Minstrel

Minstrel

Thursday, October 20, 2011

A New excuse









I haven’t been writing again.  What?  You say that you have already noticed that?  At least I hope that’s what someone is saying.  It means that you’re reading it.



Okay smarty, can you guess the reason?



I would like to blame it all on the riverboat, but that would be a lie.  Are you asking ‘what riverboat’?  I knew you would because you are bright, inquisitive people.



Well the answer is... A friend of mine, Nan Hawthorne, writes historical fiction and her next novel is going to be a M/M romance set largely upon a riverboat that belongs to one of the hero’s.  They are also on different sides of the civil war.  Now I come to the part that I play, that being the one who ‘paints’ a picture of the hero owned riverboat as well as drawings of the two men.  It helps her think of them as real people if she can see them. 



I understand this because early on I had to do drawings of the guys in my story too.  Well... Maybe I didn’t have to, but it sure was fun.  And it did help me to see them standing around being gorgeous.  If I didn’t want to write I could sit and drool over them.



Sounds a little crazy right?  It is but, and this is the truly strange part, they tell me what their story is.  Yep, that’s right, they talk to me.  That may be why I’m having trouble with Claire and the Egotistical Rat Bastard, They have been quiet lately.  You’d think they would want to get on with it, I mean I left them in an uncomfortable place in the story.  If it was me I would want to get to that happy ending.  It is partly my fault; I got rid of the villain too early on and he wasn’t all that evil to begin with.  Maybe if I nasty him up some and give him a longer part, Claire and Sebastian will start talking again.



Any way; back to the riverboat not being to blame for my not writing this blog.  It took me about 4 days for the actual picture but you can add a couple more for trying to find a period perfect picture of a riverboat, and it had to be a side wheeler.  So that accounts for most of 6 days.  I’m also doing some other work for my friend, but none of it can account for my lack of posts.



Then there’s the whole Molly and the Vampire thing.  I had finished it, sent it off to Createspace, and because I was certain that it was perfect, (I was also stupid) I told them to go ahead and put it up for sale.  I didn’t need another proof copy, in fact I ordered 20 copies for myself.  Then they came And to my infinite surprise, at some point in fixing things I turned off the mirrored margins.  Maybe you never thought about how a book is put together, I confess that I hadn’t done much, thinking that is.  A mirrored margin means that the outside margin of every page is the same and every inside margin is the same, but wider than the outside ones.  It makes it easier to read the whole page.  Don’t get the picture?  Check it out the next time you love a book until it fall apart.



Anyway, it was really annoying and it made my baby look bad.  You can understand how I couldn’t have that, can’t you?



Meanwhile, my friend, the aforementioned Nan Hawthorne, said I should change the interior to bring the price down.  She was right of course.  That $17 print price was bothering me.  So, I changed to a different font that allowed me to bring down the size of the font (did you know that just because a font is ten pts. doesn’t mean that it is the same size as another font in 10 pt.?) and that brought the page count down by almost 100 pages.  That brought the price down to $15.  Of course that changed the size of the book so I had to redo the cover.



And again I ask myself; why did I want to write this book?  And again, I have no answer.  Maybe it has to do with all those people running around in my head insisting on telling me their stories.



If you don’t already think that I should be locked up in a rubber room; My fictional characters are going to an imaginary Halloween party at a nonexistent bar.