Idle Thoughts

Confession: I Love My Own Stories.

2012-02-01T11:36:00.000-06:00

In case you don't know, I have a second blogspot site called Henry's Stories. For over a year now, I've been putting my stories out on that site, serialized in chunks. There are short stories, middle-sized ones, and novels. I'm currently in the middle of the second novel, Extreme Makeover which starts at this page. Of course, you could buy it on Amazon like all my other books, but here it's free, if you don't mind reading it a chapter at a time.

The thing is...I'm getting engrossed in the story myself. I wrote it. I've been through the text over a dozen times, or more. Preparing it for the serialization, I read through it again twice. And yet, each MWF as the next chapter comes out and it shows up in my RSS reader, I pause and read the chapter, getting caught up in the story all over again.

Now, marketing is supposed to be telling everyone how great your own stuff is, but I've never been able to do that properly. I was raised to be modest and avoid bragging. It's a hard process to get around. I'll just say it. I've got some great stories here. I'd prefer you go buy them all, but if you want free, I can handle that too.

Things I Never Would of Thought: Septic Tank Lids

2012-01-29T11:17:00.000-06:00

Out of sight, out of mind. We bought this house when it was about two years old, nearly twenty-five years ago. For the most part, the septic system works, so I don't pay any attention to it. But in December, there was an occasional whiff in the air. Indoors. So being promptly on the spot, a month later I called in the specialist, thinking it might need to be pumped, like we had done many years before.

He walked around, poking a metal probe into the ground, locating the dimensions of the tank that had long been completely buried. His face showed increasing unease as he puzzled it out. In one place, the probe had gone through deeper than it should have. He pulled out the shovel and exposed the two access ports on the top. One side was 'rotting' away. The concrete was easily a third thinner on the outflow side of the tank than the intake side. The concrete crumbled in his hand.

What had been a simple pumping job now became ten times more expensive. First off, I was warned most strenuously not to drive my tractor over the area. He had seen these situations before and even riding mowers were too heavy in many cases, and you do not want to have to fish your tractor out of the septic tank.

It was clear to me that the lid had to be replaced, although he was struggling to come up with cheaper solutions. Unfortunately all of those just were just delays, not fixes. As he dug more and exposed the surface of the lid, it was clear that the formerly flat slab was bowing down in the middle. The concrete's strength was fading away and it was only held in shape by the internal rebar steel rods.

Decades old septic tank lids aren't an off the shelf item. He took dimensions and some company somewhere poured and cast a new one. Wait two weeks. Don't walk on the septic tank.

Then came the day. It had to be Monday because rain was in the forecast Tuesday and the heavy trucks couldn't get across the yard without bogging down if the ground was wet. Carefully tensioning the chains, the crane operator lifted the old lid off and transferred it to the trailer. Everybody was holding their breath, hoping it wouldn't crumble and fall into the tank. Nobody wanted that clean-up job. Up in the air, the distorted, sagging of the concrete was plain to see.

Then, they put a gasket down around the edge and lowered the new, flat, and thicker septic tank lid in place. Now, a couple of days later, there's just a slight mound that needs reseeding and some ruts in the grass where the trucks passed. But its fixed, at least for a few more decades.

I asked why the concrete decayed like that. The guy with the experience wasn't sure. Perhaps water softening. Perhaps the chemicals given off in the air gap. All he knew was that the corrosion always happened on the outflow side of the tank. I'm just happy to forget about it. Out of sight, out of mind.

Beta Reader Copies

2012-01-25T17:24:00.000-06:00

Not too long ago, I wrote about the process of creating comb-bound copies of an early draft of a novel to allow beta-test readers the chance to find errors and mark it up. Well, this book, I'm trying something a little different. It's a gamble and I don't know how it will play out.

Instead of buying a few reams of paper and a new toner cartridge, and then queuing up multiple copies of the full book to print, I uploaded the book to Lulu and printed out private-access copies. Now, these aren't what the final copy will look like. For one thing, I just slapped a handy snapshot there as a fake cover image. For another, this is 8.5 x 11 inches. Inside, the pages are regular 6 x 9 inch pages with great big margins around them so people can make notes. These will never be sold. Once this beta-reader review is complete, I'll go back to Lulu and delete the project.

Why Lulu? Well, for one thing, this process has been a whole lot easier than filling my office with the smell of ozone for hours or days as I print out all the copies. No aching back from bending over the comb binder as I assemble them. And finally, no fretting over the binding coming loose and people scrambling the pages as they are shipped back and forth through the mail.

