Last Month in Recap

So it has been at least a month since I have last blogged, mainly because I was too busy getting Steam on the Horizon available for sale. The good news is that it is available on Amazon for a paltry $2.99 (Kindle version) and $14.99 for the paperback. I also have a contest running on Goodreads where five lucky people can win a paperback copy of Steam on the Horizon. 

Speaking of paperback books......

Saturday from 2-5 I am running my first booksigning event for people in Omaha (or anyone who feels like trekking in for the event). I have two boxes full of exactly 72 books (why they shipped in multiples of 36 per box, I do not know) and need to spend this week getting media ordered, arranging for refreshments, and preparing for other things. I'm not sure what precisely one should offer at a book signing event (keychains? a dancing bear?) but luckily the event will be at FairyTale Costume so attendees will be poke through racks of wigs and bowler hats for amusement. 

Just today I got my first review on Amazon for Steam on the Horizon, and I had to chuckle when I read:

   A good read that has me wanting to know what happens next. Melissa Ann Conroy is now on the list of authors I will be very mad at if they die without finishing the series. Robert Jordan already let me down. Melissa, I'm counting on you and George R. R. Martin!

Okay, I have my orders: no dying until the Aether Saga is completed. I will endeavor to fulfill that directive. 

July 12th will see me wending my way towards Urbana, IL for An Eclectic Affair where I will present a two hour steampunk writing panel and workshop and have some scheduled book signing events. A few folks from the Steampunk Society of Nebraska and one of my coworkers Maria is going along: Maria has never been to a con before, and I have been filling her head with tales of how wonderful cons are: three days of no sleep and constant noise and distraction. Urbana is also unique for containing the base of one of the helicopters I dispatch for at work. If I have time, I plan on stopping by the base to say hello to the good crew of the (helicopter) airship Airlife, perhaps talking them into taking me out for a ride. 

Speaking of airships, I am in the middle of crafting a song about an airship. A few weeks ago, I encountered this passage in the opening chapter of Terry Pratchett's book Going Postal. 

"The flotillas of the dead sailed around the world on underwater rivers. Very nearly nobody knew about them. But the theory is easy to understand. It runs: the sea is, after all, in many respects only a wetter form of air. And it is known that air is denser the lower you go and lighter the higher you fly. As a storm-tossed ship founders and sinks, therefore, it must reach a depth where the water below it is just viscous enough to stop its fall.

In short, it stops sinking and ends up floating on an underwater surface, beyond the reach of the storms but far above the ocean floor. It’s calm there. Dead calm.

Some stricken ships have rigging; some even have sails. Many still have crew, tangled in the rigging or lashed to the wheel.

But the voyages still continue, aimlessly, with no harbor in sight, because there are currents under the ocean and so the dead ships with their skeleton crews sail on around the world, over sunken cities and between drowned mountains, until rot and shipworms eat them away and they disintegrate."

As I read this passage, my mind conjured images up of an airship that dared fly higher than the others, so high that it broke the chains of gravity and now sails eternally in space. I've been working on lyrics for a few days now: I'm not much of a song writer, but I have a tune, an idea, and some good lines. Here is the chorus: 

Aether and Clouds 

For brave Captain Nolan was seized with a fever

To sail to the highest an airship had flown.

The crew, in their loyalty, followed their captain

Over the mountains of aether and clouds. 

In a few weeks, I should have the song completed and will be posting a video. Acappella for now but I know some musicians with recording studios, so maybe we can do a studio version. 

Another wonderful change in my life is that I started biking to work every day. I follow a lovely bike path that meanders past the Missouri River and offers a splendid view of Council Bluffs. The sun is rising when I leave work in the morning and glorious sunrise follows me as I bike back home. Inevitably, I keep on going, following the bike path as it leads to a lovely park. Deer scatter at my approach, their white tails flapping in alarm and the clamor of a thousand frogs croak in indignation as I pedal past their marshes. The scent of clover and grass fill the air and the woods are full of that rich, throaty scent of green growing things. I absolutely adore my daily commute and am exceedingly happy that I have such a wonderful trail to bike on. 

