Two posts? In one day? Has the man too much time on his hands?

Well I’m kind of writing a very dull report at the same time as this so it’s a good way to keep my brain from turning into sand and butter. I’m hopping back and forth between this entry and the report so if I suddenly lapse into RDL half way through you’ll know what went wrong.

Firstly I’d like to point out that no two book projects are created the same way. There is no real system for the pre-amble whatsoever. Some people like to tell you that until you’re ready to hit a system you should allow the ideas for a project to jazz free form in your mind. I think this is rubbish. Do whatever you have to do to get the idea out of your head and onto the page. For me this consists of a number of various techniques none of which are ever identical because *stories* are never identical. The jazz free-forming of ideas plays a part in generating these research tasks but then you actually have to do them before you move forward.

For Virus 1.0, for example, I made a bunch of league tables and contestant profiles for the mythical sword-fighting tournament. For The Figure of the Sorcechanic I drew a map of the Greater Dominon, for my vampire project I am in the process of researching the history of the UK and Hollywood film industries from the 50s until now. Each story makes different demands on you as a storyteller and the kind of groundwork you do will reflect how your story will likely evolve. If your story was a recipe this would be the difference between getting together the ingredients for a flan or the ingredients for a roast dinner.

Once you get beyond that stage the tasks become far more similar in nature, chopping, whisking, heating, basting etc. in our cookery analogy. In writing this translates to character notes, plot arc writing and so on and so forth.

But Grendel’s Basement isn’t nearly there yet. It’s quite curious that the project comes with a title attached. My far more well formed vampire project still has no title, those, I guess, are just the breaks. So what have I got for GB? And what do I intend to do to push the story into full on design mode?

Well, I have the obvious premise that this is a haunted house story and I already know that houses tend to be haunted by ghosts, malevolent spirits or a mixture of both. Where the beings terrorising the protagonists are ghosts often the spectres are reminders or indicators of the past corruptions or issues of the protagonists and also a sub plot. The more abstract the spectres become - the more they tend toward being spirits or demons - the more direct the assault on the psyches of the protagonists become.

GB is going to feature both ghosts of the past and evil spirits/demons. So essentially the ghosts are going to become characters in their own right and should, perhaps, be more distinct than they would be if they were just balls of evil or direct reflections of my main cast’s psychological flaws.

Our evil spirits are to be named Ketter, Blyre, Looshus, Kwinss and, of course, Grendel - Grendel being the chief among them. I didn’t just pluck these names out of mid air, however, each name relates to one of the flaws that I want to probe that lie beneath the surface of the main family, respectively: Contempt, Lies, Betrayal, Posessiveness and Enablement/Appeasement. The family itself maps over these spirits to create a dark opposite to each member of the family.

Now, what I’ve basically discussed here is the kind of thing that, if I didn’t discuss it here, might have to be mined out of the text by successive generations of critical thinkers and writers. One of the great questions of literature is how much a given artist is self-aware of the motifs and themes of a piece they are writing. For me, the answer is very aware. From my perspective I believe I’m supposed to know about the wiring under the board. Maybe other writers think this hampers their creativity. For me I can’t work without a scaffold.

I’ve also jotted down some notes about other important characters. The protagonist’s love interest needs her own flaws, in this case a tendency to self doubt and self pity. We also have the previous occupants of the house, whose grisly deaths will be the precursors of the eventual stand off with the five main spirits.

In addition to this character sketching I have plans to make, er, plans of the house. Where rooms are and how they’re laid out is going to be essential knowledge in constructing the story. There are also reasons why the path of interior modelling of the house is going to be essential too.

To summarise.

I don’t ever do the same initial preparations for a project twice. The parts that lead up to the process of actually creating the novel are various. Probably this bleeds into how the writing actually takes place. My next steps once I have my floor plan will be to block out events and timescales to make the novel more structured which will likely be the subject of the next writing based entry.

Maybe it’s something in the air today but while buttering my sandwiches I found myself staring one of the more important questions about my methodology in the face. Most writing related ephemera on the internet is heavily based around the idea that you want some agent to acknowledge your genius and push the manuscript on to a publishing house who will then whack off a couple of thousand copies and secure some sort of sale or return/Amazon mark down distribution package and eventually you will see your work in print by “the orthodox route”.

As has been explained I have no time for orthodoxy. The underlying issue on today’s rant is why?

Well, I guess, like everything else it comes down to community. Every profession has a community. Some people dream of being policemen, others dream of working in advertising, or journalism, or being respected in the scientific community. Writers are a community too. You want to be able to hunker down with the authors you loved as a peer, an equal, a respected member of that community. No one really dreams of being anything purely to do the job. If you knew that you would never be part of the writer’s inner circle before you started that would be one hell of a demotivator.

