A self-publisher's progress

Today I submitted a 64-page chapbook to CreateSpace on behalf of Mesilla Valley Writers (MVW), which is here in New Mexico. It's my first such endeavor, and writers considering self-publishing might want to see how it goes. I'll be publishing a second chapbook very soon, and if all goes smoothly, a novel in the fall.

In previous years, MVW has published using a local print shop. We'd print a set number for a set price, and would always have unsold copies languishing in someone's garage. We decided to experiment with an online company this year because we avoid the upfront printing costs and we can buy exactly the quantity we want.

My first inclination was to go with Lulu.com, but they have an 84-page minimum; neither this chapbook nor the next one will meet that criterion. CreateSpace doesn't have that requirement, and their association with Amazon gave me the confidence to try them.

My software includes Word 2007 and Corel Paint Shop Pro X. No doubt other software would do just as well. Formatting the layout and page size in Word was straightforward, just changing it to the 6" x 9" dimensions planned for the book. The page count has to be a multiple of four for any printed book, so I arranged my material and illustrations accordingly. Of course, a few blank pages at the end would be no problem, but you do need to plan for it.

With CreateSpace and probably other such outfits, you have to upload your book in two separate PDFs, one for the contents and one for the cover. Word 2007 allows you to create a PDF of a word processing file, which you can then look at in Adobe. (If you don't have it, download the free Adobe 9 reader. You'll need it.) This is a good time to inspect the entire file for any formatting errors. Then you can upload the PDF to CreateSpace on their website. It's quite straightforward--you get a template into which you upload the file.

After that, I turned to the cover, which was a little more intimidating for me. My front cover graphic had to be 300 dpi and sized at 6 x 9. This was a little tricky getting just right, but mainly because of my inexperience. But it wasn't too bad. The CreateSpace instructions said to export the graphic into PDF. The trouble was, I couldn't see a way to do that using Paint Shop Pro. Maybe I just missed something.

But no matter. A number of free PDF-creating tools exist on the Web. I used

http://www.freepdfconvert.com/, which worked beautifully. I just uploaded my graphic, and got a PDF in return. Very nice. Then it was a matter of uploading that into the cover template. You'll also need to create a back cover and the spine, which of course varies in thickness by page count. They

have a book tour video that shows the process. This is what took me the most time in the submission process, because it requires close attention to detail--and for me, a bit of trial and error. Here is the result:

That red border is not part of the cover; it's the trim area. Anything extending into the trim area will not be part of the cover. The yellow rectangle on the back cover is an area reserved for the ISBN, which CreateSpace puts in automatically.

And wouldn't you know it? After submitting, I realized I needed to make a small change in text. It turns out that all you have to do is resubmit the corrected file.

I'll post more about my experiences as time goes on. Hopefully, they may help someone.

First the good news...

Lots of good things are going on with me lately, along with one rather nasty one. Today I finished the August issue of the Internet Review of Books. Lots of people have a hand in it, of course, but I actually put the web page up on the 15th of every month. Check it out! You'll like it.

More good news is that I'll be publishing chapbooks for the El Paso Writers' League and Mesilla Valley Writers this week. They're lots of work and fun, collaborating with friends to get the jobs completed. They'll both be published through Amazon's CreateSpace. More about them later this week.

And finally, When Pigs Fly has received a dandy new review on Amazon.

Coachmen Santara

2009-2010

R.I.P.

Now the bad—cringe along with me, please—our Coachmen RV has bitten the dust, declared both unusable and unfixable by Camping World. The issue, we're told, is frame fatigue, meaning we could lose the entire back end of the vehicle—it could break off and kill someone—if we continue to use it. When we bought the vehicle it had 4,000 miles on it, and we have added another 16,000, which hardly should be enough to wear it out. There is a lot more detail, but we're going to Camping World tomorrow to remove our belongings from it, and then we're calling our insurance company. It's very distressing, because we love RV travel.

