Daily life: Countdown to publishing my first paperback
"Books are normally built up from gatherings or signatures - printed and folded sheets - with each signature forming a unit of 8, 12, 16, 24, or 32 pages. The 16-page signature is by far the most common. Typographers therefore work to make most of their books seem divinely ordained and conceived to be some multiple of 16 pages in length. Seasoned book typographers recite in their meditations not only the mantra of points and picas - 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72 . . . - but also the mantra of octavo signatures: 16, 32, 48, 64, 80, 96, 128, 144, 160, 176, 192, 208, 224, 240, 256, 272, 288, 304, 320, 336, 352, 368, 384, 400. . . .
"In a work of continous prose, the illusion of divine love for the number sixteen is obtained by straightforward copyediting."
--Robert Bringhurst: The Elements of Typographic Style.
For newcomers: Background to my writing entries | Background to my mentoring entries | Background to my simplicity entries | Background to my home entries.
*** 10 June 2009. Writing: ISBNs.
Well, I bought my ISBNs. I suppose that it would have been harder to sell my first-born? I don't have much experience to compare this to, because I've never spent $275 in one fell swoop before, other than as part of my rent. I mean, I've had other people pay that much on objects for me. (That's why I co-own a house.) But back in the period of my life when I was actually able to pay all my bills on my own (that would be July 1990 to February 1992, the period when I worked for the Johns Hopkins University Press for a salary of $18,000 - I felt rich), I never spent that much money on any single object.
On the other hand, don't ask me how much I've spent cumulatively on books over the years; I don't want to feel ill. So I suppose it's appropriate that my first big purchase would be code numbers for books.
Still feels like a lot of money to spend for a bunch of digits.
*** 11 June 2009. Writing: Death and leading.
Some people worry about taxes. I worry about leading.
I'm using Hoefler Text for my typeface. It's a beautiful type with lots of neat features. As the designers' Website puts it, "When Jonathan Hoefler founded the company in 1989, digital typography was in its infancy. . . . Hoefler Text, designed in 1991, was an opening salvo in the fight for fine typography. Following on the heels of the Adobe Originals program, which had just begun to introduce designers to such far-out concepts as 'old-style figures' and 'small caps,' Hoefler Text resuscitated a number of other traditions that had once been central to fine printing: extended ligature sets, the engraved capitals of the early twentieth century, and the arabesques of the renaissance."
I just know that you font fetishists are getting warm at the groin now. I deliberately chose a dark typeface because (1) I wanted the PDF edition to be easily readable onscreen and (2) I think a dark typeface looks classy in print.
But Hoefler Text's darkness made me nervous about whether the amount of leading that my father had placed between the lines in his experimental layout - two points - was enough. (The general rules is, the darker the typeface, the more leading you need.) So I spent the day being jittery about that, to the point where I went online to try to find examples of Hoefler Text as set in books.
Mistake. Six hours later, I managed to tear myself away, now jittery with Internet addiction.
However, I've decided to be brave and go with two-point leading.
Which reminds me . . .
*** 11 June 2009. Reading and viewing: Oo, shiny! Font Conference video.
Font Conference. I sent this to my father several months ago. He mercifully refrained from telling me what he thought of my low taste in comedy.
*** 15 June 2009. Home: Life outside the Internet: gardening.
I finally admitted to myself yesterday that my Internet usage has been completely out of the control for the past three weeks. So I devoted today to simplicity activities; I feel much better now. I think I'd gotten myself into the bad habit of regarding the offline world as my workplace and the online world as my play space. So I reminded myself today of how many fun things I can do offline.
The evening was spent at my father's, but earlier in the day I spent three-quarters of an hour fighting with the English ivy. (Me, discussing alternative solutions to tackling an ant problem my father and stepmother were having: "There are green solutions to that, aren't there?" My father (smiling): "No, you attack them with a bazooka. This is war. None of that namby-pamby green stuff.") Anyway, it turns out that my warfare against the English ivy was a good idea, because it's been twining itself around the cable leading down from our house's lightning rod. That can't be good. So I began untwining the ivy - with the aid of clippers - and am going to clear a spot on the ground around the cable, to prevent this from happening again.