This may have cost me slightly more. I'm not sure. I've never done a detailed print cost analysis for when I print them myself. But given that I always have to buy a new toner cartridge in the middle of the process, the costs are probably equivalent. Besides, the printing cost isn't the most expensive part of the process. The mailing cost is. Given that I'm sending these to people all across the country, I send them in flat rate priority mail envelopes with a self-addressed stamped flat rate envelope included, it costs more than $10 each just for the mailing. Even with the shipping costs from Lulu added in, that's less than it cost to print them.

Now, I hate to spend the money, but I really need these people looking over my shoulder and pointing out typos and misspellings and really horrible sentences. A writer can't see his own dumb mistakes.

My biggest fear is that since this is a perfect-bound book, it may inhibit these book-loving people from being as ruthless as they need to be in marking it up. Like I said, it's a gamble. I'll find out when they come back.

The Disappointing iBooks Author App

2012-01-21T13:44:00.000-06:00

I think from the beginning, I wasn't expecting much. I didn't watch the streaming video of the launch. Without Steve Jobs, it wasn't as entertaining, so I bailed out before they got into the product announcement, and I didn't download the free app the instant it appeared. That gave me exposure to the bad press before I had my own hands-on experience.

There are two pieces of the problem. The tool is too limited, and the terms-of-use is impossible. Let's deal with the legal stuff first.

iBooks Author is a tool designed to create output for an iPad. That's it. Nothing more. I can't even get it to work with my iPhone. While potentially it could create and edit industry standard ePub files, it doesn't. The output is specifically targeted to the iPad and the iBooks app. While the file might work on some similar platform, like some other vendor's iPad look-alike, you violate the contract if you try to sell it anywhere else. iBooks Author is part of the iBookstore just like iTunes Connect -- it's all part of the store. While it has export to text and export to PDF, those are crippled so badly (stripping out formatting for text and pasting a big ugly Apple logo on the PDF pages) that they can't really be used. From my personal experience, iBookstore is a horrible marketplace. It's a bookstore that you can only buy the books they put in the store-front windows, not a place to browse. For a small producer like me, that's deadly. My sales at the iBookstore have made be consider dropping them, and spending my efforts on Kindle, and Pubit, and Kobo, and Google Editions and my own site. For me, it is not worth it creating a separate version with a separate tool, just for Apple.

I am not the target user for this app. I write novels -- flowing words that can exist just as happily on paper as on the screen of an off-brand cell phone. iBooks Author is for dazzle-heavy multi-media 'books' with a heavy layout component. The target author for this tool is someone with a book like this that never thinks about selling it anywhere but to iPad users. For them, it could work.

Looking at the app strictly as a tool to get the job done, I can't use it. Just like Pages and iWeb, everything is built on templates. Unfortunately, they didn't seem to include a bare-bones empty template that I could drop one of my novels into. I tried. I took their Basic template and took out the pictures and dropped in a novel from a Pages document. What I have left, after a long bout of tinkering, is an ugly looking book with one chapter that contains the whole novel. It seems there's a menu item for importing a chapter at a time, but that would require that I go back to my Pages document and split it into 40 sections and import them one at a time. I can't seem to find a way to select a chapter heading and 'elevate' it to something that the App can recognize as a new chapter.

Thinking about the App's features, it looks like Pages, but with a lot of iPad specific formatting strapped on. The working page is iPad sized. The formatting styles are loaded with a couple of dozen presets. Pages has an Import Styles that lets me copy my custom styles from document to document. I don't see anything like that in this App. I guess you would have to create new styles and save them, for every style you use, for every document.

The result is a Pages with some multi-media widgets thrown in, with limited formatting capabilities, and with reduced output possibilities. It's a no-brainer for me. Pages wins.

My current workflow is this: Creation in Pages. Formatting for the paper edition in Adobe InDesign. Export to ePub from InDesign. Cleanup the ePub in Sigil. Convert to Kindle with Calibre. Four programs to produce my e-books that I can put in all the major marketplaces that can reach almost all available e-readers including the iPad.

I will not be spending the time to learn this App to the fullest so that I can create a special flashy version for the iPad but that doesn't go anywhere else. Doesn't fit my needs.

Writing Tools, Today's Version

2012-01-06T11:01:00.000-06:00

I've been writing for decades, and much of my life, I've been hunting for the right tools and the right workflow to let me write effortlessly. I've progressed from school brad binders and lined paper, to typewriters and home-built dedicated word-processors. I've built computers from scratch and written software in assembly code. For a big double-handful of years, I used Microsoft Word. When I shifted to InDesign for book layout, I began the process of abandoning Word.