It’s all very well that some stranger somewhere who can’t string an elegant sentence together on their own behalf loves your book. That’s swell, really. But if the people who do the same job have no love for you that’s much harder to bear. Community is important. It helps define who we are and what we’re about.

I was born into the community of writers. Not that I was accepted as a producer of top quality fiction from day one but I’ve been to the parties and I’ve met some of the players since I was a little boy until some time in my late teens. A decade, when young, of actually getting to hang out with people like Terry Pratchett, Lionel Fanthorpe and my dad to name but a few. Writers are cool. Brian Aldiss was a nice guy, Dave Langford’s smart as a whip, Kim Newman’s incredibly fascinating, Douglas Hill was a really good heart. And I’ve met them, sat down to dinner or lunch with them and took the lifestyle for a ride with the training wheels.

And it’s all good.

But it’s not me. I don’t really care about that community. I have my own community of peers professionally and personally. I admire a guy who can write a solid bit of code or resolve an OS problem far more than someone who can write a solid chapter, for real. I lunched with Alex Dady and Tarran Walker and that means as much to me. Personally my peers are much closer, we are brought together via this here intarwebnet and there are few career based overlaps. I seek their approval far more than anyone else.

In the end it is these guys, my friends that I met through the web who really give me the encouragement and strength to write. I couldn’t give a toss if Stephen King thinks my novel is cute (well no, obviously I care about that as much as anyone else who likes my work but no *more*) but when my friends get all excited about my work then I get a bit more excited by it.

I’ve rarely been more touched than when people have, in recent days, whacked out their plastic and been champing at the bit to buy a copy of Hidden Predators… and that’s a book I’m doing for practice.

I have had a couple of pieces published by paying/orthodox methods. No one I knew except me ever read them though. Certainly no one paid for a copy to my knowledge. Perhaps that was because it was back in the days before the internet. Maybe it’s just that the distribution channels were obscured back then. Sure, now people can buy my stuff direct through a browser. But just because something is possible doesn’t mean for a second that it is inevitable.

So, finally, I discovered a reason and purpose for my scribbling and that motivates me more than the frankly depressing prospect of trying to make an assault on an industry that I consider to be creatively stifling, moribund, hegemonic and generally not worth the bother. I don’t often pick up a commercially produced fiction book these days and become enchanted or engrossed. The best I do is to think something is clever or well-written but never interesting.

Commercially madated fiction is often dull, unadventurous and as slick as a hit of olestra. I find myself frequently forgetting what, exactly, a book was like to read. Conversely when I read an unfinished draft of something by a friend, or a poem, or anything else I tend to find that experience more rewarding. I guess that’s one of the things that I would like to see. I would like to see one of my friend’s names on a book that can be bought through lulu (or a lulu competitor not that there is one any more).

The fact is, as someone who’s seen the world of the B-list author first hand I’m not really all that excited at the prospect of being one if it means pain and effort and tears before bedtime when I could get similar results from publishing online. The fact is that the wages for being a B-List author are all in the advance, if they exist at all. The age when you could actually make money when you’re not Dan Brown in the orthodox publishing channels are gone, dead, buried, very sad, let’s move on.

I don’t want to read that crap any more anyway. I don’t want to read high fantasy that’s all warmed over Tolkien pastiche (or at least doesn’t wander too far from that mould). I don’t want to read SF centred on who can be weirdest or who can prove they have the most extensive knowledge of physics. I don’t want to read thrillers that just rehearse the same cardboard cut outs across the same paper stage.

I want to read books with heart and story and characters that I can sympathise with. What’s holding the main presses up is exactly what’s holding the film industry back from fun movies. You can quantify good writing technique, saleable hot buttons, ideal commercial structure and an easily marketable premise. But you can’t quantify a book with heart. There is no measure for an emotionally involving literary experience. The measure of brilliance is being sold to us as how saleable, marketable and safe it is.

It’s not that I blame anyone for trying to optimise the sales reaped from a very difficult business model. To a certain extent it is easy to blame the less demanding spectres of television, cinema and video games for eating into the audience figures for printed matter. However, I think that over time narrative entertainment as a mass phenomenon has shifted its focus. Video games are just starting to come to terms with its narrative potential. There are those working in the straitjacket of television who are producing some truly remarkable sagas. Movies are in trouble. Books are unchallenging. The business of storytelling is not in crisis but it is in a process of change.

