Book Production

Filling the Waiting Space With Other Work

By / May 20, 2014

I have been informed that the shipment of books will not be arriving this week after all. So now we’re back to the original schedule instead of the week early schedule. This leaves me with a space of time where I’m accumulating and processing orders, but not yet beginning to sort invoices for shipping. The busy is coming, but it is not here yet. Not only is it not here, but also I’ll be handing off portions of the work to Kiki. Even at the busiest, it won’t be as crazy as it has sometimes been.

I’m going to use the time to push through the challenge coin PDF. I my second preliminary layout for it today. The first preliminary layout showed me how I did not want to organize the stories. I knew it was wrong, but hadn’t a clue what would be right. So I talked with Howard and he said it should read as if you were sitting at a bar where folk were swapping coin stories. The moment I heard that, I knew it was the right approach. It helped me figure out what stories go where, because one story can be a set up for the next one. It gives a narrative flow to the whole project. Today I started defining the design space. I threw in a top and bottom border element which is vaguely like what we’ll actually use. I put page numbering in place. I defined the styles for basic text, pull quote text, and sidebar text. All of these things need to be refined, but when I took it to Howard he agreed that the shape is right.

One of the hard things about starting to design a new book project is that every decision extinguishes another possibility. I love the bar conversation format. I believe it is the right one for this project. But it means the death of my original concept which was to sort stories by service. Each choice narrows the project into what it will actually be. In the refining stages it is easy to see how each change makes the project better. In the early stages there are so many possibilities and they are all so ephemeral that it is hard to see which will work best. I end up spinning in paralysis of choice. Today’s work means I’m past that stage. (I hope.)

The other work I’m going to try to push forward in the next few days is writing. I’ve just hit the mid-point in my novel. I wanted to have the draft done by the end of June. I’m not sure I can make that, but it is worth reaching for. If nothing else, I want this to be a week where I average 1000 words per day across both fiction and non-fiction writing. That’s a good writing week for me. I’ve even set up a spread sheet to help me track. Now I can look back and see when I was writing and when I was focused on other things instead.

I have plenty of things to keep me usefully busy while I’m waiting for books. Yet somehow part of my brain would really just like to sit and wait. Not that waiting is fun, I don’t like it much at all, it is just that even when I’m trying to get the other things done, part of my brain is focused on waiting instead. This makes the waiting feel much longer. Not my favorite.

Watching and Counting

By / May 19, 2014

The day we open pre-orders on a new book is always a day of distraction for Howard and I. (Related news: You can now pre-order Schlock Mercenary: Longshoreman of the Apocalypse. It is one of my favorite Schlock books.) In theory we should just be able to open ordering and just go about the regular work of the day. Instead we end up watching the numbers and then doing math in our heads, because different things are possible in the months to come depending on how well the book launch does. It used to be that everything rode on book launches. We’re trying to even out the business so that there is more to sustain us in between. This reduces the stress of pre-order days, but habits formed under pressure are tricky to change. So we’ve been checking numbers a lot today.

I’m also watching the progress of the Altered Perceptions fundraiser. I don’t have much personally at stake in that one, except that I’d dearly love to see my friend Rob out from under the medical debt that has been weighing him down. I’d love even more to see the proposed foundation have enough funds to get off of the ground. I’ve donated a revised version (made more appropriate for print) of my Married to Depression post. I’ve also been making social media noise as appropriate. Possibly more than most people would prefer to have to listen to.

I’ll be watching numbers on both the pre-order and the indiegogo campaign through the end of this week. However I’m hopeful that tomorrow I can spend more time working instead of hovering. Granted, some of the hovering is necessary. I am the customer service department for the Tayler Corporation and quite a few people have needed help with their orders today. The troubles have all been easy to solve, which is good.

Despite the distraction, I’ve still done some good things today. I helped Howard eat some yummy jambalaya that he made. I visited a friend who truly needed a visit. I wrote words on my novel. The kids all got to school and then they all came home. In a few minutes I’ll remind them all that homework is a thing which exists. Though I don’t expect they have much. The teachers can count to eight-school-days-left as easily as my kids can. Also that last day is only about two hours long, so it hardly counts. Field day doesn’t count as a real school day either. We’ve reached the point where books are being turned in and desks are starting to be cleared out. Soon I’ll be figuring out how to work with the kids home all day long. But for tomorrow, I send them to school and have a normal work day. Today was a day of counting. Tomorrow I go back to work.