Here's what I'm using today. This is Apple's Pages software on my Mac, in full screen mode. Note that I'm not writing in standard manuscript format any longer. I've chosen a more comfortable standard for the writing phase, all controlled by about a half-dozen styles, bound to the function keys. Most of the writing is styled as shown above in simple Times. The section breaks (###) are marked with a centered style. There is another style for block quotes, another for chapter titles, and when I need computer text, like tweets and texting, there's still another style.

Everything is styled text and I don't make any exceptions.

With the autosave and versioning supplied by the operating system, I really don't have to worry about that stuff. Occasionally, I'll do a Command-S to save, but that's mainly habit. I leave a project up on a screen by itself for days and weeks. Even if the machine reboots, I don't lose anything. Writing is simple. The uncluttered page is there with a couple of swipes to the side. Reference pages from the web browser, or another document, or a map are also up as full pages.

The reason I've moved away from writing in manuscript format is that the standard double-spaced format is ideal for editors, but not for the composing. For the writing phase, there's a trade-off between more words on the page and big, legible text. I don't need to force double-spacing on myself as well.

If I need manuscript format, it's easy to convert. Everything is styled text. A handful of search and replace commands will convert my writing format to manuscript format. It's so easy I have never gotten around to automating it.

If I need to move the text into InDesign for a book layout, I save the document as a .doc formatted file, place it into my layout, and do the same search and replace on styles to shape the text into nicely positioned and book-styled text.

If I need to edit the document on my iPhone or iPad, I drag the file over to Dropbox and import it into Pages on the i-devices. The styles are preserved. I can move it back to the Mac with no loss of changes. For simpler purposes, I can even just cut and paste the text from Pages on the Mac to Notes in Mac Mail and the text will be synced automatically to Notes on my phone.

Old documents that I wrote in Word can be easily imported into Pages. I could even go the other way, but my most recent version of Word no longer runs on the Mac. I haven't missed it.

And there you have it. My current writing workflow, using standard tools by big companies.

Filling the Queue

2011-12-31T14:56:00.000-06:00

As an independent writer/publisher, that means I have to share my time between writing, and getting those words out where people can see them. (Also called marketing.)

That means, in addition to book signings and science fiction conventions, I also spend quite a bit of time using the Internet to make contact. Now, I've had a personal writer's website for ages, about as long as the web has been in existence. I also have this blog, and if you take a look at the archive over in the sidebar, you can see how long I've been doing this. Then came Facebook and Twitter and I'm even toying with Google+, but over the past year I've been keeping a new bloggish kind of site running, Henry's Stories.

This is a magazine, where I'm responsible for new content every MWF.

Over the past year, I've serialized a novel (Emperor Dad), many new stories that have never been previously published, and many of my stories that were first published in the science fiction magazines and various anthologies. Sometimes it's a bit of a race to see if I can keep the queue filled before it runs out, and a couple of times I missed a day.

But, in spite of it all, I put a number of stories out this year, all in chapter-sized chunks. I've taken a couple of days off from my other projects to fill the beginning of the year with another novel, starting on January 2. You are all well welcome to come watch it unfold, chapter by chapter, for free. Or click one of the links below and read one of the 2011 stories. If it appeals to you, please spread the word. I don't make anything off of this (not even advertising), other than enjoying the comments and hopefully convincing people to buy my books.

HENRY'S STORIES OF 2011

Tagging My iTunes Songs

2011-12-06T11:29:00.000-06:00

I'm an enthusiastic adopter of iTunes Match, but I have also been an extensive builder of Smart Playlists. Unfortunately, not all Smart Playlists that work in the Mac's iTunes window will be accepted by iTunes Match. This is my failed attempt to work around it.

For example, consider this one:

For some reason, this one is rejected by iTunes Match with the comment that it doesn't like playlists that are dependent on other playlists. (This doesn't seem to always apply.)

(Ignore the fact that I'm showing you the wrong playlist. I screenshotted the wrong one, but the mark is what I was talking about.)

So in the playlist pane, there is a slashed cloud marker and it doesn't appear on my iPhone and iPhone and on another Mac, there's an error marker. I hope eventually iTunes Match will handle it, but until then, I've chosen to work around it by adding tags to my music. I'm sure you're familiar with #hashtags in Twitter and other places. I needed a way to mark all my Instrumental songs, without just making a playlist of them.

My first thought was to re-purpose the Genre marker, but that would lose possibly valuable information. There are Holiday instrumentals and Jazz instrumentals and many others. So I could just add the information to the Comments field. Of course that could be laborious to add manually (to avoid wiping out any existing comments).

So. Applescript. But before I opened up the Script Editor and wasted some time writing one of my own, I went to the Doug's Scripts site and there it was, exactly what I had intended to write for myself. Append to Comments. It's donationware, and worth making a trip to Paypal.