The fact is that storytelling is a human activity, it should be a specific form of human interaction. Systematising it, turning it into a profit margin lead business and authorising people to be waged storytellers is only one way of engaging in the activity. People should tell and engage in live storytelling, in community story generation and consumption. There is another way.

This Lulu adventure is about that. It’s about me getting together with the people in my life to do good story work. I want to write my graphic novel for Ian, my children’s stories with Beth and all the other story projects that are to be produced by people communicating. And monolithic industry has nothing to do with that.

So today would be only two working days after I ordered my book and apparently it’s on its way. So delivery time estimates are slightly exaggerated (for insurance in case of some book-delaying disaster no doubt). Quite swift in dispatching the work.

Good work lulu.

Have watched the risible remake of The Amityville Horror in which Ryan Reynolds managed to be as scary as a tank top. And no, they’re not scary.

The movie did, however, give me an idea for a neat little project of my own. Unlike my other “bubbling under” projects it is neither stuck (Virus) nor in need of further research (untitled vampire project) nor is it just too easy (follow up to Sorcechanic). These are all good things and so I plan to start work on the first 50k draft immediately. So expect my following writing based entries to be a bit more along the lines of a traditional creative process blog. The difference being, of course, that you can follow this tiny germ of an idea through from its birth (now) to its unleashing upon the public in a few month’s time.

I’m planning on jotting a few notes down tomorrow, so you can tune in then to see how it’s going. Right now I’m planning on hitting the sack for a bit of a read.

I have ordered a copy of HPDP final. Once I have received a copy and checked it for any signs of cheap tattiness I will be making it available for sale at… *inhales* £6.34 UK, $11.00 US, $12.81 CDN $15.40 AUS *approx*

Soon people. Soon.

I plan on eventually turning this entry and the next, final, sizable Lulu entry into their own page on the site. It has always been my goal to make this site a guide for people wishing to self-publish. There is a lulu community, which to be fair I just find confusing. There are also more FAQs than a stick can be sensibly shook at but FAQs only go so far. I’ve always had a pragmatic view on these things and I have found Lulu’s interface and attempts to help/guide limited in their usefulness.

Maybe that’s just me.

One thing that’s come to me very clearly during this process is that getting your book together is like putting together a recipe for cooking. You need to have your components set out before you start to go through the process. There is one major flaw in lulu’s system which I will point out as we go through. It concerns ISBN numbers and, in truth, it may be a flaw of omission rather than technical design. However I have experienced it as a flaw of technical design so I will mention it as such. I will write to Lulu towers once I am done and query them on this before I start working on The Confessor’s Tale. Any results will, as ever, be found here.

My approach to this is to use the bare minimum of money to achieve my finished result. Partly because I’m not Stephen King but mostly because it wouldn’t be much use to anyone else if I use tools or techniques well beyond the cost or technical expertise of a reasonably intelligent layperson. So in this instance there is no LaTEX, there are no super expensive cover artists, I have not taken premium distribution options, no professional proofreading services, no Paintshop Pro, no frills of any kind. This is not a guide to how to get your text up to some aesthetic standard of form and function. This is about actually producing a book that looks and feels like a book using the most basic tools available.

So at the very beginning what will you need to produce your book?

I used:

OpenOffice.Org 2.0 (this saves out in .odt XML format which theprevious OOo doesn’t. It’s open source too)
The GIMP 2.2.10
Lulu.com wizard.

Now, out of pure laziness I used Fireworks MX to actually arrange all the bits on the cover. You could equally well use The Gimp and the same sort of file comes out at the other end. But I prefer The Gimp for fiddly image manipulation and Fireworks for issues of layout. I’m absolutely 100% positive I would be just as fine using The Gimp for layout but I just don’t. It’s a habit.

As far as fonts go I have stuck to:

Times New Roman for body text, dedication, and copyright notice.
Some sans serif for title page and main section titles, probably Tahoma, something fairly non-contentious anyway. (It’s not really too important just the sans serif makes the statement.)
Georgia on the spine of the book (this is the lulu default and I think it’s classy).
A typewriter style serif font called Adler from free-typewriter-fonts.com for the cover text. Obviously using this kind of text ties in a theme from my website, it’s pulpy and redolent of cheap text produced on the fly. That’s my, er, brand for want of a less vomit-inducing concept. Importantly make sure that you are using a public domain font, otherwise there could be trouble.

So. Part A - The text.

I’m assuming that you have a fully proofed version of your manuscript printed in Courier New, double-spaced here. If you haven’t you have some work to do. Go and do it now.