Strength of Wild Horses Available Now

By / May 5, 2014 / 1 Comment


There it is. The Strength of Wild Horses made into a book. I wrote it. Angela illustrated it. Three hundred people backed the Kickstarter project that funded the printing. The books arrived. I sent rewards to Kickstarter backers. And now the book is available. You can buy it in our store by clicking that link or on the picture above. Or on Amazon.com


Don’t the books look pretty together? They match.

It has been a long road getting to this point, but here it is. Excuse me while I go happy dance for a bit.

Pondering the Sources of Errors

By / March 28, 2014

I was talking with my friend Mary the other day and she was telling me a tale of behind-the-scenes frustration in publishing. They happen frequently to many of my nationally published author friends. An example of the sort of snafu that occurs is Mary’s story about how one of her books was released without its first sentence. Mistakes happen and they can be terribly frustrating to the people they happen to.

I’ve never had someone else mess up one of my books. This does not mean that Cobble Stones, Hold on to Your Horses, Strength of Wild Horses, XDM X-Treme Dungeon Mastery, or the Schlock books are error free. Far from it. They all have errors. Every single book that I’ve helped to make has something about it that I would like to fix. Even the books that we’ve re-printed. You’d think that on a reprint we could fix all the errors. We try to, but we still miss some or accidentally introduce others. All books have flaws.

So as I listened and commiserated with Mary’s story, I wondered whether it was better to be frustrated and helpless, or to be frustrated and responsible. I don’t have an answer to that. Neither situation is enviable.

Re-Considering the Covers of the Cobble Stones Books

By / March 21, 2014 / 2 Comments

I’ve been increasingly aware over the last year that there is something lacking in the covers of my Cobble Stones books. I was pleased with the covers when I made them, but even then I thought they could probably be better. I didn’t know how to make them better using the skills I already possessed. I couldn’t even see why they were wrong, I just had a vague sense that they could be better somehow. I called it good enough and put the covers on the books. Then they didn’t sell. Not only that, but I watched during conventions when all the other covers on the table got perused or picked up and examined. The Cobble Stones covers did not. Ever. The only time those books sold was when someone who reads this blog came to the table specifically looking for them, or when people listened to me read out loud from one of them.

I’ve spent some time trying to figure out what to do differently, particularly as I’m contemplating releasing a new book in the series this year. I’m going to need another cover and I didn’t want to replicate the mistakes I made with the first two. So I did what I should have done before designing covers. I went out and found several books that are very like mine in tone and content. Then I stared hard at the covers. I found they all were mostly plain with a single image and then text. In comparison the cover of Cobble Stones 2011 is busy and confusing.

I chose to photograph photographs because that was within my skill set. I chose images that had actually featured on the blog, because that seemed appropriate to me. I thought that having lots of images reflected the episodic nature of the book’s contents. I tried to make sure the images had an implied journey. Up close you can see all those things. From more than two feet away, or at thumbnail size, the book just looks…brown with something jumbly going on.

In contrast, Kennison’s book grabbed me from across the room. The blue drew me in and the title captured me. In fact, that is how I found Kennison’s book. A teacher had it on her desk during a parent teacher conference. I kept sneaking glances at the cover and scribbled down the title at a moment when the teacher thought I was taking notes on my student.
Here is another stark comparison.

For the Cobble Stones 2012 book I was in a tearing hurry. It is even less cohesive than the first Cobble Stones cover. With the first cover I refined it multiple times and engaged the help of a friend with an artistic eye. We shot all sorts of arrangements and selected the best one. For the second cover, I did it all myself in the space of an afternoon. It shows. None of the images match to any of the essays that are inside it. All they share in common is the fact that they appeared on this blog during 2012. I suppose that is fine for a sampler book, but the cover image is supposed to be an advertisement for the contents, not an extension of them.

The cover for My Grandfather’s Blessings demonstrates to me the importance of a good subtitle. In creative non-fiction, memoir, and essay books the title catches the reader, the subtitle elaborates and sells the book. I need better titles than: Cobble Stones with a year appended. I need to make clear that these are books in the Cobble Stones series, but each book should have its own title and subtitle. I suspect the first two will always retain the titles they currently have. I intended them as samplers, and they’ve served that purpose. Incidentally this will also solve a problem I’ve had when packing and shipping orders. The titles of the books are so similar that I have to pay special attention to which book was ordered. In fact I put the words “snow” and “sand” into the item description just to help me differentiate. This is manageable with two books, but could get very problematic with more.

