Disappointed with Lulu

I use Lulu as my printer/distributor for printed books. One of their free services is called Extended Reach (well, they call it extendedREACH, with insane and pointless capitalisation). It adds your book to  bibliographic databases in the US and UK and makes your work available on Amazon. Once enabled, the data should appear in those places after 6-8 weeks.

Both my novels started out with covers designed by me, then eventually got professional covers. I wrote about Turner's cover here, and CF2K's cover here.

The new Turner cover was uploaded to Lulu in October 2012 (c. 26 weeks ago)
The new CF2K cover was uploaded to Lulu in January 2013 (c. 15 weeks ago)

Guess what? Lulu still hasn't sent that data to Amazon, which still displays the old cover. So much for '6-8 weeks' - it is now half a year since Turner got a new cover!

Amazon.co.uk - wrong print covers (image taken 2013-05-17)

My writing bookshelf

What's on my 'writing' bookshelf? Now you know. The books on the right are the reference works I use most often, and will always be part of my writing shelf. I like to keep them nearby.

I have other shelves downstairs full of books that are reference works or inspiration for when I work on new stories in the future (including books on astronomy, deep sea fish, death metal in Norway, and the science of flight). After that those books will move on to lives in the hands of others. But my office shelf, above, will outlast them all.

If you're a writer do you have a writing bookshelf? If you're not a writer, do you have a collection of reference books of some kind?

PS I've just remembered: I have a dictionary too, but I keep that by the bed. The OED. I did try reading it from cover to cover, but am only up to letter B. The structure is logical and well thought out but the subject matter is quite random and the character development almost nonexistent, so that project ended up in hiatus.

The day is a Turner (ha ha)

I write because I have to, but communicating with readers is the thing that makes the afterglow enjoyable. I was a bit grumpy this morning, but then got an email from a reader who was reading both my books for a second time. It has to be a good sign. I grinned.

Then I had a wonderfully self-effacing message from someone else saying that they had finished Cold Fusion 2000 and written a review.

"Well, Karl, with the gardening already done at the weekend, with a warm glow from having just watched my lad win his football cup final, what better to do on such a sultry bank holiday afternoon than dust off a lounger, grab a cold one or two, and rattle through Cold Fusion 2000. An amateur reviewer of limited intellect can never really do justice to such a work and the craft involved, and another day would give a different take, but I've had a go and put some considered words on LibraryThing and at Goodreads."

And what a lovely review it is. I really felt that Ian 'got it', and he touches on a few elements which I hadn't mentioned before (since the CF2K FAQ is already a million pages long). It is such a nice thing when you've been able to communicate something that is in between the words, through the lines, and in the shadows of the sentences. It means you've at least partially succeeded, and by the powers of Greyskull that feels mighty. So I grinned some more and suddenly my day was better. Putting a book out there isn't the end; selling a book isn't a one-way process. So thank you to all the people who have read my books and even bigger thanks to everyone who has written reviews and rated them. One day I'll be far better known, maybe even sell some books, and if so it will be thanks to the kindness of people who took the time to read my scribblings and then even more time to think about them and champion them. I know a number of writers and I'm certain they feel the same way.

Get in touch or keep in touch

On my 'Contact' page there are details of how to find me online. It mentions my mailing list - sign up for it if you want to be told when I have a new book out. And if you use Facebook then feel free to 'Like' my page there. It's the place where I normally post reviews and news. I'll probably do some book giveaways (of other people's work!) from time to time as well.

So you'll find me here, there and everywhere, and I hope some of you stay with me on this journey.

The flow of a story

Things have moved on a lot since I last blogged about the structural work I was doing on my novel. I've broken the previous draft into pieces and spent time reassembling them like a jigsaw. The current table is now much more colourful and information packed, with extra columns for the day of the week, rows for transitions between sections, and different colours to show where scenes are set. It's almost at the point when I can assemble all my notes and previous drafts into the order governed by the master plan table and start rewriting. Of course, first I'll strip out all formatting using notepad.exe. Since things have built up over the years from different versions of Word and different style sets the underlying formatting is probably a mess. Best to nuke it. Believe me, it is quicker to go through with a consistent style adding occasional italics back in than it is to try and format an e-book from a Word.doc that is a complete mess of hidden codes. I've been there and it wasn't pretty,

I've always been interested in Kurt Vonnegut's mapping of stories as graphs. There's a lovely graphic explaining it here, or just watch the video below. I'll wait while you do that.

Microfiction

I got distracted yesterday by a flash fiction competition. I thought "Hey! I have one already written, I could enter that!" It turned out my existing story was more than three times too long, since the limit is 99 words. 99 words! It's amazingly few to tell a story. Try it. I started drafting a new one, which hovered around 104 words despite all my chopping and polishing.

