Available Now!

After months of careful, preparation, I'm happy to announce that Like Leaves, We Touch, Book 1: O Fortuna is now available for purchase in a really nice trade 6 x 9 paperback edition.

It took some time, but all the formatting gaffes have been eliminated, and I am well-satisfied with the final proof copy.

Not everyone either has, or likes to read on, a Kindle, and luckily CreateSpace provides a nice alternative for authors who wish to publish in both formats.

If you decide to purchase and read, thank you! Feel free to contact me with comments/feedback any time. All electronic contact info is listed on the back page of the book.

Enjoy...

More re-formatting

I have been learning a lot about self-publishing a hard copy of a novel in the past few weeks. There are so many more possibilities now than there were when I sought out iUniverse in Y2K. At the time, iUniverse was a good deal at only $199. I still did a lot of the formatting work myself, using their template, and they would not allow me to design my own cover. I could send my graphic, and they would decide upon the best way to utilize it. They did a decent enough job, but it did not end up being quite what I had envisioned. However, it would have cost extra money to re-do it in any major way, so I let it go. Ditto for the formatting of the interior text. There were mistakes, but only a certain number of them could be corrected for no charge, so I had to let a bunch of those things go, too. Tried to tell myself that inconsistent hyphens really wouldn't detract from the content, but you know what? Every time I open that copy of O Fortuna, they leap off the page at me, screaming, "Amateur!"

O.K., so perhaps I overdo the fastidiousness, but the fact is, to my eye, it looks sloppy, and I suspect it looks sloppy to the reader, also. If I expect to be taken seriously despite the fact that I am self-publishing, it has to be even more perfect than what a "real" publisher would do. If it's not, I perpetuate the myth that no self-published author is worth reading.

Don't be getting your knickers in a twist; I do not agree with that, and I can overlook the sort of errors I can't overlook in my own work if the story is a good one. However, that is the Attitude I have gotten from other writers in some alleged writers' "support" groups. If your goal as an author is NOT to be picked up by a "real" publisher and thrust into a particular niche, then you are not a "real" author.

Oh, puh-LEEZE! I'm as real as anyone. I live, move, breathe, work a day job, make music, and WRITE. I mean, SERIOUSLY WRITE, dammit! But I write what I want to write: the sorts of books I would have loved to get my hands on over my years of reading. I also use them as vehicles to process, and lighten, my own personal load of baggage. All writers do that. If one tells you they do not, then I believe they are lying.

O.K., off the soapbox, Jehan. Back to formatting and re-formatting, and this era's changes in self-publishing.

I know very well not everyone is a fan of Amazon. However, I LOVE Amazon. Nearly everything I could possibly want may be found there, from coffee, to books, to music, to hand lotion. As if that wasn't good enough, NOW they have made it possible for me to publish my books, FREE, via Kindle Direct Publishing and Create Space. It's a no-brainer.

My proof copy of O Fortuna, received on Thursday of this past week, is beautiful, but there were things I needed to tweak on the covers, and as for the interior, it was lovely, BUT I forgot to put in page numbers and headers, and thanks to the way I had spaced the text, the book came out to a whopping 642 pages and weighs a ton! Reformatting was definitely in order. I did all that, and now am reading the hard copy to see if there are any further little quirky errors that leap off the page at me. Sad to say, I have found a few, which probably no one else would notice, but bug the piss out of me. It's time-consuming, but that's all it costs me: my time. When I upload the corrected file, it will not cost me a red cent, and within 24 hours I will be sent an e-mail informing me that the files have been processed, and I may order a new proof copy.

Oh, and did I mention that I managed to cut the number of pages down from 642 to 430, just by fixing the spacing? That brings cost down for everyone: me, the author, and you, the readers. What's not to love about that?

Author copies are not expensive on Create Space. On iUniverse, I think I got maybe five bucks off the list price, which they had set in the region of twenty bucks. That was a lot of money for a paperback in Y2K, and who wants to pay THAT MUCH for a paperback?

List prices are also more reasonable at Create Space. I had to jack the price up twenty-five cents more than I wanted to, because my set price was three cents lower than they required. Three cents! How silly, that they will not let me sell at a price three cents less than I want to charge, but I shan't quibble, and I expect people who buy the book won't quibble, either.

Maybe iUniverse has improved since I published that first edition, but they have priced themselves well out of my reach, and I think the copy Create Space did for me, even with my silly errors, looks a lot more professional and classy than the iUniverse copy.

So far, I am not impressed by the lack of response I have received from iUniverse in regard to unpublishing those earlier editions. I want them OFF the market NOW, because they are no longer up to my standard in many, many ways. I guess I will have to make a phone call and see if I can get the wheels rolling in the desired direction..

My next task to work upon is self-promotion. I really, really suck at that!

Oh, well, tomorrow is another day...

Announcing Book 2!

Well, it's done, and it's live on the Amazon site. Snow days are good for something, I guess. I wasn't really expecting to do this yesterday, but somehow all the pieces fell into place, and I made it all the way to the end of "Grievous Unto Us." From there, a simple matter to create a new cover, which features the same image as the previous edition, but a new title, and lastly, uploading the actual book. I accidentally sent the PDF file, which does not format well, and when I discovered that error, I promptly sent over the HTML file, and now all is well. One of these days, perhaps I'll remember the proper formatting sequence, and thus not have to issue apologies.