I loaded the script, went to my Instrumental playlist, selected all tracks and ran the script from the pulldown:

I chose to use the < > markers so that I could easily mark the beginning and end of the flag when hunting for it. That way I can have multiword tags and tags that are subsets of other tags. I then changed the Smart Playlist to:

Now iTunes Match is happy on the Mac side of things and it shows up on my other mac with the right songs.

Unfortunately, the IOS versions aren't showing correctly. The playlists show up, but not the songs. Solve one problem and discover others. Oh well. I told you it was a failed attempt.
Still, the flexible tagging option will pay off on the Mac side and I can always hope that we reach parity between OSX and IOS eventually.

Walking the Bottom of the Pond

2011-11-04T16:41:00.000-05:00

The drought has been with us for quite a while, and the pond has been dry much longer that it has been in my memory. I took a walk down on the bed this afternoon. The deep, deep cracks have even begun to weather down a little in places. Even the plants that have grown up around the last remnant of the spring are curled up.

One interesting thing was the relics from previous years that were resting on top of the dried mud. Someone, probably my son, has lost a number of golf-balls over the years. And I think that's the core of a baseball. There was also an old boot, and a broken fishing float, but I didn't feel like recovering those.

I suspect that there are many more interesting things down in the mud, if I cared to dig them up. I know I've lost a few lures over the years.

What I ought to do is build a dock while the water is gone, but I probably won't get around to it. I'd love to rent a mini-dozer and move some of those decades of mud to the upper pasture that has zero topsoil over the limestone. I probably won't get around to that either.

The rains will come. I'm confident.

Readings in the Park

2011-10-26T15:55:00.000-05:00

It's part of my writing process. Near the final editing stage, I print out a copy of the novel, take it to a nearby park, and then with pen in hand, sitting at a picnic table, I read it aloud.

It takes several days. My voice gives out after a couple of hours. But I make many corrections. Sometimes they are errors that I had missed during dozens of passes, editing on the computer screen. Sometimes they are perfectly legal sentences, but I can't speak them from beginning to end without tripping over my tongue. Nearly all had also eluded the beta-readers than had send me marked up copies earlier.

My personal stamina is about two hours, although if people drop by and I stop to chat, it can stretch out into a three hour session. I know I absolutely have to have a big drink at hand to refresh my throat. A session covers about fifty pages in final layout format.

This novel, The Copper Room, is being read at Hutto Lake Park, which is close by. Other times, I've read in other parks. It's a little windy the past couple of days, so I camp out in the pavilion next to the wall as a wind-break. Every day, people stop by, so I have a little display that tells people what I'm doing. Most times, I'll find a convenient break in the text and talk with the visitors, but sometimes, they prefer to just sit and listen.

I find it interesting how tired I get after reading the text for a couple of hours. It's not labor intensive, but perhaps it's the process of putting emotion into the words. I don't really know. It's satisfying, even though it takes several days to work through an entire novel.

I advertise where and when on my Facebook fan page or on Twitter, just in case people are interested. Two more sessions to go, if you're inclined to show up.

Siri vs. Forget It! (1977)

2011-10-25T12:30:00.001-05:00

Back in 1977, I was asked to write a short science fiction story with the general theme of 'memory' for a new computer magazine named ROM. In it, I imagined my perfect computer assistant. It was a wrist watch, with a tiny screen and a voice interface. You can read the story here on my Henry's Stories online magazine. It's short, in two parts, click the Next Part link down below the comments.

With all the news coverage of the Siri voice assistant on the new iPhone 4S, it occurs to me that there is a lot of common ground between the two devices. The idea of a voice operated personal assistant device is hardly a new idea, especially in science fiction. The very first thing Carlos does in the story is make a calendar event, and I bet Siri would do the same task with the same verbal command. (Unfortunately, I can't justify a 4S just yet, so I can't try it out.)

There are plenty of differences. In 1977 I couldn't quite imagine the always-connected world we live in, and that was actually part of the plot. The wrist watch was also voice specific, more as a security feature than because of any limitation. The voice recognition was also all in the device, rather than Siri's server-based method.

In truth, I want a merger. I travel in remote areas, so I'd prefer a device-only voice system. But Siri's 'personality' is better than the one I wrote. Maybe a wrist watch would be more convenient than a hand-held, but I could wish for something waterproof that rode in my ear, or even embedded under the skin. The screen output is nice, though, so I could live with either the 4S or wrist watch device.

Just something all-knowing, with infinite storage, that never misunderstands what I ask for. That would do nicely. Please.