Having an external limit sometimes leads to greater creativity as you work around the constraints. I decided that instead of a long word count I would make each word work harder, and allow multiple interpretations. So far it is ambiguous enough to sustain three different meanings. It will be interesting to see if I can pull it off.

The competition is the New Welsh Review Flash In The Pen - Microfiction Competition. Write something. Enter. The joy with such a small word count is that it takes only minutes to write 99 words but much longer to polish them. It's like an equation, add and subtract, change variables, strike out a line and start again. Pretty much prose poetry, which is always worth practising.

Cold Fusion 2000 nominated

I found out the other day that Cold Fusion 2000 has been nominated for the 2013 Carapace Prize for Best Indie Novel. It was a complete surprise to me, and left me grinning like a Neoclinus blanchardi. At that time I was one of three nominees - now there are four, and the list is sure to grow, but knowing I was one of the earliest to be included makes me glow like a Lobate ctenophore.

PS Don't worry, I am human. Just.

'M is for Monster' - anthology review

M is for Monster by John Prescott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I loved the concept for this collection – 26 letters of the alphabet, 26 stories, each letter gets its own story and monster. Some were guessable, some were left-field, and with some I still didn’t know the relevance of the letter even after finishing the story! It doesn’t matter though, and doesn’t affect enjoyment of these well-written tales. As usual with this kind of thing I’ll pick out my very favourite stories and explain why I liked them, though I won’t give away the monster if I can help it. So, my favourites were:

My writing week

Every day in Wales is just like this

Writing is so nice. Today I was working on structure for novel 3, since if I get that perfect before I start re-writing it will save loads of time and keep me on track, even though it looks like distraction tactics to an observer.

I'm really pleased with the good reviews of my work recently: and I didn’t even have to sleep with anyone! On second thoughts, just as well, that could lead to bad reviews.

I ran up and down the local cemetery a few times today, possibly a 45% gradient, it is my current favourite ‘quick burst’ exercise as a break from writing. Hard work in the sun, and with the ever-present possibility of a rotten hand grabbing me from underneath the ground. Burpees are a close second. I also want to do one of the zombie fun runs this year, which will give me something to aim for. Either Zombie Run or Zombie Evacuation. Do any of you have any recommendations of good exercises for writers so that we don't become decrepit from days sat on our arses?

Talking of exercise has made me want some more so I'm off to watch the Youtube video again...

Business cards #2

My new cards. Five different front designs. 

The bottom right shows the backs of the cards.

I've nearly run out of the Moo Minicards I ordered back in 2011 so decided to get some more. They have many uses: one of mine is to slip them into my books when sent out for review. I had been thinking of holding out until my third novel is published, but in the end decided not to wait, since I can always get more later! Plus, since I write in two genres, these won't go out of date - any future horror books can have a Turner card/bookmark slipped in, and any future literary ones get a CF2K card. So if people like the book they then know what my previous book of that genre was, and might go and buy a copy.

This time I went for the greenest option, which excludes the minicards (Moo still don't offer a green paper option for them). So regular-sized business cards it was; and to be honest, they are a better form factor for displaying a book cover. They're just not so obviously like a mini bookmark when tucked into one of your books.

If you want to get some Moo cards (or just look at their options) then if you follow this link then you will get 10% off your first order, and I gain some credit! My order also included a card saying that I could pass on the code for people to get 15% off their first pack of 50 business cards (enter code G2MSCG at checkout). I imagine you can only use one code or the other. Remember that the cost of promotional cards are legitimate expenses to include in your self-assessment tax return if you are a writer.

Working on sub plots

Columns for plots and sub plots, rows for scenes and events in the novel,
running in order from top to bottom. Explained in detail below.

You have the idea for your novel, and the central plot. This includes what is at stake for the protagonist(s). Love? A glittering career? Survival? Unravelling a mystery? In itself that may leave a rather straightforward story, so it is useful to weave in sub plots to add depth. The simplest is to throw in a love interest but that is rather predictable (and is the Hollywood sub plot of preference). One of the criticisms of a draft version of one of my earlier works was that it needed more fillings in the sandwich, more sub plots to keep the reader engaged. And that's what I'm working on at the moment.

I've already blogged about the process of listing what I already have from the previous draft. Next I created a table in Word. I headed it with the protagonist's name, then used headings for each sub plot, however minor. So we have a column for each sub plot, split into rows. The top row is the start of the novel, the final row is the end. Now and again I would create a heading by merging cells, representing some important section of the novel, breaking it into more manageable chunks.