When writers have ADD

Some blogger I am, not posting for three weeks. Lots of writing-related activity has been going on, though, which seems to be an excuse both for not blogging much and for gaining no traction whatsoever on my next novel. In fact, will there ever be another brand-new novel from my keyboard? Certainly not for a while, as one project after another pops up its alluring little head and gives me that come-hither look. A very good writer friend once described himself as a literary roundheels, by which he meant that every appealing idea that occurred to him made him want to stop what he was doing and cavort with something new. It was a self-effacing comment for someone who has published 10 mysteries with St. Martin's Press, but I understand his sentiment. Active projects on my plate include writing book reviews, maintaining the Internet Review of Books (IRB), participating in three writers' groups (president of one, chapbook editor for two, admin for an online group), flirting with writing poetry, finding and working with web development techies to develop a new and improved IRB website, eagerly searching for typos in other people's work, and putting together some short pieces for a writing contest, all while frequently stopping to check email and too infrequently checking other people's blogs. It's all fun at least 90 percent of the time, or I wouldn't do it. The trouble is that novel writing requires a long-term commitment that's inconsistent with this fragmentation of time, this self-imposed ADD.

There will be another novel, but it's already written, sitting on my hard drive since the previous millennium, when an agent was unable to place it. An artist will create a cover, and then off the novel will go to publication, probably through Lulu. It's serious, though, and most of my fiction in the last few years has been fairly light.

What about you? If you're writing a novel, do you clear the decks of distractions? Do you block out time, plunk your butt in the chair, and just write? That's the way to do it. Once upon a time, that used to be me. No longer, but I'm not complaining.

Writing like Stephen King, but not getting paid like him

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

—Or so the I Write Like website says, based on its analysis of chapter one of One Must Die, to be published in 2011. Check out your writing at http://iwl.me. Is it accurate? Who cares? If you like the results, as I do, go with 'em.

When Pigs Fly available on Kindle

I'm pleased to announce that When Pigs Fly is available on Kindle at http://tinyurl.com/whenpigsfly-kindle.

It’s a rollicking road trip, a comic crime caper, and one man’s quest to do the right thing. The Alamogordo, New Mexico, Friends of the Library refused to let me do a reading because of immorality of the bad guys—what better recommendation could I ask for?

For six bucks, you can’t go wrong. You don’t even need to buy a Kindle reader. You can download Kindle for PC for free.

Redwood forests and London Bridge

We're approaching the halfway point in our4,000-mile, month-long RV trip to the West Coast. The main highlight was seeing our son in the San Francisco area for three days, but almost every day adds to the catalog of delights: petroglyphs where we never expected to see them; London Bridge in the middle of what should be nowhere; trees turned to stone; Victorian Painted Ladies; a town consisting entirely of a general store and a gas pump; thriving redwoods that were already giants when Columbus was but lust in his father's loins. Yesterday I walked in a redwood forest--actually, we're staying in an RV park that sits in the middle of one--and examined an old trunk that had fallen sometime in the distant past. Its diameter might have been seven or eight feet, and one end was hollow. I stood inside, imagining being a hiker who sought shelter from a sudden downpour--the inside of the old giant would have been perfect for a half dozen hikers. On its outside, however, the bark was covered by clover, ferns, lichen, and moss, thousands of small roots extending from the top of the mass. It's going to take a long time for Nature to wipe all traces of the tree's existence, but she is patient. She will do it.

My new card reader doesn't work, though it was fine at first, so I haven't been able to upload photos from my camera for a few days. But perhaps because Man trumps Nature (in his own mind), a highway will lead me today out of this ancient glory and north to a Radio Shack. So by the end of the day I should be able to upload more photos.

Here, at least, is London Bridge, carried stone by stone across the Pond in the 1970s and reassembled in Arizona. Oddly, it looks at home.

Book covers

Here are a couple of book covers I designed for a friend, Dr. Judy Hilbert. She's published both titles on Lulu.com. Desert Blooms is her chapbook consisting mainly of writing by members of her local writing group, who are all seniors living in Las Cruces. The red blossoms are a detail from a photo I took this spring in a neighbor's yard.

This one is from last year. Our fiction critique group meets at a restaurant in Mesilla, so Judy and I set up some shots in the parking lot. She brought along a teddy bear that was germane to her story, and she placed it in the remains of an old, broken-down wagon.

ebook ups and downs

A while back, iUniverse approached me with an offer to turn my novels into ebooks in the epub format for an introductory price of $79. After some dithering, I said yes to creating an ebook for When Pigs Fly about three weeks ago. If it worked out well, I thought, I would go back to do other titles.