The nice thing about English ivy is that it's easily cleared. You tug up a root, and the stem turns out to be attached to six feet's worth of vine, which you can pull up within seconds. I've got nearly all of the western side of the house (one of the side yards) cleared of the ivy now - not that there was much there to begin with, but it gave me a sense of accomplishment.
"Did your mother plant the ivy?" my father asked. (My mother was the gardener in the family.)
"No, I think it was there when you and she bought the house," I replied.
"Oh, yes, I remember now," my father said. "It was a tiny patch."
Thirty-five years later, the ivy has taken over one-third of our spacious front yard. Doug hinted at one point that he wouldn't mind if it took over the entire yard; he hates mowing the remaining grass but is afraid of not doing so, as long as any grass remains there. I think he envisions riots from our neighbors if the grass grows over two inches. Since one of our neighbors has turned his entire front yard into a vegetable garden, I have a bit more faith than Doug does in our neighbors' tolerance of natural gardening. But still, there's no point in taking chances. Daddy recounted tonight the occasion, many years ago, when some teenage kids raced their motorbikes over a neighbor's meticulously manicured lawn. The neighbor appeared at the front door with a rifle in hand.
(I hasten to say to any foreign readers that the reason my father still remembers this anecdote thirty years later is that this sort of thing doesn't normally happen in my part of the U.S.)
(Rather, it happens in my apprentice's part of the U.S.)
Since I don't like the way that the English ivy has been throttling the remaining plantlife in the front yard, I've decided that the best thing to do would be to clear the ivy out of the area closest to the house and the big trees, but leave a border of ivy further out, running parallel to the sidewalk - and encourage Doug to allow the ivy to grow into the lawn area. At the same time, I'll keep the area around the trees mulched, and hopefully some interesting plants will grow there. Thus we will reclaim our yard from the evil suburban lawn.
Meanwhile, Doug and I are fighting about the forsythia that serves as the border for most of our property. "You can't let it grow wild!" he cried.
"Why not?" I asked. "It's a wild thing."
Well, I've volunteered to clip the forsythia this year. (The part of it that faces the sidewalk really does need to be clipped yearly, to keep the right-of-way clear.) If Doug decides I haven't clipped the forsythia enough, he can go in and do the job himself.
We do seem to be in agreement, however, about turning part of the front lawn - the part closest to the forsythia and therefore not easily seen from the sidewalk - into a wildflower meadow. This is in fact where wildflowers naturally grow, because it's the sunniest part of the yard. Last year, the blooming was so beautiful that I was able to persuade Doug not to mow it, after shown him some gardening photos where part of the grounds was kept as a meadow while the rest was mowed. So he tried the experiment of leaving that part of the lawn unmowed, and nary a neighbor complained. (Well, they'd better not. Our town's public works department does exactly the same thing with part of the main grassy area in the middle of town.)
This year, I'd like to create a border around that area - such as a fence or a low wall - so that it will be obvious that we're letting the grass grow for gardening reasons, and not because we're lazy. (Or, as Kirk would put it, "Not just that.")
*** 19 June 2009. Home and Writing: Gardening, layout, and publishing plans.
Yesterday, Doug told me that a thunderstorm was on the way, so I rushed outside to do a bit of gardening before the storm arrived. At a certain point, as thunder was rumbling ominously behind me, it occurred to me, Maybe this isn't the best time to be clearing out the ivy from behind the lightning rod.
At any rate, I've now pulled all the ivy off the house's walls and cleared out the ivy from the west side yard. Now I'm going to take a break in order to deal with the forsythia, provided that Doug and I can come to any agreement about the pruning. (I don't suppose he'll go for the argument that the neighbors will be really envious when they see what tall hedges we have.)
Meanwhile, I'm continuing to struggle with InDesign. I've never met such a needlessly complicated bit of software in my life. I'll spend thirty minutes struggling to get it to do things in the "easy" manner that it promises, will finally give up and do things the hard way, and then will go on to the next step, only to find that the next "easy" job is impossible to do. I'm making about a millimeter of progress each day.
It really shouldn't be this hard to lay out a novel that has a straightforward design.