Superlatives at Restaurants

2011-10-24T10:21:00.000-05:00

Several times in the last few months, I've been at a mid-range restaurant. The food is good but not outlandishly expensive. The wait-person has done their job, provided the drinks and food with reasonable promptness.

And then a greeter wanders through the room, stopping for a brief visit at each table. "Is the food wonderful?" "Are you having an outstanding time?" "Is your steak cooked perfectly?"

I feel like this is a new trend, and one I don't care for. I have a life-long sales resistance, as do many other people. I do not like to be put in such a position. If I agree, to be polite, I am allowing the vendor to put a superlative description in my mouth. If I disagree, then I feel like I'll have to immediately complain about some food that is honestly adequate. So, I am left in frustrated silence. Usually, someone else in my dinner party says the appropriate words and the greeter moves on her way. But I'm left with a bad feeling.

I guess it's time to construct a quick come-back. Some phrase I can whip out at an instant when this happens again. Something like, "It was perfectly adequate." Perhaps with a smile, letting them know that I'm aware they've been coached to feed me that line.

Of course, it's probably just one of my quirks. I have many. I'm just glad I have a blog where I can vent in a relatively conflict-free environment.

Have a spectacular day.

Bat Signal over Texas

2011-09-15T21:15:00.000-05:00

I've been watching the Central Texas bats on radar for some time now, so I've grown quite familiar with their patterns and know when they appear. A couple of times now, I've seen one of the downsides of the bats-on-radar. As actual real thunderstorms begin to move into the area, the computerized storm track detectors that filter the Nexrad radar signals and try to make sense out of them get confused.

It happened again tonight, and I was quick enough on the screen capture keystrokes to catch the bogus signal before the real weather people removed it. In the image above, that greenish patch around the Austin area is 'mostly' bats. There are some clouds running from Waco through Bryan that are real moisture with water droplets in them. But the rest of that patch running Round Rock to San Antonio is a bat signal.

The danger is that we have to put up with such false positive alerts because of the real ones. See that diamond shape half-way between Austin and Abilene? That's a real thunderstorm.

Here's a different look at the same radar signal seen through the RadarScope program. Because I've been watching the radar all day long (it's my 'screen saver' on my media server), I knew what was bats and what was weather, but it's not obvious from one screen image. And it certainly wasn't obvious to the Nexrad computer system.

Testing the Blogger IPhone App

2011-09-08T18:39:00.001-05:00

Well, it seems there's a iOS app out from Goggle (free) to handle blog postings on the go. Now, I've tried out a number of similar apps over time and I've never been pleased enough to keep using them.

This one seems pretty bare bones as well, but at least you can include images on the fly, although it's missing a lot of the formatting and layout tools I've come to expect.

It's easy to use, but I can already tell I'm not going to be using this for regular postings. I expect it to shine for on the spot news postings where twitter is just too sparse.

Okay, I've composed, added an image and indicated my location. Let's see what it looks like.

More Uses for Radar: The Bastrop Fire

2011-09-05T00:36:00.000-05:00

I'm gradually waking up to the idea that weather radar is for a lot more things than just clouds and rain. After watching bats on the radar all week during a particularly dry atmosphere, clouds are coming back, and then today, the Bastrop fire broke out. Now, this is a forest fire, not just the grass fires we're used to. Forest fires with pine trees filled with resin that burn hot and high and send great big billowing smoke plumes up into the sky -- smoke plumes that just happen to reflect radar pulses. There are several big fires in the area this evening, but it's only the Bastrop fire that's making it's mark on the radar screen. (click image for a more detailed look)

At one point, which I neglected to capture, the image was complex with bats, and rain clouds and ground clutter and smoke plumes all in the same image. In animation mode it was interesting to see the differences. The smoke originated at a fixes point and the winds swept it off to the south, as in this image. The rain clouds moved with the wind. The bats spread out in all directions, but today their path was pushed to the south by the winds as well.

Maybe someday I'll be able to look at the images and instantly tell what I'm seeing, but it's early in the learning stages for me.

By the way, while the Radarscope program (both on iPad and Mac) give me the best images, more traditional weather radar images on Weather underground and the like also show these things, if you look for them.

Bats on Radar in Central Texas

2011-08-30T21:58:00.002-05:00

I've been watching the iPad app 'Radarscope' quite a bit, hoping for a thunderstorm to come my way. It's been dry so long here. But I've been noticing some activity about sunset every day and I finally realized what I was seeing. In several locations here in Central Texas, the Mexican free-tail bat hides out in colonies of millions under bridges and in caves and tunnels. When the mood strikes, at about sunset, they stream out and go foraging for the night.