So, yeah, that has been my life. I am incredibly busy but I have never been happier before in my life. Things are just so very, very good right now. I am so happy that my oldest brother Seth lives with me and we have so many good times together: biking, gardening, or simply sitting around talking. I am blessed with an abundance of friends, I have a steady job, my family is happy. I finally have a published book with more to come. God has been exceedingly, abundantly extravagant and I am overflowing with blessings and happiness, almost more than I can bear. 

And with that, I will sign off for now. More to come!

And Yet More Proofreading

Sadly, my blogging time as of late has been superceeded by both work demands and a myriad of tasks involving preparing the finalized manuscripts for both the e-book and the print book. I now have a profound and wondrous regard for book editors and all those hardy souls whose careers revolve around taking typed words in a Microsoft document and converting them into artistically gifted, visually pleasing pages in a book.

As I noted in the last post, preparing the manuscript version for the e-book was a testy process, mainly involving setting up an active Table of Contents. However, this was a trifling feat in comparison to the madness of formatting the print book pages. E-book pages are not meant to be that pretty and as long as the words line up correctly and chapters and paragraphs are clearly delineated, you are golden. Print books, however, require chapter headings, page numbers, graphics, and an assortment of formatting goodies, all which seem easy but a Word template is never an easy task to handle.

Lucky, Amazon's CreateSpace offers free templates for print book pages. I decided on a book size of 5.5X8.5 and downloaded the appropriate template. This pops up in Word with two pages side by side, so you can see what the general layout of your book will be. The template has gutters (the margins close to the book binding: these are deeper than the margins on the opposite side of the page) so the paragraphs are a bit askew in the program, but they will look fine in print.

On the right-side pages, I decided to have the title of the book and the page number on the top right hand side. On the left-side pages is my name and the page number. However, I have a few pages of information (copyright, acknowledgements, title page) before the story starts, so I tried to get the page numbers and headings to start on a specific page. Word, most infuriatingly, kept putting everything at the beginning of the document, and it was several hours of work and some research before I finally got the headers and page numbers to start where they should be.

Once everything was formatted, I created a PDF document that shows what all the print pages will look like, and I am currently looking through them one last time for errors and formatting mistakes. I have made some minor word changes, particularly since I found two "widows" (a widow is a single line on a page). Chapters 2 and 9 ended with widows, so I went back through the chapters and cut out a few words to get rid of the widows. I also kept an eye out for "orphans" (a one word line ending a paragraph).

Also, as I was going through everything, I realized that I needed more use of Captain Roberts' first name (Gavin) in conversations. I have a number of conversations where he is talking with an old friend and they constantly refer to each other by their last names. In review, I realized that this seemed to give the conversations a flavor of disrespect, so I edited some of these to make more liberal use of first names.

In all retrospect, it is a good thing that I had a disappearing graphic artist. The last posting I made showed an updated cover for "Steam on the Horizon". However, the artist of the cover simply dropped off the face of the earth and I had to scramble to find a new one. By a stroke of luck, I came across the artist Brent Schreiber: his work is phenominal, and you should take yourself straightaway to his website to see some examples of his work. When Brent and I first started talking, he sent me some examples of his work, and this particular piece caught my attention as being pretty steampunk-looking

Brent puts such amazing detail into his work! I can't wait to see the final cover for "Steam on the Horizon", We have been exchanging a flurry of emails and I just got to see the inked drawing today. Brent is setting to work on the painting next and is working hard to get the cover done.

Because there has been a delay in the cover, this has worked to be a blessing in disguise because it has forced me to take yet another read over the manuscript and make sure it is as perfect as possible. I am so ready to get this book done that I just want to throw it out there. However, I don't want to make mistakes and since I am waiting for the coverart to be finished, I have no excuse not to go through the manuscript again. Just yesterday, I realized that I had forgotten to justify the paragraphs and made a quick scramble to rectify this mistake. I don't want the book to come out and then I realize an abundance of errors I should have corrected!

It looks like I will be headed to OSFest 6 in July: I have no excuse since it is in Omaha, the lovely and talented Omaha-based singer Ally Rhodes will be there, and I will be able to meet Gail Carriger, author of "The Parasol Protectorate". Also, OSFest will be offering an Authors' Alley where authors can be available for book signing. Best of all, Authors' Alley will be open to the public, so anyone in Omaha can drop by to get a copy of "Steam on the Horizon". More information forthcoming!