Editing and electronic layout are going a lot faster than that, thank goodness. I've finished all but the last bits of editing on Transformation and am making progress on various Website changes and Kindle e-books. By the end of July - barring unforeseen circumstances, such as me murdering InDesign - I should have the first three Eternal Volumes laid out for online/Kindle publication and the first volume laid out for paperback/PDF publication. That will leave me the rest of the summer for marketing, heavy editing, and research.
I'd set myself the goal earlier this year to get all of my completed stories online by the end of my 2010 publishing season. WIth the possible exception of the first novel I ever wrote - which will need very heavy editing before I let it see the light of day - I think I'll meet that goal. Next year will be my Three Lands publication year: I'm one-and-a-half scenes away from having three more volumes from that series ready to post (other than them needing to be betaed and edited). I'm also hoping that, if I do enough research this summer for my Prison City series, my Muse will get the hint and hand me the first two volumes of that series next winter. If he also decides to finish the fourth volume of The Eternal Dungeon or the first volume of Loren's Lashes (I'm halfway through completing both those novels), I won't be at all displeased.
As for paperback publishing, we'll have to see how Rebirth sells before I make any further plans. At least I know that this is the hardest work I'll ever do on paperback publishing. Once I have the template and routine in place, subsequent paperbacks should be a lot easier.
*** 20 June 2009. Writing: Prison City research day.
Arnold Lunn's The Harrovians arrived at the interlibrary loan office of Montgomery County public library system this week, two months after I'd put in a request for it. I'd say, "This is unworkable," but actually, it's the most workable of my solutions for getting access to interlibrary loans, for a simple reason: Doug picks up the books. That's vitally important, since six months out of the year I can't take the bus over to the University of Maryland to pick up books from its much swifter interlibrary loan office. (Even assuming I could spare $150 to pay for access to that system, which I can't.)
Doug dropped me off at the university library today on his way to pick up my loan (his own interlibrary loan had arrived at the same time), so I spent a while drooling over the juvenile fiction collection there. The University of Maryland has an excellent collection of mid-twentieth-century children's books; I'm going to pore through it this summer, and if the books I find there aren't available through the State of Maryland's interlibrary loan system (which only covers this state), I'll put in more requests through Montgomery County's interlibrary loan system (which covers every library that's hooked in with WorldCat).
If this all sounds complicated, it's because it is. I dream of a world where I could pay a fee to download an electronic copy of any book I wanted.
At any rate, I'm glad I was able to get my hands on Arnold Lunn's school story, because it's obvious that Alec Waugh (whose The Loom of Youth is my main resource in creating the boarding school in my Prison City series) is heavily indebted to Lunn. Lunn's papers, you may recall, are held by Georgetown University in D.C., including his school diary, which The Harrovians is supposedly based upon. It looks as though it might be worth my while to visit Georgetown, perhaps in August.
While I was at Maryland, I perused through other research material: 1960s books on journalism, a couple of retrofuture books, and issues of Seventeen from 1962.
"It must have been horrible to be a girl back then," I said to my apprentice afterwards. "All that Seventeen talked about was fashion and dating."
"I hate to break it to you, Sir," my apprentice replied, "but that's all that Seventeen talks about today."
Oy, vey. Well, at least we have GQ now, so that the guys can have equal opportunity to be shallow.
My library research isn't done yet; I have to browse through more 1960s periodicals and more 1960s journalism books and more memoirs of 1960s life among folksingers and Greenwich Village residents, and I haven't even started yet on the boarding-school historical studies. Fortunately, Seventeen has turned out to be an excellent source of mid-sixties slang, so I'm no longer worried about locating texts with that slang (which had previously looked as though it would be a major problem, because I need to get the language right). But the two retrofuture books that I looked at today were so unhelpful compared to the retrofuture Websites I've found online that I suspect that my main sources for retrofuture information (aside from the oodles of media I've already looked at) will be the 1960s "life in the future" newsreels from British Pathe - available free online, hurrah.
And the Jetsons. Seriously, even though it's meant to be comedy, it's turning out to be one of the best retrofuture sources I have.
*** 20 June 2009. Reading and viewing: A WTF moment: "Career Building Through Fan Fiction Writing"?
Career Building Through Fan Fiction Writing, by Miriam Segall.