Taking screenshots and combining them with Keynote, I made a 2 minute slide show of the display, with three different zoom factors.

The bats are fascinating to watch, on radar, and in person. The Congress Avenue Bridge colony is famous, as well as the McNeil Bridge in Round Rock, but you can see many colonies all over the state.

Update: Mary Ann Melton, my wife, has bats in her blog as well. For a closer look, see here: Texas Bridge Bats - by Mary Ann Melton

Sweating Through the Hard Parts

2011-08-12T17:38:00.000-05:00

I haven't tweeted, or blogged, or participated in any of the interlinked social networks in the past couple of weeks. My todo list (automated of course) keeps building up reminders to go out there and be visible. But I haven't. The reason is a critical part of a novel coming out next year.

Some stories are a joy to write. I can sit down and turn out thousands of words in a day with no effort. The story is just ripe and ready, and all I have to do is keep those fingers moving. I wish they were all that way, but sometimes a story takes a turn into the rough ground.

Most of my published novels are YA science fiction that in my fondest dreams are stocked in school libraries across the country, shelved between Heinlein and Norton. It's those shelves that formed my taste in reading so many decades ago.

But the novel I'm writing right now has sections that I couldn't recommend for that shelf. I'm writing a novel of post-collapse civilization rebuilding and part of that struggle is the battle against the dark spiral of human nature that would just love to be free of the constraints of civilization. The story demands I write this part to the best of my ability, but I don't like it.

So that's where I'm at. My heroes and heroines are in deep trouble, and they and I can't just wish the situation away. Here's where my detailed outline, by spreadsheet of word-counts, my heavily annotated Google Earth map of the area, and my nightly dreams are all necessary to pull me through. Sorry I don't have time to tweet. I'll be back later, I promise.

Why Comb Bound Reader Copies?

2011-07-28T01:46:00.001-05:00

Today was the day for printing and binding...no, it's after midnight. Yesterday was the day. It's a long slow process to produce this very limited run of a pre-pub novel so that a handful of helpful people can read it and scribble all their notes all over it. The printer glitched a number of times. I ran out of toner for the laser printer. Working the comb binder kills my back, so I have to build these over several hours with break time in between.

And it's certainly crossed my mind that I could print the novel to a PDF, upload it to Lulu, slap a default cover on it and have them printed and shipped to me for not too much more than I'm spending doing it all manually.

But I won't change any time soon. I think I like this compromise. I've tried a number of different ways, with a dozen or so different novels.

A decade or so ago, I talked Mac, a co-worker at Motorola, to read several of my novels. Back then, I gave him the regular manuscript, a ream of double-spaced courier printed paper loose in a box. After all, that's what the publishers wanted.

But after getting his feedback, I realized I'm not getting this first-reader advice from editors in some publishing house in Manhattan. I'm getting feedback from real people who read books. And the books they read are single-spaced, with a good font in narrower columns. And they don't have to work though hundreds of loose sheets of paper either. So my first variation was based on magazine formatting. I was using Microsoft Word at the time, so it wasn't terribly difficult to write a macro to change the font and spacing, and throw it into a two-column format. That's what I used for several books.

Then by the time I began formatting books for real, I had acquired Adobe InDesign and could handily create the proper formatting for the 6 x 9 inch pages I'd be using. So, it was easy to create the PDF that Lulu wanted, and I used that to create Advance Reader Copy books back when I was trying to get pre-publication reviews.

So why am I still printing a 6 x 9 page to 8.5 x 11 sheets and comb binding them? I think it's to encourage my first-readers to mark up the pages. Many people have a real problem marking in books. I'm not sending these to professional copyeditors or proofreaders who do this all the time. I'm trying to get the feedback of readers, and everyone is used to marking on 8.5 x 11 inch pages in various types of binders, especially if they have big fat margins. Giving them a trade paperback is a different animal and I just have to believe they would be more reluctant to mark it up.

So, I'm stuck with a process that chews up the toner cartridges and leaves me with a back ache, but if I catch those typos and horrible sentences before publication date, it's all worth it.

My Lion Report

2011-07-21T23:49:00.000-05:00

So, I'm in my second day of OSX 10.7 and it's getting better. I expected to like 10.7 AKA Lion. I'm always an early adopter of these things. I took the precaution of making a separate 10.6 partition so that I could still use some of the obsoleted software, but I haven't had to use it yet. I also installed the free Scroll Reverser tool that let me get used to the new standard scroll direction on my trackpad. That took a little over a day before I forgot about it. One scroll direction is as good as another and if it's the same direction my iPad uses, then all the better.