Well, I followed up yesterday and learned that they'd forgotten to place my order. So today they've corrected that, and their rep saw that I got the service for free. Meanwhile, the price for future ebooks has gone up from $79 to $249. Yikes! Now I am strongly tempted to just figure out how to do it myself. The ebook won't be ready for about another six weeks.

So it's a good news-bad news deal with iUniverse. On the one hand, they have always treated me fairly and honorably. On the other, they have not overwhelmed me with their competence.

Las Cruces author Jim Lindberg

Today I submitted a short profile to Southwest Senior, about local author Jim Lindberg. This gentleman has done a lot--earned a degree in physics, built rockets at White Sands, studied the atmosphere for the Army, took up gemology as a hobby, bought gems for cash from Mexican miners, earned a private pilot's license, worked as a police officer for ten years, once had dinner in Brazil with a woman who identified herself as Hitler's photographer, and has written two books. He is a member of Mesilla Valley Writers here in Las Cruces, and says he never has writer's block or runs out of ideas.

Whew. I'm tired just thinking about it all.

Here is a link to his two books: http://www.llumina.com/store/ShortStories.htm

An interview with Anne Hillerman

Anne Hillerman

This interview with Anne Hillerman, daughter of the late mystery writer Tony Hillerman, appeared in the May 2010 issue of Southwest Senior. Reprinted with permission.

You and your husband Don Strel have two new books out within six months of each other: Tony Hillerman’s Landscape last October and Gardens of Santa Fe this month. What were the challenges and the pleasures of these two projects?

Both books posed a similar challenge—how to condense the information and select among so many possible photos to give readers the best book possible. For Tony Hillerman's Landscape, photographer Don Strel and I both enjoyed traveling throughout the Four Corners area and the Navajo Nation, following the footsteps of Tony Hillerman's detectives, Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn. In Gardens of Santa Fe, we delighted in the opportunity to see such gorgeous gardens and meet the interesting people who created them.

Tell us about the origins of Tony Hillerman’s Landscape.

Each fall, I help present the Tony Hillerman Writer's Conference: Focus on Mystery. One year New Mexico mystery author Michael McGarrity was our keynote speaker, and Don Strel created a slide show of the places in southern and southwestern New Mexico McGarrity used for his latest book. Tony was in the audience and enjoyed McGarrity's illustrated talk. Afterward he said to Don "Why don't you do something like that for my books?"

Which of your dad’s Chee/Leaphorn novels is your favorite, and why?

Working on our Hillerman's Landscape book gave me a great excuse to re-read them all and I found something I'd forgotten and admired in each of them. I especially enjoyed the early books, Dance Hall of the Dead, Listening Woman, The Dark Wind. I hadn't read them for 25-30 years and they hold up over time very well.

Why do you think readers connected so well with his work?

Tony Hillerman was a wonderful storyteller, with a tremendous appreciation for the landscape in which his stories are set and for the characters who inhabit them. The plot resolutions leave the readers satisfied. The bad guys get what they deserve, Leaphorn and/or Chee solve the crime—and teach us something about the Navajo in the process.

How have his novels affected popular perceptions of the Southwest?

As Don and I have traveled throughout Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico on our book tour, we met many people who say Dad's novels provided their introduction to the Southwest. They liked what they read, came here to visit, and maybe even moved here. The books present American Indians—Navajos, Hopis, Zunis, Utes and other tribes—as real people, and as different from each other. His skill here has helped educate readers who haven't had much other exposure to Southwestern Indians.

Did your dad model any of his characters on real people? And how much Tony Hillerman is in Joe Leaphorn's character?

Yes, Dad often mentioned that he built Joe Leaphorn in part on a sherriff he came to know when he worked a reporter in his early days on the police beat in rural Texas. Other characters, including one memorable villain who spends his spare time trying to find the mother who abandoned him, came from his years in journalism. Sometimes, Dad would let non-profit groups auction off the chance to have a character in his next book named after the buyer. But, although the names are real those character don't necessarilly have anything in common with the real person.