According to one blogger, "The book doesn't suggest that anyone try to make money from writing fan fiction, but instead use fanfic as a way to practice your writing and get your name out there," but still - what an overly provocative title. What's really worrisome is that I can't find any references within fandom to this book. Did I miss the stir about this?
"In a work of continous prose, the illusion of divine love for the number sixteen is obtained by straightforward copyediting."
--Robert Bringhurst: The Elements of Typographic Style.
For newcomers: Background to my writing entries | Background to my mentoring entries | Background to my simplicity entries | Background to my home entries.
*** 10 June 2009. Writing: ISBNs.
Well, I bought my ISBNs. I suppose that it would have been harder to sell my first-born? I don't have much experience to compare this to, because I've never spent $275 in one fell swoop before, other than as part of my rent. I mean, I've had other people pay that much on objects for me. (That's why I co-own a house.) But back in the period of my life when I was actually able to pay all my bills on my own (that would be July 1990 to February 1992, the period when I worked for the Johns Hopkins University Press for a salary of $18,000 - I felt rich), I never spent that much money on any single object.
On the other hand, don't ask me how much I've spent cumulatively on books over the years; I don't want to feel ill. So I suppose it's appropriate that my first big purchase would be code numbers for books.
Still feels like a lot of money to spend for a bunch of digits.
*** 11 June 2009. Writing: Death and leading.
Some people worry about taxes. I worry about leading.
I'm using Hoefler Text for my typeface. It's a beautiful type with lots of neat features. As the designers' Website puts it, "When Jonathan Hoefler founded the company in 1989, digital typography was in its infancy. . . . Hoefler Text, designed in 1991, was an opening salvo in the fight for fine typography. Following on the heels of the Adobe Originals program, which had just begun to introduce designers to such far-out concepts as 'old-style figures' and 'small caps,' Hoefler Text resuscitated a number of other traditions that had once been central to fine printing: extended ligature sets, the engraved capitals of the early twentieth century, and the arabesques of the renaissance."
I just know that you font fetishists are getting warm at the groin now. I deliberately chose a dark typeface because (1) I wanted the PDF edition to be easily readable onscreen and (2) I think a dark typeface looks classy in print.
But Hoefler Text's darkness made me nervous about whether the amount of leading that my father had placed between the lines in his experimental layout - two points - was enough. (The general rules is, the darker the typeface, the more leading you need.) So I spent the day being jittery about that, to the point where I went online to try to find examples of Hoefler Text as set in books.
Mistake. Six hours later, I managed to tear myself away, now jittery with Internet addiction.
However, I've decided to be brave and go with two-point leading.
Which reminds me . . .
*** 11 June 2009. Reading and viewing: Oo, shiny! Font Conference video.
Font Conference. I sent this to my father several months ago. He mercifully refrained from telling me what he thought of my low taste in comedy.
*** 15 June 2009. Home: Life outside the Internet: gardening.
I finally admitted to myself yesterday that my Internet usage has been completely out of the control for the past three weeks. So I devoted today to simplicity activities; I feel much better now. I think I'd gotten myself into the bad habit of regarding the offline world as my workplace and the online world as my play space. So I reminded myself today of how many fun things I can do offline.
The evening was spent at my father's, but earlier in the day I spent three-quarters of an hour fighting with the English ivy. (Me, discussing alternative solutions to tackling an ant problem my father and stepmother were having: "There are green solutions to that, aren't there?" My father (smiling): "No, you attack them with a bazooka. This is war. None of that namby-pamby green stuff.") Anyway, it turns out that my warfare against the English ivy was a good idea, because it's been twining itself around the cable leading down from our house's lightning rod. That can't be good. So I began untwining the ivy - with the aid of clippers - and am going to clear a spot on the ground around the cable, to prevent this from happening again.
The nice thing about English ivy is that it's easily cleared. You tug up a root, and the stem turns out to be attached to six feet's worth of vine, which you can pull up within seconds. I've got nearly all of the western side of the house (one of the side yards) cleared of the ivy now - not that there was much there to begin with, but it gave me a sense of accomplishment.
