Finally finished at last again

I guess some things never end.

I read someone somewhere saying about – was it books, or music or film? I don’t remember, but they said something like, ‘You don’t ever finish them, you just let them go.’

I’ve completed my latest read through of Ephialtes in paperback. That must have been about the tenth time I’ve read it from start to finish, excluding all the times I’ve read individual chapters or scenes. And still they come – the typos.

This time around I picked up two hundred and fourteen required corrections. To be fair, around three or four of these were missing words or punctuation and a further five or six were minor editorial adjustments. The rest were hyphen-based.

Obviously, I’d like the finished article to be polished to a dazzling shine, but I think I may be at that ‘letting go’ point. I’ve been here before, of course, and how foolish those times seem to me now. But this time? I don’t know, I think this might be it.

I had a skim through my digital proof before ordering a hard copy. I noticed I had ‘air-lock’ in there somewhere, where it should be ‘airlock.’   I guess I’ll stick that on the pile for the next go-over, should there be one. If there isn’t, maybe I’ll come to treasure that one little rogue hyphen. Maybe that’s the necessary flaw that sets off the perfection about it.

Or could it just be that I can’t face going through the whole damn thing again?

Definitely the former. That’s what I’m telling myself; definitely the former.

Please talk about typos again, please

Everyone loves typos. I know it’s cheap, but since I’m here to garner popularity I’m going to go on about typos again. I spoil you, and you know it.

I’m ploughing through the paperback proof of Ephialtes and noting required corrections. I’m up to page 184 (of 464. Tiny font too, so it’s lots of words) and have 118 minor corrections so far. I say minor – I think there are a couple of missing words and a few instances of minor editorial tinkering, too – because the bulk of these corrections concern the use and misuse of hyphenation. Ain’t that funny?

I’ve already mentioned that, of all things, I had quite a bit of gyp with capitalisation, and that’s weird enough, but who’d have thought that hyphens could be such a bother?

So this is my top writerly tip for the day: keep on top of your capitalisation and hyphens, and the rest will look after itself.

There. Is that enough typo-talk for you? Right then, on your way. Don’t you have homes to go to?

One nil to the Arsenal

Gavin E Parker, looking comfortable and relaxed in a retro Arsenal top at the Emirates Stadium

Just got back from the Emirates. Here’s my match report:

Arsenal won.

What, am I a sports correspondent now?

Pretty grim weather-wise. Realised shortly after we set off that it was going to be even colder than a standard English Summer rainy day. I was only wearing a T-shirt (okay, and trousers, pants, socks and the rest). In the end I had to buy a massively overpriced long-sleeved T-shirt in the Arsenal shop in order to avoid being cold and miserable. Well, to avoid being cold, anyway; it would take more than a T-shirt to stop me being miserable.

It felt very weird donning Arsenal garb at the stadium. I felt self-conscious, like it would make me stand out where, of course, if anything it would make me blend in. I guess I had a low-level fear that a stranger would grab me and ask me obscure questions about 1992/1993 squad or somesuch. Once I had failed that test the shirt would be unceremoniously ripped from my back in front of a laughing crowd. But that didn’t happen, so win for me.

All in all a fun day out, and we avoided the rain, too.

Still no comment

Just another quick one:

It’s coming up for two weeks, and still no one has commented on any of my posts. Now, I realise that no one is reading my posts, but is that really any excuse? I mean, ask yourselves; really?

I have a couple of followers now who, I presume like me, have just followed a few random people in the hope of getting followed back. When they get a notification, ‘Gavin E Parker has done a blog-poo. Again,’ they probably pay as much attention as I do when I get one for them.

I guess what I’m saying is that the followers aren’t following, in any meaningful sense, and the ‘views’ I get (suspiciously, they come very soon after new posts, and according to WordPress statistics are from search engine referrals) are probably from bots or the like.

So, if you’re out there and are a real person, please just add a comment. Even just a single word. Even just a single letter.

Let’s go to the football

A break from writing and proofing today. I’m taking the kids to the football, Arsenal vs Wolfsburg at the Emirates.

We’re not big football fans but we do have a vague interest in Arsenal. My dad was a big fan, and there are historic connections between Arsenal and Margate, our hometown.

The Emirates Cup is looked down on by the hardcore fans. It’s a silly preseason micro-tournament of no import whatsoever, but that’s what we like about it. There’s a carnival atmosphere and it makes for a fun day out.