For the print editions of the first two books, I’m stuck with these covers for awhile. I have over a hundred copies of each book and it doesn’t make sense to spend money re-printing them when they still haven’t broken even. I’ll continue to sell them at conventions and use them for promotional purposes. The next Cobble Stones book will be different. I may try to do a more thematic arrangement of essays. I’ll definitely see if I can work with a cover designer who has the necessary skills to produce the right cover.

Of course the other reason the Cobble Stones books haven’t sold is because I’ve put so very little energy into marketing them. People can’t buy books if they don’t know the books exist. With both books, I kicked them out into the world with very little support because there were so many other things going on at the time. I hope I can do better for future books.

By the way, I highly recommend The Gift of an Ordinary Day by Katrina Kennison and My Grandfather’s Blessings by Naomi Remen. They are both excellent.

Strength of Wild Horses Advance Copies

By / March 20, 2014

With all the other things going on, I forgot to share the joyous news that I’ve received my advance copies of Strength of Wild Horses. They are beautiful. They match the original Hold on to Your Horses books in all the ways that I hoped they would. I am really excited for the rest of the books to arrive so that I can send them out into the world. Naturally the Kickstarter backers have already had a chance to read the book. I sent them all a PDF, as I promised. I really like fulfilling promises. So happy.

A Day for an Inventory of Creative Projects in Process

By / March 13, 2014

This morning my email informed me that the advance copies for Strength of Wild Horses should arrive at my door tomorrow. Opening that package will let me know if the books are everything that I want them to be. I’ve been through this with fourteen different books, but I still get nervous when I know the package is coming.

At lunch, Howard and I met with Tracy and Laura Hickman to talk about XPC (Xtreme Player Codex), which is the follow up book to XDM (Xtreme Dungeon Mastery). Howard and Tracy will be meeting again next week for a massive brainstorming and outlining session. I’m excited to see the results of that. This fall I will get to do the editing and layout for the book. We hope to release it next spring. So a new project is underway.

This afternoon I picked up a color test print of LOTA. This is for the final pass where I scan once again for errors that I’ve missed. I found some. Tomorrow I’ll find more. Then I’ll fix all of them. Then I’ll upload it and tell the printer “Go.” Two months from now it will be advance copies from LOTA that will arrive and make me nervous.

Also this afternoon I sent postcards and note cards off to print. These are backer rewards from the Strength of Wild Horses Kickstarter. Tomorrow Kiki will help me stretch the canvas prints so that they are ready to go. That only leaves the bookplates. Mid-April is when I need to have everything in hand so that I can mail books to backers. Then I will have fulfilled the promises I made.

This evening Howard and I sat down to watch Stripped, a documentary about cartoonists and cartooning. Howard is in it multiple times, which makes me quite happy. It is a brilliant work of documentary film making and made me glad that we participate in this amazing tradition. I highly recommend picking it up on iTunes and watching it. You can pre-order now. It releases on April 1, 2014.

Somewhere in the middle of the other things, I put together book binders for Massively Parallel and The House in the Hollow. MP is the next Schlock book and it exists in a binder because there are white spaces for Howard to fill. HITH you’ve never heard of before, because before yesterday I didn’t have a name for it. This is my novel in progress, which currently has a word count just over twenty thousand. I’m quite pleased that the name for it showed up, because I was pretty stumped. HITH gets a binder because I need to be able to glance at earlier chapters, scribble revision notes in the margins, and keep track of where I’m at. I’m used to paper as part of my editorial processes, so this seems like it will work for me.

As soon as I complete a few of the projects listed above, I’ve got lots of projects lined up to take the available space. The challenge coin PDF is of first importance. It represents an unfulfilled promise. There are family photo books, my printed copy of this blog for 2013, and then the 2013 Cobble Stones book. I want all of them done by July.

I’m glad that my life has so many creative projects in it. They bring me joy.

The Messy Desk of Many Projects in Process

By / March 5, 2014

This was my desk about halfway through this morning.