Joe Leaphorn did remind me of Dad in some ways....his unflapability, his dogged anaylzing of problems until they were solved, his tremendous love for his wife and, of course, Leaphorn's appreciation for the beauty of the landscape of the Navajo Nation. Dad loved that country and was totally devoted to his wife, my Mom Marie.

Do you plan to write fiction some day?

Yes. If it will be good fiction remains to be seen. I think every person who enjoys playing with words and stories shares that fiction dream.

Tell me about his influence on your own writing.

Both of my parents always believed that I could do, and succeed at, whatever career I chose. I saw how much my Dad loved journalism, so that was my first career and it lead to books. I had some classes with Dad at UNM when he was teaching journalism and he gave me the same tough, honest criticism he gave everyone in the class. He encouraged me to keep at it, not to get lazy with my writing, and to always expect a little more of myself.

Finally, aren't you glad he didn't follow that agent's advice to get rid of the Indian stuff?

You bet!

Cuddling my new iPad

A couple of weeks ago, I bought an iPad at the Apple store in Albuquerque. Was it worth the money? Oh, that's probably the wrong question. It's a bright, shiny grownup's toy that entices the shopper with its utter and shameless sexiness. Walk past the display model and you can almost hear it coo, ooh, baby...take me home...stroke your fingers on my interface...

They were out of stock on the $400 model, and I had to act while my resistance was low. So my wife and I walked out of the store $500 poorer but feeling oh-so twenty-first century.

People, myself included, seem to be buying these machines based mainly on their potential. A certain number of applications come with it, such as the Safari browser, email, a notepad, a calendar; other apps are free or modestly priced. Nota bene: so far, all of this duplicates functionality already on my laptop. I purchased a Sudoku game and use it a lot, but could have kept playing on my laptop for free. There is a free app that lets me read all my Kindle purchases in an appealing display, but I already own a Kindle. I can upload photos and music, but I already use my laptop for that. There's an iBook app I don't use yet because my Kindle books won't transfer over. Other apps exist, but they are still relatively few.

So I ask myself, potential for what? Simply for the uses I haven't thought of, the surprises developers will dream up.

Meanwhile, it's hard to see the iPad fulfilling any immediate need that my other gizmos can't satisfy quite well. I love it, but so far it's mostly an expensive Sudoku-playing machine.

Redundancy, anyone?

Back on the blogging wagon

First rose of the year in our patio

A friend reminded me today that I've fallen off the blogging wagon. Guilty, your honor.

My writers' groups have had interesting guests this month: Robin Romm at Mesilla Valley Writers and Rus Bradburd at El Paso Writers' League. Both seemed like seasoned presenters as they spoke about their own works and about the writing process. Bradburd spoke of the need for writers to write against the readers' expectations and to avoid the familiar. Writing about losing is more interesting than writing about winning, he said, because losing (and conflict) reveal character.

Tony Hillerman on writing

“Sitting at a computer is the place for taking a clunky sentence and smoothing it out, making it read better. I do some of my best writing in my head before I fall asleep for my afternoon nap. I recommend that!”

—Tony Hillerman, quoted in Tony Hillerman's Landscape by Anne Hillerman

Draft cover for Cobra

Here is a draft of a cover design for my mystery, Cobra. The clip-art snake image is copyrighted material I will purchase from ClipArtOf.com. The rest of the work is my own, using Paint Shop Pro X.

The story itself, which I'll self-publish, is a detective novel set in urban U.S. with flashbacks to Cambodia. Unlike my previous works, this one is serious.

So here's my question: Does the cover make you want to read the book? I'd really appreciate people's input either way. If anything in the design doesn't work for you, please tell me. Thanks!

The worst typo ever?

The Red Room asked readers about the worst typo they've ever seen. In the early '70s I wrote for a local weekly newspaper. On one fateful deadline night, a reporter (not yours truly) wrote his account of a planning board meeting, and the editor rushed it through to print without giving it much of a look. But the reporter had embedded a parenthetical note to the editor, not meant for publication, mentioning a member of the public who'd attended the meeting. The gist was that the gentleman, who was named, was a loudmouth, a fool, and the town drunk. Naturally, the article was published with the private note intact, and it caused quite a commotion. The way I heard about it later, the newspaper's owner privately apologized to the man, who in turn acknowledged the basic truth of the article as printed.