The only time we’ve been when the vibe was anything other than chilled and fun was in 2013 when Arsenal were beaten 1-2 by Galatasaray. It was fine in the stadium but after, when we were queuing for the tube station, the Galatasaray fans were marched passed us with a mounted police escort, ensuring they had no access to us. They were chanting ‘We are best of Arsenal’ and looking anything but friendly. It did occur to me to lead a chant in retort, ‘We are best of grammar,’ but in the interest of public order I let it go.

The best policy

I’ve updated my ‘About’ page to more honestly reflect my motivation. Also, it made me laugh a little bit.  It was an evil laugh, like a banshee.

Check it out here.

What are you reading?

Weird thing: reading a book once it’s book-shaped is different to reading it as a manuscript. Why? No idea, but it certainly seems to be true.

I’ve spent some time today reading a paperback proof of Ephialtes. Despite the strong story, great writing and terrific characters, I had become weary of reading through it in draft form. But now it’s book-shaped, it’s like reading it for the first time.

What does that mean for ebooks? Again, no idea. They aren’t particular booky, but seem to do okay. I guess it means there is something you don’t quite get from that experience that you do from reading a physical book.

This seems a shame to me, because CreateSpace have a minimum price for physical books they produce, based on size and length. In the case of Ephialtes, that minimum price is seventeen dollars (roughly eleven pounds), which is prohibitively steep for a paperback by an unknown author. It’s too bad, because as I’ve been discovering, the essential ‘booky’-ness adds to the reading experience.

I’d love to be able to get the price of the paperback version down to something realistic, as it’s my preferred version. I recommend this to you: if, come September, you download and enjoy the ebook of Ephialtes, treat yourself to a copy of the paperback.

Go on. You’re worth it.

I think I might read a book

Today is another day chasing typos. I’ve checked my proof, and although the formatting is great (one scene was unjustified – typographically speaking; there are loads of scenes that are unjustified generally) typos are popping up all over the place.

I’ve looked at the first four chapters so far (of thirty-seven) and have a list of fifty corrections to make. Most of these are odd uses of hyphenation, things like ‘fire-power’ where it should be firepower. It still seems strange to me that I missed so many of these previously.

A thing that interested me, as it was not what I was expecting, was that when I came to revising the first draft the thing that caused most problems for me was capitalization. Really. My book Ephialtes is set during a future conflict between Earth and its former colony on Mars. So I have lot of generals and majors and so forth. On the political side of the conflict there are presidents, secretaries of defence and foreign affairs and whole load of other people with fancy job titles.

The capitalisation of these titles is trickier than you might think. Look it up if you’re interested, but it changes according to how the title is being used (indirect address, direct address etc). I’m still not quite sure if I’ve got it right for all my uses of ‘army’ (an army is just army, but a specific army might – might – be Army, depending on how it’s being used. Nightmare.

Anyway, I’m settling down today with the paperback of Ephialtes and noting all the little errors that I thought had been put to bed weeks ago. It’s somehow nicer to be reading a paperback than an A4 manuscript, but there’s still that dread feeling that this process will never end.

Still, there’s worse things I could be doing.

Proofs at last

I now have proofs of two versions of the Ephialtes paperback. One has dodgy margins, both have dodgy covers. The cover image is a spacescape. When printed, most of the stars are too small to be visible. Also, the deep blue is very deep, and some details are lost. I can live with that, but I need those stars so I spent some time last night making them bigger.

This is the first time I’ve had a proof of a book to peruse. Somehow the book seems more like a book now it is a book, if you can follow that. Now its compact, laid out in Garamond with proper covers and feels slightly heavy in the hand, it is somehow very ‘book.’

My next task (having fixed the cover) is to laboriously check the formatting, page by page. I’ve had a glance through and have already noticed some typos (particularly annoying as the formatting seems pretty good). Don’t those things ever give up? It seems somehow miraculous to me that there are any left, but they still keep coming. I’ve read that thing over and over again, sometimes literally one word at a time. Many times I’ve thought, ‘That’s it, done. There may be one or two sneaky typos hidden in there somewhere, but I’ve got most of them,’ only to come across a glaring error moments later. For instance, I have ‘one hundred thousandth’ hyphenated. How did I miss it? Moreover, how did I miss it ten or fifteen times? What other howlers are sat there, hiding amongst the text, ready to mock me in their simple discovery?