My desk is not usually this buried in piles of stuff, (that would drive me insane) but yesterday I was in the middle of copy edits for LOTA which spread out everywhere. The arrangements of those papers would allow me to pick up where I left off. Then this morning we ordered some lapel pins, which poked the financial section of my brain and I could tell I was going to fret over the bill for those pins until I opened up the accounting and proved to my brain that yes, we really do have the money and this is a good idea. So you can see me mid-accounting on top of being mid-copy edits. You can also see a stack of Strength of Wild Horses art, a manila folder full of postage and invoices ready to be shipped from the warehouse, a returned package, the black binder with the rough cut of Massively Parallel, and lots of other reminder notes. I took this photo at the maximum messy point of the day. Within an hour all the financial stuff was cleared off. Within two, I’d taken care of the shipping things. The copy edits are still using most of the desk landscape because I’ll tackle them tomorrow.

Despite the messy desk, things are going very well. I don’t know if we’ve caught up after being sick, but I’m not really trying to keep score anymore. Mostly I’m just trying to make sure that each day contains the right mix of work, parenting, house stuff, writing time, and relaxing time. It’s been pretty effective the last couple of weeks, so I’ll continue.

Adding Something to an Already Full Book (and Life)

By / February 26, 2014 / 1 Comment

I’ve been working on Schlock books this week. Longshoreman of the Apocalypse will be heading to print in about a week. I’ve also been working on Massively Parallel, which will be the biggest Schlock book we have ever made. The page count is 256 pages in the preliminary layout. It was really important to lock down the page count so that Howard could have a firm number of pages to plan for the bonus story. It is a sad day when Howard has written a ten page bonus story and the book only has seven blank pages. It hasn’t happened to us yet, but I’ve been afraid of it often enough that I started working layout early and nailing down the basic layout before telling Howard to start writing.

I knew that MP was going to be big when I started working. In fact both Howard and I were afraid that it was going to be much bigger. We worried about spine strength and whether we ought to split the story into two books. So my driving focus as I began to put strips into place was “waste no space.” In most Schlock books I’m very careful not to split up a multi-row strip across pages, even if I have to add white space to do it. For MP, I broke that rule some. I still tried, particularly in dramatic story moments, but I leaned toward taking less space. Then there we were with 256 pages and nineteen of them were awaiting a bonus story. Then I talked to Howard about my process. He agreed to the necessity of splitting multi-row strips across pages, but asked that I go back through and make sure I wasn’t splitting them across page turns. I knew that I had and we certainly had enough spare pages to re-shuffle. But how many pages would it take? Every page added meant a white space created for which Howard would have to draw margin art.

I was surprised then when the very first added page had a cascading effect through the following thirty pages. I shifted strips around, placing for dramatic effect and to keep multiple rows together. At the end of thirty pages, I was staring at a blank page. I had just majorly improved the book and not reduced the number of pages available for bonus story. I went through the whole book that way, optimizing for story instead of space preservation, and I ended with a 256 page book that had 13 pages available for bonus story.

It is counter-intuitive, but there are times when adding a thing does not result in less for all the other things. In January we added cello lessons for Patch and horseback riding lessons for Gleek. These things combine to use up at least four hours of my time per week. As packed as my schedule gets, it does not seem I can spare those hours. Yet these things slipped right into our lives without even a ripple. If anything, I’ve seen a reduction of stress and an increase in productivity. That was unexpected. I’m thinking about this because there is a writers group that I’m considering adding to my life. Logically it is going to use up some time that could be spent on other things, but I hope it is going to do that magic trick where it just enters my life without diminishing the time and energy that I have available for all of my other things.

Intense Work Day

By / February 25, 2014

Yesterday staying focused on the positive took lots of conscious effort. Today, not so much. Perhaps that is because today was a project focused day where I tuned out everything except what was right in front of me. The noise turns off when I’m hyper-focused on a project. This was the first hyper focused day I’ve had in a long time and I re-surfaced with lots of work done. There was also a long list of things that I did not do today. I’ll look at that list tomorrow because I’m worn out this evening and would rather dwell in a feeling of accomplishment than of failure. I guess maybe that is the hard part, learning to be glad without qualifying it or tempering it. The other hard part is staring at the chocolate brownies on my kitchen counter and not eating them because I’ve finally realized that chocolate is like jet fuel for my anxiety. And, at least today, I want to not be anxious more than I want to eat chocolate. The scales may tip the other way on a different day.

After all-day layout, Gleek’s horseback riding lessons, Patch’s cub scout dinner, and all the other things. I’m tired now. Early bedtimes for all.