Ottomans, widows, and orphans

Okay, time for more cats! (Yes, it is relevant. Keep reading.)

 "Two Jolly Kittens at a Feast," published and printed by Th. Kelly, c. 1874.

This week, I edited. Five more chapters are done. Here are the highlights (or nitpicky details, however you look at it):

1) I checked on some vocabulary. Although my book is set in its own world, the historical time period that I'm freely adapting is the early 1800's, and I'd rather not use words or objects that weren't being used at that time. So off to the dictionary I went, to check on "jiff," "thingummy," and the history of stoves. They all passed the test. 

2) "Ottoman," however, had to go. It refers to the Ottoman Empire, which doesn't exist in my book. "Footstool" made a good replacement, as well as a good excuse for the kittens above. "Gothic" had to go for the same reason.

3) I also decided to capitalize the word "Season" when it referred to The Season, the social season when debutantes make their debut.

4) And there was the usual missing period/awkward phrasing/"Wait, didn't I change that in Chapter 1? This needs to match" stuff.

Coming up this week: editing the last four chapters, plus Widows and Orphans.

"Mother and Child" by Henry Essenhigh Corke,1912. Widow? Orphan? Who knows?

There are widows and orphans in my book, and I'm not talking about my characters (although a lot of them are one or the other). I'm talking about little words, all by themselves, looking stupid. Like a single word at the end of a paragraph, alone at the beginning of an otherwise empty line, or at the top of a turned page. 

This is a typography thing, and MS Word has a setting which will prevent it, but the problem is that it prevents too much as well as leaving some pages with as many as two fewer lines than others. Using that setting gets rid of single word orphans, but also prevents a paragraph from starting on the last line of a page. After some intense research on the subject, I find that modern published novels do that all the time. But they don't seem to have orphans. Apparently I'll have to fix it manually. [loud groans]

On a more fun side, I've learned more about iStockphoto including that I could use one of their images for my cover. I've found an image I like and have started playing with the downloadable comp. Exciting stuff! Now I just need to figure out what program to use for the cover layout. . . . 

(Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the illustrations.)

Extreme editing

Editing. It's enlightening, necessary, and boring. It's hard work. It's even harder when it's my own work I'm editing, because I know it so well that my eyes want to race ahead. "Come on, I already know this stuff, keep reading!" I read the chapters aloud as I edit, but it's still easy to speed up and miss the errors.

I went into extreme editing mode this week on five chapters--the first two and the last three. I started with the last chapter because it's short, then worked backwards a couple of chapters, then decided to bite the bullet and tackle Chapter 1. You may remember I was having problems with the first page; I'm happy to report that I'm happy with it now. Still, it was a hurdle.

There are fourteen chapters in Just Like Magic, so I'm about a third of the way through. Here are the kinds of things I found to edit:

1) Typos, e.g. "mat" instead of "met." Or an exclamation point where there should have been a question mark. 

2) Word choices, e.g. "further" vs. "farther," "toward" vs. "towards." Both are okay, I just wanted to pick one. Also "Stepmother" vs. "Stepmama" vs. "Step-mama" (as a term of address). I had to pick one. The winners were "further," "toward," and "Stepmama."

3) Punctuation marks. I scanned the quotation marks to make sure they were all facing correctly, and I eliminated a few excess commas.

4) Flow. In a few spots I noticed that the sentence structure was bad, and I fixed it. Nothing big, just moving a few words around.

5) Minor plot points. I lowered one character's age by a couple of years, changed the layout of Ella's kitchen slightly, and loosened a board in the back gate to explain how a large dog could have gotten into a walled back yard. These changes will, I hope, prevent some reader comments of the "That doesn't make any sense!" variety.

I also did more research on creating covers this week, and what I learned is that I need to learn more. And I will! That and more editing, coming up this week.

What kind of self-publisher am I?

I was reading this old post on "The Book Designer" blog last week and decided to answer the question posed there by blogger Joel Friedlander: "What kind of self-publisher am I?"

He posits that there are two kinds of self-publishers. The first is "hobby publisher," someone who publishes for personal reasons and expects to spend money to publish, not make money. The second kind is "competitive self-publisher," someone who goes into it as a business, expects to make a profit, and will hire professionals to help.