At first, I started using full screen mode for apps whole-heartedly, but I've had to back off on the Safari version. Whole screen mode there hides my bookmark bar unless you go bump the cursor up against the top of the screen to make it unhide itself, and that just makes every trip to the bookmarks about three times harder. Instead I moved Safari to it's own screen manually and just sized it as large as it would go. I get most of the benefits of full-screen without the side-effects.

There's definitely a learning curve with Mission Control, which took over the grid of Spaces that I used to use, but it's getting comfortable. I did have about six hours or so of feeling like Lion was a mistake, but that's going away. Just a GUI learning curve thing and I've been through that too many times to count.

Thus far, I would recommend users to switch to Lion, but expect to bull through the period of strangeness, knowing it'll get better very soon.

No Fish Left Behind

2011-07-20T13:25:00.000-05:00

We've been in drought conditions for quite a while now. For the third time in the decades I've lived here, the pond on the eastern side of the property is going dry. It's barely a puddle down in the bottom. And I have no fear that any of the fish I stocked the pond with back a year and a half ago will go to waste. Most of the ponds in this area are dry or nearly so, so any open water attracts egrets and herons. There's even a little group of ducks from I don't know where (on the left side of the picture) that are living here now. From a bird-watching perspective, it's fascinating. From a fisherman's view, it's heartbreaking. Personally, I have my fingers crossed for hurricane storms to come and dump a few feet of water my way.

My tweets from Feb 9, 2010:

Getting ready to stock fish in the pond. 100 catfish 100 perch 10 larger bass http://twitpic.com/129kn7
Letting the minnow sized fish get used to the pond temperature before turning them loose. http://twitpic.com/129l0k
These bass are acting too tame. I would have preferred little ones but it's all the truck had. http://twitpic.com/129n3f
The perch adapted the quickest, schooling up and heading off together.

Emperor Dad Ebooks are Now On Sale

2011-07-11T14:15:00.000-05:00

This is an experiment for me. Way back before I had any idea what price to set my ebooks at, I chose $4.99 as a reasonable value. Royalties from that price had returned about the same per sale as a paper copy sold off Amazon.

But things have changed since then, and I haven't kept up with the shifting marketplace. One reason was my reluctance to tinker with the 'product' once it was already on the shelf, so to speak. But the combination of having Emperor Dad serialized on my Henry's Stories e-magazine for free and stories I've heard of vastly increased volume when books are dropped in price, I'm trying this experiment.

Starting today, as soon as the various marketplaces update their databases, Emperor Dad will be available for 99-cents. Depending on the results, I might adjust the prices on the other novels as well. Perhaps a sliding scale based on age perhaps? I don't know. This is an experiment.

So if you have a Kindle or a Nook or what-not. Check your favorite ebookstore and see if you can pick up a copy for next to nothing.

InDesign CS5.5, ePubs and Blockquotes

2011-07-11T11:03:00.001-05:00

Juggling ebooks never ends, does it. I have been working to leverage the enhancements to InDesign in its CS5.5 incarnation, hoping to streamline my ebook production. Ideally, I'd create one copy of the book, formatted for trade paperback, and then with the use of the Articles panel, remove and re-order to eliminate some excess not used for the ebook versions and use anchored images to keep them showing up in the e-text in the proper places. I am also using the ability to edit for export the tags associated with paragraph styles.

So I was rudely interrupted from my pleasant dream when epubcheck complained loudly that all my blockquoted text was illegal.

It seems this is illegal:

<blockquote>
this is text
</blockquote>

Which used to be just fine.
Now it's supposed to be:

<blockquote>
<p>
this is text
</p>
</blockquote>

Now I have to decide whether to edit the code manually, or learn how to make InDesign generate the proper code.

UPDATE: It seems the easy solution is to ignore the tag exporting for blockquote. Instead of selecting 'blockquote' for a section of indented text, leave it at [Automatic]. This will export a <p&gl; tag with a special class and generate CSS that will indent the section.

Repairing Cracks in the Pool

2011-07-06T20:24:00.000-05:00

It was a true dilemma. The exceptional drought in this part of Texas had pushed my pool a little too far. The cycles of wet and dry over the years had caused the ground to settle such that the pool's plaster skin had cracked.

Now, the cracks had been there for a few years, but there had been no noticeable water loss before. This year, with water rationing ratcheting up, I was having to add water to the pool frequently just to keep it at a level for the water pump to function. No water circulation and the pool would go to pea soup green in no time flat. I've had it happen before.