"Did your mother plant the ivy?" my father asked. (My mother was the gardener in the family.)
"No, I think it was there when you and she bought the house," I replied.
"Oh, yes, I remember now," my father said. "It was a tiny patch."
Thirty-five years later, the ivy has taken over one-third of our spacious front yard. Doug hinted at one point that he wouldn't mind if it took over the entire yard; he hates mowing the remaining grass but is afraid of not doing so, as long as any grass remains there. I think he envisions riots from our neighbors if the grass grows over two inches. Since one of our neighbors has turned his entire front yard into a vegetable garden, I have a bit more faith than Doug does in our neighbors' tolerance of natural gardening. But still, there's no point in taking chances. Daddy recounted tonight the occasion, many years ago, when some teenage kids raced their motorbikes over a neighbor's meticulously manicured lawn. The neighbor appeared at the front door with a rifle in hand.
(I hasten to say to any foreign readers that the reason my father still remembers this anecdote thirty years later is that this sort of thing doesn't normally happen in my part of the U.S.)
(Rather, it happens in my apprentice's part of the U.S.)
Since I don't like the way that the English ivy has been throttling the remaining plantlife in the front yard, I've decided that the best thing to do would be to clear the ivy out of the area closest to the house and the big trees, but leave a border of ivy further out, running parallel to the sidewalk - and encourage Doug to allow the ivy to grow into the lawn area. At the same time, I'll keep the area around the trees mulched, and hopefully some interesting plants will grow there. Thus we will reclaim our yard from the evil suburban lawn.
Meanwhile, Doug and I are fighting about the forsythia that serves as the border for most of our property. "You can't let it grow wild!" he cried.
"Why not?" I asked. "It's a wild thing."
Well, I've volunteered to clip the forsythia this year. (The part of it that faces the sidewalk really does need to be clipped yearly, to keep the right-of-way clear.) If Doug decides I haven't clipped the forsythia enough, he can go in and do the job himself.
We do seem to be in agreement, however, about turning part of the front lawn - the part closest to the forsythia and therefore not easily seen from the sidewalk - into a wildflower meadow. This is in fact where wildflowers naturally grow, because it's the sunniest part of the yard. Last year, the blooming was so beautiful that I was able to persuade Doug not to mow it, after shown him some gardening photos where part of the grounds was kept as a meadow while the rest was mowed. So he tried the experiment of leaving that part of the lawn unmowed, and nary a neighbor complained. (Well, they'd better not. Our town's public works department does exactly the same thing with part of the main grassy area in the middle of town.)
This year, I'd like to create a border around that area - such as a fence or a low wall - so that it will be obvious that we're letting the grass grow for gardening reasons, and not because we're lazy. (Or, as Kirk would put it, "Not just that.")
*** 19 June 2009. Home and Writing: Gardening, layout, and publishing plans.
Yesterday, Doug told me that a thunderstorm was on the way, so I rushed outside to do a bit of gardening before the storm arrived. At a certain point, as thunder was rumbling ominously behind me, it occurred to me, Maybe this isn't the best time to be clearing out the ivy from behind the lightning rod.
At any rate, I've now pulled all the ivy off the house's walls and cleared out the ivy from the west side yard. Now I'm going to take a break in order to deal with the forsythia, provided that Doug and I can come to any agreement about the pruning. (I don't suppose he'll go for the argument that the neighbors will be really envious when they see what tall hedges we have.)
Meanwhile, I'm continuing to struggle with InDesign. I've never met such a needlessly complicated bit of software in my life. I'll spend thirty minutes struggling to get it to do things in the "easy" manner that it promises, will finally give up and do things the hard way, and then will go on to the next step, only to find that the next "easy" job is impossible to do. I'm making about a millimeter of progress each day.
It really shouldn't be this hard to lay out a novel that has a straightforward design.
Editing and electronic layout are going a lot faster than that, thank goodness. I've finished all but the last bits of editing on Transformation and am making progress on various Website changes and Kindle e-books. By the end of July - barring unforeseen circumstances, such as me murdering InDesign - I should have the first three Eternal Volumes laid out for online/Kindle publication and the first volume laid out for paperback/PDF publication. That will leave me the rest of the summer for marketing, heavy editing, and research.
