front matter. The actual content of the book still had an issue. This was going to take some exploration. I think it may now be fixed.

The trick had to do with using Microsoft Word Professional 2016. Barnes and Noble Press let you upload your work as a formatted Word document or as a PDF. Converting from Word to PDF proved troublesome, so I used Word. It occurs to me now that the issue with the transformation may have been the same on I had with the publishing.

The book has two sections. The first is the title page and assorted front matter. Those pages do not have page numbers in my case. The second section is the actual text of the book and should have page numbers starting on page one of the story. Word lets you create section breaks and start the numbering on the start of the section.

There is an issue, however, if you use the default sections. One of the most annoying things about any Microsoft product is that it tries to be helpful. In most cases, it is about as helpful as a four-year-old. In this case, the default section settings try to optimize your layout so that you have no extra blank pages. This can end up, like for my novel, starting page one on the even side of the paper.

To fix this, you have to go to the Layout tab in their ribbon toolbar and specify that you want a section that starts on the first odd page. They have several choices, but unless you know to look for them, you would sit with the same frustration that I had. (When the revolution comes, I’m sure the Microsoft people will be lumped in with politicians and other hated figures.)

My hope is that this will finally fix the issue. I need to get it settled so I can start real promotion of the novel. I also need to stop working on it because my day job has just gotten busy with the start of the semester. By whining here, maybe this will help someone else too.

When last we visited our newly-printed novel, all the pagination was effectively correct except for being one page off. That meant the title page showed up on the left side instead of the right and all the page numbers appeared almost in the gutter. With some simple instructions from the publisher, I made changes. Now to see what effect the changes had.

The process was easy enough. As noted in earlier posts, I’m printing through Barnes and Noble Press. They have a good website that makes it easy to submit your manuscript and covers for publication. The site is short on instructions, so there is a bit of a learning curve. However, the responses from Customer Service have been relatively prompt and helpful.

The steps for making a change to the manuscript are almost the same as the steps for creating the project originally. You simply go to the book project on the dashboard, click on the ellipses in the upper right corner for the item to be changed, and choose “Edit”. From there, the site walks you through the same steps as creating the project, but you only have to upload new things. Once done, the processing starts.

A side effect of this process is that your book is not available for sale during the processing phase. I did note that the edit processing did not take as long as the original processing. There’s no way to tell if that was because I was just editing or if the servers were not as busy. Be prepared for a wait.

My new set of promotional copies are on their way. They should arrive about Thursday. I can start my devious plan to get them into the hands of people who may be able to encourage others to buy. It’s also just cool to have a box filled with copies of your novel in your car; it makes the publishing feel less abstract.

Unfortunately, my day job starts up with the fall semester. The last two weeks have ran me ragged trying to get ready. One of the disadvantages of teaching technology is that it is never the same from year to year. At least I managed to outline and make notes for a horror short story involving sock puppets (don’t ask). As the term settles, I should be able to get back to more writing-related activities.

It was quite exhilarating to actually hold a physical copy of my novel in my hands. For years, I dreamed about it. I couldn’t wait to start handing out promotional copies to get it into people’s hands. What I should have done was taken the time to inspect it better. Now I need to get some changes made.

First I noticed that the title page was on the wrong side of the sheet. In a traditional novel in our culture, you can open the book to the title page and the title will be printed on the right hand side. For my novel, it was on the left hand side. Okay, I thought, that’s odd but it’s a relatively minor thing.

It was not minor. Instead, it was a symptom of a larger issue. All the pages were moved to the wrong side of the sheet, i.e. off by one page. All the pages were there and otherwise laid out well, but the page numbers were in the gutter (the side nearest the spine) instead of the outer margin.

Since this is my first novel, I will assume that I screwed up. When I approved the layout, I did so online instead of looking at a physical copy, so I didn’t notice. I’m also the one who put together the electronic form of the novel for submission, so that is probably where it happened.

For the moment, I have a message to Barnes and Noble Press to see what I can do to fix the issue. My hope is that I can just make the paperback version unavailable for a very short time, upload a new file for the contents, and then make things available again. Fortunately, I have yet to do my promotion plan and haven’t spent any money on that.

I will chalk this up to a learning experience. I always tell people that when things don’t go smoothly it makes for a better story. I will have to heed my own advice.