Done it? Good. Right you need to make a document to put your book in. Now if you already have such a document then don’t worry, it’s certainly not the end of the world. It’s just you feel a bit ouchy actually messing around with the actual text of your actual document to make it print ready. These instructions are valid for OpenOffice.org 2.0 any other word processor and I haven’t any experience. OOo 2.0 is open source though so why not get it now?

Basically you will be wanting some pages with no header/footer on, then the book which has headers/footers afterwards. You may, initially, have grand plans about having pages after the main text which revert to no headers footers. I think that may be a little more tricky. Or it may be dead easy with some help from lulu’s project editor. Doing that *just* with OpenOffice is a pain in the bum and I’ll show you why.

Basically to have a single document with a heeader/footer on some pages but not others means you have to mess about with Page Styles. A page style is an OpenOffice concept that sets a bunch of formatting options for a particular page and then titles those options. The way that they get distributed is down to a sequential chain of styles. (This is bonkers for reasons you will shortly come to understand).

To fiddle with page styles:

1) Off the top of the formatting menu there is an option called Styles and Formatting, also there is a button hard left on the lower toolbar that switches on the styles and formatting viewer.

2) When you activate the viewer a little window will appear which allows you to browse styles and formatting that comes by default with the document. The fourth button on this window’s toolbar is page formats.

3) Pick a format to play around with. Left click to highlight it. Right click and pick “Modify…”. This will open the Page Style editor. This allows you to do just about anything to this page style. What we’re interested in is size and margins, whether it’s a left or a right page, and what style our style will lead on to. Close this dialogue as we’re going to have to create our own style for the first (blank) page of our volume.

4) In the Styles and Formatting window right click anywhere and pick “New…”

5) This will bring up the same window as the modify window but now the Style will be Untitled. Look at the first tab in the dialogue. It will say something about “Next Style”. This isn’t vital at the moment but note that it exists and move on. YOu now need to format all the styles you will need in your book. The first page of the actual book will be a right hand page and will probably be blank and backed with the copyright notice. So call this first style BlankPage1 or somesuch. Then set up its margins, paper size and whether the page style is intended to be mirrored, left only, right only, or right and left. Aside from the common sense connotations of these settings I’m not 100% sure what the implications of that last setting are but as your first page of the book that isn’t the inside of the jacket is a right hand page set BlankPage1 to be a right only page. You’ll see why shortly.

6) To make the page size fit into a lulu 6″ x 9″ the dimensions in cms (the OpenOffice measurement of choice) are 15.24cm x 22.86cm The margins on the left side of a right hand page should be slightly more generous than the right side because of the binding.

7) Once you have set up this style click OK. Now, this is where you will start to understand why having a few Header/Footerless pages at the beginning is fine but having them reoccur a tthe end might be a small pain in the backside. You now have to make a new headerless/footerless style for every page up until your main content body starts all with identical settings. In my book the list goes.

• Blank 1 - Right Only
• Copyright Page - Left Only
• Title Page - Right Only
• Blank 2 - Left Only
• Dedication Page - Right Only
• Blank 3 - Left Only
• Main Content - Mirrored

I made one style for each up to Blank 3, all identical, and then adapted the Default style for the main content. In this last I put the header and footer on, set the content up to be mirrored and had different header on both sides (but identical footer). Once this was done I went back to BlankPage1 style, right clicked and picked “Modify..”

8) Remember the bit where I said note on the first tab that there’s a drop down for “Next Style”? Well now we’re going to change that so that the Next style is the style for “Copyright Page”, then you need to click “OK”, go to the “Copyright Page” Style and set the next style to “Title Page” and so on. Chain them together till you set “BlankPage3″ to “Default”. In “Default” you set the next style to “Default”. So essentially from page 1 the style will change until it hits the first page of Default and from there on Default will loop to the end of the book.

See what I mean? It’s bonkers. You have to chain together as many page styles as you don’t want to loop. Hopefully Confessor will provide me with an easier method of achieving this. For now this is the best I can advise you, sorry.

So your next step, once you have your book document set up with its lovely headers and so on and so forth is to make your covers in the Gimp. Essentially make sure the canvasses are 6″ by 9″ and don’t forget that by canvasses I mean you have to have 2. One for the back and one for the front.

Once you have assembled a PDF of the body text (don’t ask about exporting .odt files as .pdf files, if you don’t know this then you’re not ready to be here Hint: Off the file menu there’s an option to export as PDF…) and you have your two cover plates you are ready to approach the wizard of doom.