I'd set myself the goal earlier this year to get all of my completed stories online by the end of my 2010 publishing season. WIth the possible exception of the first novel I ever wrote - which will need very heavy editing before I let it see the light of day - I think I'll meet that goal. Next year will be my Three Lands publication year: I'm one-and-a-half scenes away from having three more volumes from that series ready to post (other than them needing to be betaed and edited). I'm also hoping that, if I do enough research this summer for my Prison City series, my Muse will get the hint and hand me the first two volumes of that series next winter. If he also decides to finish the fourth volume of The Eternal Dungeon or the first volume of Loren's Lashes (I'm halfway through completing both those novels), I won't be at all displeased.
As for paperback publishing, we'll have to see how Rebirth sells before I make any further plans. At least I know that this is the hardest work I'll ever do on paperback publishing. Once I have the template and routine in place, subsequent paperbacks should be a lot easier.
*** 20 June 2009. Writing: Prison City research day.
Arnold Lunn's The Harrovians arrived at the interlibrary loan office of Montgomery County public library system this week, two months after I'd put in a request for it. I'd say, "This is unworkable," but actually, it's the most workable of my solutions for getting access to interlibrary loans, for a simple reason: Doug picks up the books. That's vitally important, since six months out of the year I can't take the bus over to the University of Maryland to pick up books from its much swifter interlibrary loan office. (Even assuming I could spare $150 to pay for access to that system, which I can't.)
Doug dropped me off at the university library today on his way to pick up my loan (his own interlibrary loan had arrived at the same time), so I spent a while drooling over the juvenile fiction collection there. The University of Maryland has an excellent collection of mid-twentieth-century children's books; I'm going to pore through it this summer, and if the books I find there aren't available through the State of Maryland's interlibrary loan system (which only covers this state), I'll put in more requests through Montgomery County's interlibrary loan system (which covers every library that's hooked in with WorldCat).
If this all sounds complicated, it's because it is. I dream of a world where I could pay a fee to download an electronic copy of any book I wanted.
At any rate, I'm glad I was able to get my hands on Arnold Lunn's school story, because it's obvious that Alec Waugh (whose The Loom of Youth is my main resource in creating the boarding school in my Prison City series) is heavily indebted to Lunn. Lunn's papers, you may recall, are held by Georgetown University in D.C., including his school diary, which The Harrovians is supposedly based upon. It looks as though it might be worth my while to visit Georgetown, perhaps in August.
While I was at Maryland, I perused through other research material: 1960s books on journalism, a couple of retrofuture books, and issues of Seventeen from 1962.
"It must have been horrible to be a girl back then," I said to my apprentice afterwards. "All that Seventeen talked about was fashion and dating."
"I hate to break it to you, Sir," my apprentice replied, "but that's all that Seventeen talks about today."
Oy, vey. Well, at least we have GQ now, so that the guys can have equal opportunity to be shallow.
My library research isn't done yet; I have to browse through more 1960s periodicals and more 1960s journalism books and more memoirs of 1960s life among folksingers and Greenwich Village residents, and I haven't even started yet on the boarding-school historical studies. Fortunately, Seventeen has turned out to be an excellent source of mid-sixties slang, so I'm no longer worried about locating texts with that slang (which had previously looked as though it would be a major problem, because I need to get the language right). But the two retrofuture books that I looked at today were so unhelpful compared to the retrofuture Websites I've found online that I suspect that my main sources for retrofuture information (aside from the oodles of media I've already looked at) will be the 1960s "life in the future" newsreels from British Pathe - available free online, hurrah.
And the Jetsons. Seriously, even though it's meant to be comedy, it's turning out to be one of the best retrofuture sources I have.
*** 20 June 2009. Reading and viewing: A WTF moment: "Career Building Through Fan Fiction Writing"?
Career Building Through Fan Fiction Writing, by Miriam Segall.
According to one blogger, "The book doesn't suggest that anyone try to make money from writing fan fiction, but instead use fanfic as a way to practice your writing and get your name out there," but still - what an overly provocative title. What's really worrisome is that I can't find any references within fandom to this book. Did I miss the stir about this?
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