I'm really pleased with the way this story grew in the re-working. The original edition was not bad, exactly, but within a week after the release in 2001, I was thinking I could have done better.

Fast forward to 2015, and I did in fact do it better. I'm pleased and have no regrets this time around.

Interested in reading? You'll find the book here. If you do decide to read it, and you like it, please consider posting a review.

Thanks, and enjoy!

I'm off to work on the third book now...

New Excerpt and New Title

O.K., so I've decided I hated "Sins of the Fathers" almost as much as "To Walk in Newness of Life" for the second book. I still want some sort of Episcopal/Anglican reference, though, so now, tentatively, it's "Grievous Unto Us." This is taken from the Rite I form of the general confession in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. The entire text is as follows:

Almighty God,

Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,

maker of all things, judge of all men:

We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins

 and wickedness,

which we from time to time most grievously have committed,

by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine Majesty,

provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.

We do earnestly repent,

and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings;

the remembrance of them is grievous unto us,

the burden of them is intolerable.

Have mercy upon us,

have mercy upon us, most merciful Father;

for thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ's sake,

forgive us all that is past;

and grant that we may ever hereafter

serve and please thee in newness of life,

to the honor and glory of thy Name;

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

There is no question that Neal, and a few others in the book, find the remembrances of their "misdoings" grievous indeed, so for the moment, at least, this new title seems the most appropriate so far.

I've also got a new excerpt to share. It's a flashback sequence from the second book, and I actually posted it a few weeks ago, then forgot to post a link here. Music is an excellent trigger for all sorts of writing, and this excerpt was triggered by one of the best: Olivier Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony. I was actually in attendance at the concert documented, and Messiaen himself was sitting a few rows in front of me in the audience. He had just turned (or was about to turn) 80, and I was astounded when he was invited to take a bow, and there he was, suddenly, almost within touching distance! Neal is blown away by the same movement of the symphony as I was: the fifth. I was weeping openly by the end of it. Why? I'm not sure. It was simply overwhelming, and utterly beautiful on more levels than I can count. Listening to it on a record, CD, or mp3 is not the same, but one hears glimmers of it.

All that said, Messiaen is an acquired taste. I did not appreciate or understand the symphony half so well in 1988 as I do now. I expect I may understand it still more deeply in twenty years' time, if I live that long.

I have to say, it was a really exciting moment when I happened to remember the time frame and realized that Neal could easily have been part of it, and I an unknowing witness to that. Google helped fill in the gaps in my memory, and I began to write in earnest.

Here's the result: Turangalila. Hope you enjoy it, and if you feel inclined to comment, please do. E-mail is also welcome.

New Author Photo

I'm sometimes not sure whether these crazy smartphones are a blessing or a curse. I love playing with the camera and then manipulating the resulting "selfies" with my graphics program. Graphics programs are very good at hiding a multitude of flaws. Don't like that double chin or those crows' feet? Blur them and use the sketchbook feature, and get rid of the real-life color in favor of black and white, which looks oh so much more artsy. I'm liking it. :-)

Back to writing now. Enough Fun with Graphics for today!

Stepping in the Flashback Zone

Sitting at work day in and day out, mostly doing repetitive manual tasks it's not at all difficult to memorize, my mind wanders. This is why I like working in manufacturing so much. Most of the time, my hands are busy and my mind is free to go off on its own. "Wot larx, eh, Pip?"

Now that Book I is complete and published, I have begun work on Book II, which will be subtitled (I think, at least) "Sins of the Fathers." Since the day when I first saw the cover for the book, back in 2001, I really, really didn't like "To Walk in Newness of Life" as a title, but it was too late to change it, and I couldn't think of anything better, no matter how much I wracked my brains at the time of publication.

NOTE TO READERS: PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE DO NOT PURCHASE THE PAPERBACK COPIES PRESENTLY AVAILABLE. THEY ARE OUT OF DATE, AND I WANT YOU TO READ THE BEST, MOST CURRENT EDITION POSSIBLE. FOR AWHILE, THAT MUST BE VIA KINDLE, UNTIL I FIGURE OUT MY BEST OPTION FOR PUBLISHING HARD COPIES. IF YOU HAVE NO KINDLE, FEEL FREE TO E-MAIL ME, AND WE CAN DISCUSS OTHER OPTIONS.

Anyway, as I have been working through the re-edit of that second book, all sorts of interesting ideas are popping into my head, and as I sit at my station mucking about with wires and small electrical assembly parts, whole scenes are forming in my mind. Bare bones ideas are noted on scrap paper during breaks, and carried home to the computer at the end of the day.

Neal being Neal, these scenes are memories that come back to him in various situations. Very much like me, his mind often wanders to the past, and to things that actually occurred, or to things that he wishes could have occurred.

Some of these scenes are terribly inappropriate to be thinking of at work, but as far as I know, none of my co-workers is able to read minds. Thank God, because "oh, the  places you would go!" Yikes!

So, in short, it may be awhile yet before "Sins of the Fathers" is ready, but it's coming, and it will be bigger and better than the original. Guaranteed.

Thanks for your patience.

Corrected Version is now Live!

Like Leaves, We Touch Book I: O Fortuna is now available, with all the formatting fixed.Enjoy!