Now, to be fair, the lovely people at lulu have done a really good job of getting something pretty useable up there. It’s just that when it stinks, it really stinks to high heaven. When you first get to the site and sign into your account (you have signed up for an account, right?) go to the tab marked publish and then to the large, friendly button marked ’start a new project’ situated somewhere on the left near the top. This will take you into the wizard.

Now, first thing’s first, almost no matter what you do here you can change the options later. Even if you go all the way through and publish until you’ve bought an ISBN number you can still alter all the settings. The one slightly flaky thing is the upload feature but even that goes within the bounds of acceptability.

Now here’s the part that’s a bunch of old dingoes kidneys. In order to make you feel like you have published a proper book you could really do with an ISBN number, am I right? Of course I’m right. And in order to maximise the feeling of having achieved the ISBN should be displayed on the copyright page, right? Well. In order to display it there you have to know what it is. And the only way I found to get one was to buy a distribution package (which also whacks a barcode on the bottom right hand corner of the back cover, sweet). Here’s the problem. In order to get to the Distribution Package stage you have to have a live, published project which is based upon a file or group of files which will include a copyright page which won;t be complete until you have, yes, an ISBN number. Once you have payed your 20 quid odd to procure your ISBN you return to your document quickly slip it ontot he copyright page, remake the PDF, return to the project and…

OMG, WTF, BBQ, LOLLERSKATES?!?

Yes. In order to actually properly publish your book in it’s fullest form you have to make a second edition (Actually you can call that edition first as well but still… it’s sloppy). I don’t know what the repurcussions are of me essentially buying an ISBN and then reissuing the book again. Now it’s in unpublished status without the proper cover art and awaiting my very last iteration for publication.

It seems that everything is fine, but I am uncertain as to whether the whole distribution fiasco is going to come and bite me in the ass. I shall keep you informed. But to all appearances although the interface gave me pause for panic on several occasions it appears as if there is nothing in the project that can be done that can’t subsequently be undone if necessary. It’s all useable but conceptually it’s a vicious and unfriendly interface that makes you think you’re about to do something irreversible when in fact nothing is irreversible. Lulu, imho, need to re-evaluate their user management on a design level.

Ideally, I would like to be able to make my book, buy an ISBN for it and then upload it once I was completely happy with the results. As it is it works but it feels like it’s a rough system, like a beta release or something.

Anyway. I sent a preview graphic of my cover art to Ian in Oz last night and he didn’t get it. I was worried that I would have to come up with something else and it took me long enough to do that one. Then he said he’d have a go. He sent me the image today and it blew my mind. I have a new cover artist. This is a great cover concept.

So tonight I am preparing for the final push, and by tomorrow my copy of my novel should be ordered. Tune in after and I’ll be sure to tell you how it went.

So I went through the wizard.

If you’re going in to just find out what to do as you go give yourself at least three hours to get through that wizard. I spent 90 minutes just to get the book uploaded (it had grown a third of an inch wider mysteriously, hmmmm) with some decent cover art. I haven’t done my back cover or ISBN yet. The book will cost roughly $11 US when I publish it.

It’s a tricky old business. Your cover art will obviously have to be the same size as the cover. Make sure you don’t use any public domain only fonts if you’re making money off the copies sold. You may need a back cover too. The cover resolution has to be 300 dpi. 6 inches is 15.24 cms. 9 inches is 22.86 cms. I haven’t yet looked into buying an ISBN number. That is a job for tomorrow.

With the Teen bar lifted there’s stuff appearing that looks in danger of being decently written and interesting. Spread the word.

So as promised this is where the whole lulu thing is born and starts to take shape. For those of you who don’t kcnow what the frick I’m talking about lulu is to be found here and is a site for authors to self-publish.

On first entering the site I discovered that most of the offered items were not the best or most enticing of written products. I have determined to buy and review works on this very site. In fact I may well place an order tomorrow. Those interested in joining me in this experiment may wish to also sign up for an account and IMPORTANT set your viewing option to see all published works by default nothing that rates higher than teen displays. And the number of titles you can see with all the mature content included is much higher.

In fact, confusingly high.

I shall have a job browsing this lot to make my review selections.

Anyhow. If you are planning on actually publishing a novel I would urge you to check out their FAQs and if using a product that displays formatting information in cm then I would recommend Megaconverter! in order to help you set those margins and stuff in your typeset document.

Plus please, please, please for the love of the Supreme Beard don’t rush in ready to publish immediately. I got there and although the process comes down to essentially uploading a pdf there’s other stuff that needs doing first. For example later on I have to buy an ISBN no. Which then needs to go on my copyright page.

I’ll say it one more time, read the FAQ for publishing it contains a lot of really worthwhile stuff. More to follow when I’m done on a final proof.