Defining the border

Gene Keller, the speaker at today's El Paso Writers' League meeting, gave us a 15-minute writing exercise to "define the border." Since El Paso is flush against the U.S. Mexican border, that's the one he meant and the one we wrote about. Here is my effort:

The border is a line we've agreed upon—a river, a wall, a treaty. Land that once was theirs but now is ours, and they had better not show up without their papers.

It's a line between us and them—our language and theirs. Our money and their drugs; our guns and their crime. It's a line we cross every day, enjoying the benefits of each others' culture. It's a line that once kept shifting but now is fixed in the ground. It's a line that is both distinct and blurred.

Writing book reviews

I'm working my way through Barnaby Rogerson's The Last Crusaders, about the century-long clash between Christendom and Islam that lasted into the 16th century. My assignment is to review it for the February issue of the Internet Review of Books, so I need to finish soon, even though it's not a speedy read. When I come across a passage that might be worth referring to, I write the page number and the first few words of a sentence on a piece of paper. When I've finished reading the book, I'll open a Word file and start writing notes--initial impressions, then perhaps quotes or ideas from the list I've compiled. That's generally enough to get me started on writing the review.

That sounds straightforward enough, but what do others do? If you write book reviews, how do you approach the task?

A book unfit for review?

A book reviewer I know recently refused to review a self-published book on the grounds that it was so sloppily written and edited. The book review editor tactfully explained to the author that the reviewer preferred not reviewing it at all to writing a scathing review.

The author blithely responded that since his manuscript had been edited by an English teacher and a grammar-checking program, he felt perfectly comfortable with the book the way it was, and that the reviewer must simply be judging by her own unique standards that were of no concern to the author.

I haven't seen the book in question, but it's hard to imagine a writer with such a cavalier attitude having any success.

Gringos in Mazatlán

Here in Mazatlán we are yards away from both a busy street and the ocean. As I listen to the mixture of sounds, I sometimes find it hard to distinguish between traffic and surf. Perhaps two-thirds of the RVs here in Mar Rosa RV Park are from Canada, including every U.S.-bordering province except for the Maritimes. License plates abound from British Columbia, and these people are here for multi-month stays. With the exception of someone from Ohio, the U.S. visitors are all from west of the Mississippi.

If you can tear yourself away from the lovely beach, getting around the city is easy and inexpensive. Yesterday we rode a bus into downtown for nine pesos each, which amounts to a little over a half dollar. The bus had a hand-printed destination on its cracked windshield, and a little girl who was maybe four or five years old sat on the driver's knee. Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, I suppose.

We rode a pulmonia to an indoor shopping area with dozens of vendors selling clothing, arts, crafts, food, and such. Vendors tend be assertive and friendly, and to an extent you can haggle on prices. Nancy and I must have Gringo emblazoned on our foreheads, because the vendors immediately try out their English on us. For regular shopping, the big chains like Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stand ready to take your pesos. We've been buying groceries at a nearby Mega super market, which is as modern and well-stocked as any in the States.

One night this week we attended an excellent flamenco performance in the historical part of the city. You can see a YouTube video of the dance troupe on their website.

Mexico trip, day 7: Celestino Gasca

Empty beach, Celestino Gasca

At 4 p.m. I walked the long beach at Celestino Gasca and looked around to find that I was the only person in sight. The water is warm, and young men swim out beyond the surf with flippers and mesh-covered inner tubes, apparently diving for oysters. We’re in a tiny RV park built for eight occupants, with a couple of small buildings, a pool that I’m told is called an “infinity pool,” and some colorful flowers. Oddly, at least to me, two sides of the property are fenced off with chain link and barbed wire, even though any unlikely trespassers could easily walk around it. Near the pool is a covered patio area for lounging and dining; they serve excellent seafood dishes.

As nice as this place is, it’s not near anything else as far as I can tell. I’m eager to move on to Mazatlán and, I hope, leave the sand fleas and godawful Internet connection behind.

By the way, my experience so far is that a great many places accept only cash instead of credit cards. That seems to go for gasoline, RV fees, and many restaurants, although my Visa worked for a couple of lunches.