Both types, he says, can be successful. You just have to know what "success" means for you.

I suppose I fall into category one. I feel fortunate that I don't need to make money at writing (I have a full-time job). I also can't afford to hire professionals to help me except in a very modest way (more about that below). What success means to me is to be able to hold in my hand a copy of my book that I can be proud of and that is available to anyone else who wants to read it.

I don't think this is an unreasonable wish for an author. Writing is an art and a craft. When other artists paint or draw or sculpt, they have their finished product in their hands when they are done. They can promote it, sell it, or hide it. Why should authors be different? Yes, authors have their manuscripts, but a manuscript is a very different thing from an actual book.

Sure, a lot of books and art is bad and unlikely to ever sell. But isn't that what the market is for--weeding things out? Galleries or publishers can be useful to artists/writers (and buyers) as filters and publicists, but I don't think it is unreasonable for any author to want to see their writing in actual book form, whether a traditional publisher wants it or not. In the end, consumers can vote with their cash if the book is out there and available.

Having labeled myself a hobby publisher, I still want to create the best book I can. I want it to be a great story, well laid-out, in an attractive cover. I may be an amateur, but I'm serious about this.

We pause now for some amateur artwork by one of my favorite artists. May I ever be such an amateur.

The Chess Game, by Sofonisba Anguissola, 1555. 

What have I done for my book this week? I have:

1) Edited some finicky stuff, e.g. use of  'til versus till. (Till won.) Also how to handle "..." One of my characters uses a lot of "..." when she talks, and I examined some published books to see how they handled it. Also cleaned up capitalization in titles such as "Your Majesty."

2) Cleaned up the "sections" in my manuscript. I didn't know there were such things as sections in MS Word until I started trying to create different headers for each chapter. The template I used from CreateSpace has each different part of the manuscript a different section, some of which I managed to blindly merge by backspacing while entering my chapters into the template. But since I wanted my headers to have the book title on the left and chapter titles on the right, I soon discovered that without manipulating the sections correctly, headers in one section applied to the whole book. This is now fixed, and every chapter has its own section and the correct headers.

3) Printed some pages to see how it actually looked on paper. Tried some different fonts and font sizes. Went back to my original. I may not be quite done playing with that.

4) Revised page one, that is, the writing. Page one has been my headache from day one. I've never been happy with it, but I almost am now. [loud cheers]

5) Wrote the first draft of my back cover blurb.

6) Started researching stock photography, looking for possible cover photos. I am encouraged to see that there is some stuff out there that might work, though my favorite wasn't free. This is one area where I might have to pay. Still, there are free photos out there and I haven't seen them all.

This week, I want to do some serious final editing, emphasis on final (well, until I see a proof copy). We'll see how that goes.

Tax number, style guide, and cat

That's my cat, Shadow, watching me work. More about him later...

After doing more research on the IRS and CreateSpace websites, I found that I don't need to get an EIN (Employer ID Number). My social security number will do just fine for CreateSpace to report my earnings with. (Earnings! Earnings? Yipes, earnings...) So that's that, although it looks pretty easy to get an EIN online through irs.gov if I ever need one.

My main writing project this week was completing my Just Like Magic style guide (or encyclopedia, as I called my file). This list of all names, places, events, times, things, dogs, and dresses in my novel has already come in handy, too. I discovered in chapter eight that I had already named my heroine's father something different in chapter one. (Is he Charles or Thomas? Make up your mind, Beth! Okay, he's Charles.) Consistency! I love it, I need it, I want it.

This style guide will also come in handy for the sequel. Oh, yes, there's a sequel. I have several chapters written, and I like the beginning, but what I need to do is figure out the entire PLOT before I do any more writing. But first things first--and that's publishing Just Like Magic.

And lastly, Shadow demonstrates his basic understanding of writing and computers.

Namely, he hasn't got any.

"Mouse? Why do you have a mouse? I will nudge your hand so you will forget about faux mice and pay attention to me me me.

"You didn't really need that hand for anything right now, did you? I will settle down right here."

Love you too, Shadow.