I guess at some point you just have to let your manuscript go. Sure, there will still be errors in there, but I’ll collate them and create a ‘revised edition’ somewhere down the line.

Funny thing is, even knowing as I do how hard it is to eradicate these bastards, I still can’t help thinking badly of other people’s typos. ‘Couldn’t you even be bothered to check’ I will loftily think, sneering as I wrap my cape about me. I know, from bitter personal experience, that that is not a justifiable position, but it is how I feel in my gut. I can switch in my manual override (‘I know that seems lame, but I bet that person had as much trouble as I did trying to stamp those out’) but deep down my animal brain will be thinking, ‘Look at that typo. Twat.’

As a self-publisher you don’t get an editor. If I had one I could blame them for any errors. In fact, I’d turn that magnanimous, ‘of course, the errors are all mine,’ thing on its head. ‘Any errors are my editor’s fault. Blame them. What am I paying them for, anyway?’ I would say in my gracious preface.

But I don’t have an editor, so what am I going to do? Well, try my hardest to chase the little blighters down and otherwise just take it on the chin. It would all be my editor’s fault, if I had one, but don’t, so I’ll have to grudgingly concede that all the sloppy errors in Ephialtes belong to me, and me alone.

Also, in accordance with Murphry’s Law, there will be a typo in this piece itself. Twat!

All substance and no style

When I set out to write my first novel, Ephialtes, one of the many things I had to consider was style.  This is how I approached it.

I don’t like writing that feels ‘writerly’.  It seems to me there is no need to over egg every sentence, or to describe in depth every little thing a character is thinking, feeling or wearing.  To me that seems fake, and suggests the author is trying too hard.

With that in mind I made a conscious decision to imagine my story and then simply describe what I had imagined.  I wanted to convey these imaginings as clearly as possible.  I strived for clarity and didn’t consider a conscious style at all.

This isn’t to say that style is unimportant.  It is. However, it’s one of those things like accents – you can’t hear your own, but everybody has one.  And like an accent, it will sound dreadful if you try to fake it.  By strenuously avoiding a deliberate style I hope that my style, whatever it is, will be there on the page.  I’m sure I must have a way of constructing sentences, scenes or stories that seems unremarkable to me, where it might seem distinct or noteworthy to someone else.  And if not, at least I hope I have written clearly.

Apart from specific instances (where you want to create mystery or ambiguity for plot reasons) I can see no value in confusing the reader.  To me, that is just bad writing.  You could kid yourself that you’re deep and arty, but if you’re such a damned hot shot you should be able to communicate with precision and clarity – that is what good writing is.

Sadly, this isn’t to say that I made a total success of it.  Like most people I fall easily to waffling, and I’m sure there are many passages in Ephialtes that contradict what I’ve said above.  It’s what I tried to do though, and I think it was worth aiming for.

Let’s do lunch

I just wrote about six hundred words of utter drivel. Yes, even worse than the stuff I actually post.

With great relief I deleted all of that.

Instead, I’ll let you know what I’m having for lunch. Two slices of cold pizza. Sweet Chilli Chicken and Deep-pan Margherita.

I think I’ll go for a cup of coffee in a minute.

Don’t judge a book by its cover

Maybe you’ve been here yourself. You spend the better part of eighteen months – perhaps even longer – writing, rewriting and honing your book. Somewhere near the end of that process you start thinking about a cover. ‘I know about as much about designing book covers as I know about writing books,’ you think to yourself. Then you think, ‘Bollocks, I’ll have a crack at it.’ The fun begins.

I had an idea for the cover of Ephialtes quite a while back. I knew I’d have to go for something stark and bold, as I don’t have any drawing or 3D design skills. I had an idea I thought was pretty good. It was a black background with a fraction of yellow circle on the left and a fraction of a pink circle on the right, each spilling off the edge of the cover. In between, equally spaced on an invisible straight line are four more circles, coloured appropriately so they represent Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The yellow and pink partials are the Sun and Jupiter – it’s easier to figure it out when you can see it. Above the red Mars circle I had an oblong which, together with the Mars underneath it, combines to form an exclamation mark.

I thought it was quite a strong graphic. It was direct, required a little bit of thinking (crucially, not too much) to ‘get’, and it suggested an issue with Mars, which is what the book is all about.