So we called the pool leak specialists. Austech Pools advertising sounded good, so although it seemed expensive (don't mind me, everything seems expensive), we called them in.
Arriving with hydrophones and all kinds of cool gear, they quickly determined that no, it wasn't a pipe leak. Those cracks had just gotten wider and were the main cause of my water loss. I winced a little when they gave me a repair quote, but I'd either pay it in water bills, or run up against rationing limits or something else, so I had them come back.

Well, yesterday, they drained the pool. Today was the day for the repair. Superficially, it looked simple. He took a routing tool and dug into the cracks to make them wider. Then he filled them in with an epoxy substance and smoothed it over.

We chatted the whole time about science fiction, philosophy and the like, so it was and interesting morning. In the end, the cracks were patched and now I wait for several days for the sealant to properly cure before refilling the pool. The birds, the honeybees, the squirrels and I will all appreciate it when the water is back.

How long did it take to write your novel?

2011-07-02T15:51:00.000-05:00

How long did it take to write your novel? I've gotten this question a number of times, and it throws me a little, because of the way I write.

Right now, today, I have several writing/publishing tasks to do:

Star Time, my latest novel, is just now coming to market, so I have to update my Henry Melton website, update the Wire Rim Books website, write emails to potential reviewers, notify the local book stores, and generally make some noise so that people will know that the new novel is out.

Star Time needs to be converted into e-book formats and placed with all the Kindle store/ Barns and Noble/ Kobo, Apple iBookstore, and Google Editions.

I need to file copyright for the latest works, update my travel plans for conventions, etc.

The next scheduled novel, The Copper Room, a YA Science fiction time-travel-ish story is written in first draft, but I need to start collecting First Readers to send hand-printed copies to so that they can mark it up and tell me where I've messed up.

The direct sequel to Star Time, titled The Kingdom of the Hill Country, is outlined, but only 10,000 words or so into the first draft. I'm spending half my work day right now working on that story.

My personal magazine, Henry's Stories, has to be updated. I'm sort of committed to putting out 2,000 words every MWF, on there. That means polishing up some unpublished stories, reformatting previously published ones, or writing new ones. While I can mine the old stuff, I really need a constant influx of new stuff as well, so that means I have to fit short fiction writing in with the novels.

So, considering that a typical day might have some or all of these elements running, it's hard to put a clear label of how long it takes to write a novel. The short answer is that in the past, I've written two novels a year. But that was before a lot of this publishing, marketing stuff got in the way.

Oh, yes, and I have to have a life fitted in there somewhere.

Cover Art for Star Time

2011-06-22T17:23:00.000-05:00

The cover for the new novel Star Time, coming out in about a month, is unique for me. As those of you who follow my publishing efforts are aware, I have been lucky to have gotten some wonderful covers for my YA series of books. And there's no doubt I'll be tapping those same wonderful artists for additional books in that series.

But Star Time is the first book in a whole new series and I had an urge to try for a distinct and different look for the books of The Project Saga. In fact, I spent so much time visualizing the cover that I realized that, for once, my own Photoshop skills might be enough to put it together.

I have always done a lot of the overall cover design--just not the actual artwork. I place the text and position the elements and add the logos. I've also built the series logos, like I've documented before in these blog postings. It was a step outside my normal comfort zone to do without a real artist this time, and I'll only do this under certain circumstances. I'd much prefer to pay the money and be tickled by the results as I've done before.

This time, I wanted a clean, nearly photographic look. For Star Time, the star Betelgeuse is almost a character itself, and showing off its blaze, in the Orion constellation was an easy task in Photoshop. A skyline of Austin, with all the electric lights blacked out was also doable, although I had Mary Ann's help and her fancy camera there to get the source image.

The final component was the human element, and just for this instance, I had access to a son-in-law who could easily pull off the uber-geek hero that was needed. I even took a few cell phone videos of that photo shoot. Take a look at the fun youtube short I composed.

Double Spacing from iPhone Notes to InDesign

2011-06-13T18:52:00.002-05:00

Since many of my new stories are created in the Notes application of iPhone and iPad, I just recently ran up against a new issue while formatting the results in InDesign for my latest novel. My standard text formatting for print uses a single space between sentences. While composing in Notes, a double-space will add a period at the end of the sentence and capitalize the next word. This is a handy time saver while composing, but when the text is eventually moved into InDesign (or some other word-processor or layout software) I find that sentences are double-space separated.

One of my regular clean-up procedures is to find and replace double-spaces with a single space, repeating until there are none left. Unfortunately, this doesn't work with text created in Notes. You see, that first space is a 'non-breaking space'. To clean them out, you first have to do a find and replace on them, converting them to regular spaces, before collapsing duplicates. It's a quick fix, but unless your eyes are on the lookout for resistant double-spaces, you might not even notice that they exist.