In the end, I decided to not go with it. Even a pared down graphic like that needs precise execution to pull it off, and I thought I couldn’t do it justice. So I went looking for alternatives.

My first thought was to look at other book covers. When I did that I came across this startling fact: book covers are universally awful.

I hadn’t really given it much consideration before. I usually select the books I buy based on newspaper or magazine articles, so I don’t pay much attention to the covers. And I’m glad I don’t, because so many of them are just terrible.

The guy at Smashwords (why should you pay any attention to someone who can’t get their formatting guide below a hundred and twenty pages?) advises that the cover image should be strong enough to work without any text. That’s an interesting position, given that most modern covers a) have text all over them; title, author’s name, review quotes, tag lines etc, and b) have dreadful, bland, generic images under the text.

In the end I used a piece of free software to generate a spacescape. On my front cover are the title of the book and my name over the spacescape image – nothing else. I worried that this made my cover look ‘wrong’ – where’s the text all over the place, like all the other books have? – but I decided that it might make my cover stand out. Of course, there’s a problem with that, too, because you want your book to look like the others – like a book – but you also want it to look different. Go too far either way and you’re in trouble.

The other issued I had was with the back cover. I put a headline and a brief description, and under that I had some made-up quotes. It all looked ‘right’ when I roughed it out a month or two ago, but when it came down to submitting it for the final print version of the book over the weekend I had to take the fake quotes off, and then it just looked wrong. There’s a place on the back of a paperback book that somehow should have positive quotes on it. That’s just how it is, but no one has said anything quotable about my book. ‘Oh, you wrote a book?’ isn’t going to cut it for a compelling cover quote.

In the end I fudged a couple of my dummy quotes so they looked more like statements of fact, and, of course, I had to remove the quotation marks. It looks sort of okay, but should anyone ever say anything vaguely positive in the future – ‘Yeah, that wasn’t too bad,’ – I’m firing up InDesign immediately and that quote is going on there.

I’m happy with what I came up with, in the end. It looks a bit old fashioned, but I think my story telling is a bit old fashioned, too, so that’s cool.

If you’d like to see it it’s on my Amazon page.

Laters!

No comment

We’re about a week into this adventure and so far I’ve had one like and one follow. How about a comment?

Is it too ambitious to aim for a record breaking fifteen plus visitors and a comment on the same day?

Heck, what am I doing in this game if I’m not prepared for my reach exceed my grasp?

Go on, internet. Comment.

Lies, damned lies and WordPress statistics

On a mission to get loads of visitors today, so I’m hanging on my WordPress stats with bated breath.

How about this: So far today I have five views, three in the US and two in the UK. The weird thing is this; I have one visitor. So either that character has crossed the Atlantic at unprecedented speed, or WordPress stats are a bit screwy.

Incidentally, I originally spelled ‘bated’ wrong above, like my breath was some sort of a trap. Maybe it is, who would be so impolite as to tell me?

Day of the blog

As you may be aware, I’m trying to drum up interest in my book.  To do that, I have to go against the grain and try to drum up interest in myself.  That’s what I’ doing here.

I’m going to try to break my recently set daily record of fourteen visitors.  The day of that record  was coincident with my largest number of posts per day, so I’m going to go post-crazy today to see if that has an effect.

Desperate?  You betcha.

But what the jiminy, here goes nothing.

Stand by for more . . .

Parker out.

Ever feel like you’re being followed?

Yes, that’s right, muthaflikkas.  Someone’s following this shit right here.

Parker out.

Boom.

The proofs is in the pudding

I ordered some more proofs, again with known issues.  While quickly checking the digital proof for widows and orphans, I noticed a sentence with no full stop at the end.

I ordered anyway, because I thought it was a minor issue and there would almost certainly be others.  And lo!  I’ve come across a few more today.  I’ve been through that thing with a fine-tooth comb and yet still they come.  The Typos.  The Bloody Typos.

The margins was a big deal.  I think I had a brain-out there.  This time I knew what I was doing.

I’m going to have to read the whole thing again once the proofs arrive (not too much of a chore because it’s go gripping and exciting.  Don’t just take my word for it, pre-order your own copy today!)  I’ll have to  make notes and whatnot.

Also, I decided to blow out Smashwords.  I tried to read the Smashwords Style Guide and, through swirling clouds of hate, thought better of it.  I’m going to stick with Amazon, the place where most people buy their books anyway.  It’s a bigger market and much, much easier to submit to (in every sense).  Hard to justify the effort with Smashwords, given the scraps you might pick up there.

Unless anyone can advise me otherwise?

Is there anybody out there?

A quick one:

If anyone is actually reading any of these (and I wouldn’t blame you if you weren’t) could you like my Facebook page?  I know it sounds like some sort of desperate scam or scramble for likes, but it would be nice to know that people are actually out there.  A sort of ‘nod if you can hear me’ for the digital age.

At the time of writing I have six ‘likes’ for https://www.facebook.com/ephialtestrilogy .  Surely we can push that up to seven.  Come on, internet!

I get the feeling that the ‘views’ I’ve had  so far may have just been people quickly passing through by accident.

If you’re feeling particularly bold, a comment would be even better.

I can promise you this much; if I know people are reading I will try to raise the standard.  Please focus on the ‘try’ rather than the ‘will’ in that sentence.

No, really. You did WHAT!?

I laid down five hundred and seventy-five dollars for a three hundred and fifty word review.

Given that I was feeling a little sheepish at somehow – I still don’t quite understand it – throwing away thirty dollars on two copies of a proof that I knew needed correcting, chucking the better part of six hundred dollars at a short review does seem a little odd.  So let me try to explain, for my own benefit as much as anyone else’s.

I’m coming at this from a standing start.  I have no momentum whatsoever (merry-go-rounds just about starting to turn notwithstanding), so I have to drum up interest somehow.  CreateSpace has a link to Kirkus Reviews, who appear to be a legit organization.  For cold hard cash they will give books short reviews and publicize them through their various channels – website, magazine, newsletter etc.

To make the whole exercise worthwhile they review your book properly.  That is to say, they actually review it, coming to a conclusion good, bad or indifferent.  Let’s face it, reviews from http://www.wegivegreatreviewsinexchangeformoney.com wouldn’t be worth reading.

Apparently, once your review is in you have the opportunity to bury it.  You can say, ‘Oh.  Let’s keep that quiet, then,’ and everyone discreetly looks the other way.

So I came to be thinking:  What will I do if I get a terrible review?

It’s a tricky one.  Given where I am, I think maybe even a terrible review might be better than nothing.  I know I’ve read terrible reviews and gone on to read/watch/play whatever it was being reviewed despite, or even perversely because, of the review.  In fact, I went through a stage of seeking out video games with dreadful reviews, and I enjoyed quite a few of them (Damnation is a bad/good favourite).

Given that I will have paid north of a pound per word, I wonder how dreadful the review would have to be for me to decide that it should never see the light of day.  And how about this: what if the review is merely luke-warm or even, whisper it, good?

However it turns out it will be interesting to have an opinion from an honest broker, someone without a dog in the race, as it were.  I’ve had some feedback from a work colleague and my partner.  They both seemed to say my book is not terrible, but how would they say it is terrible, if they thought it?

I guess that’s why I laid the money down; because I need to know.  This whole project comes crashing down if the book is not up to snuff, and ultimately that is something you cannot hide from.  At this point – publishing – you have to lay your cards on the table, and if you have a bum hand there’s not much you can do about it.  It is what it is now, good or bad, and it will be out there for people to judge.

At least one lucky person gets to pass judgment with a fraction of my six hundred in their pocket.  So yes, that’s what I did.  Paid money to a stranger to call me out on my delusions – maybe.

You did what?

Another quick bulletin.  I spent most of yesterday formatting Ephialtes in inDesign.  As well as the formatting itself, that involves going through the whole thing, page by page, each time a major change had to be made in order to check widows and orphans and all that sort of malarky.

When you’re happy with that, you need to export it to a PDF and then check it again.

When you’re happy with that, you upload it to CreateSpace, and then check it again.

When you’re happy with that, you submit for review.  When you interior and exterior files are approved, you check them again.

I did all that then noticed this morning that my bottom margin (no sniggering) was a bit too big.  What did I do about it?  Well, I ordered two proof copies and then spent another few hours fixing the margin.  Why?  I don’t know, it was a pretty stupid thing to do.

I think I have a good version now.  I’ll have to review it, submit it for review and then review it again.  Then I’ll order a proof copy of that version, which is what I should have done in the first place.

Maybe I have created two incredibly valuable collector’s items.  More likely, I’ve just wasted thirty dollars.

Ho hum.