And now, off to more proofreading. Oh dear, what grievous writing mistakes await me?

Editing, Formatting, Cursing

Things are rapidly heating up in Writing World - I had a few wonderful souls come over last week to help me read through Steam on the Horizon for typos, grammatically awkward sentences, periods meandering where they shouldn't go, and all other matter of boo-boos:

Featured: my mom, my oldest brother Seth, and my friend Matt, all studiously at work. Erasmus is filling in as Editor in Chief and helping by whining a lot because he is not getting enough attention.

Because I wanted everyone to focus on sentence structure and punctuation, not plot and organization, I took my manuscript and made a spectacular mess on the floor.

Then I had everyone pick up random sheets of paper to read them out of order. I also advised them to read each page backwards, starting with the last paragraph and working up from there. My mom amused us by occasionally reading the last line of one page, then the top line of the next page she had in her stack, the resulting sentence usually comically mangled.

Once this was done, I set to work correcting all issues and making a final copy. However, there is no rest for the weary for I had to set to work at formatting the manuscript for Kindle. Kindle has a clear formatting guide and the work was tedious but not difficult: I mainly had to take out the manual indentations and replace them with automatic ones. All was going fine and dandy until I turned my attention to the table of contents: for Kindle, you need to have an active Table of Contents that is hyperlinked to each chapter heading. Kindle thoughtfully provided this Microsoft guide to making active Table of Contents, and I urge you to look at this link and see if you can pull any moiety of sense out of it. I hazily stumbled through it for almost an hour, making no progress but a lot of mistakes until in desperation I turned to this extremely helpful thread on the Kindle Publishing Community page which explained the process. Boom - about ten minutes of work and I have a correct table of content!

I am currently waiting for my graphic artist to color in the cover - here is the latest version he sent me. Pretty awesome, huh?


My goal is to have the Kindle e-book available by the end of the month! Basically, I need to get the cover finished, buy an ISBN number, finish any editing to the manuscript, then get it up on Amazon. Exciting, exciting!

Publication and Steampunk Rap

I was hoping that today would end with a pile of paper lovingly scribbled over with corrections, courtesy of some trusted friends who were primed to look over the final draft of Steam on the Horizon and hunt for egregious spelling errors, comma splices, appalling grammar, and other irksome impediments to silken prose. However, the Fates and the dear Lord himself saw fit for other plans, so another week will pass before I can have a collection of eyes look over the manuscript in a final hunt for boo-boos. Luckily, two good friends have already scoured it fairly thoroughly, so I am fairly confident that few mistakes exist, but just today, I spotted at least three that had escaped my eyes in the last several readings, so I am sure that more still lurk in waiting. As small consolation, I have caught at least two errors in every e-book of the estimable Terry Pratchett, and if he can get away with it, I can as well.

A friend of mine at work is putting me in contact with an editor who can format the e-book version, a task I had assumed was relatively simple but after talking with my friend, I see the merit in forking over $150 for someone else to do it. If all goes well, the e-book version of Steam on the Horizon should be available before April is over. Oh, how exciting!

Cover art is being constructed as we speak, and here is a rough draft of what is happening so far:

I sent my artist some things I wanted changed, such as the Horizon scooting over to be on the front cover more, but so far I am very pleased. I love the way the artist captured the city of London at the bottom of the book.

And, as if I didn't have nearly enough with which to occupy myself, I have decided to make a steampunk/gaslamp costume from this pattern:

I have a hat I adore:

but alas an overly pastel theme does little for my complexion except wash it out. Therefore, I am thinking of a black and white skirt (fold the pleats so that one side is black and the other white and they will "pop" as you move) and a pink jacket. Or I may spy some fabric at the store that I passionately adore and will have to adjust my plans accordingly.

If I had no job and no need for sleep, I would also be auditioning for a choral part in Opera Omaha's upcoming Carmen: I took voice lessons in college and although I have not formally trained in opera, I have a fighting chance of landing a part, but without a wibby wobbly timey wimey machine, there is no way I can work (48 hours a week twice a month), publish my book, exercise, and maintain some sense of sanity.

On a parting note, I am begging some creative soul to create a steampunk version of "Thrift Shop Feat" - minus the swear words, this practically defines steampunk. "I'll wear your grandfather's clothes. I look incredible" and digging through second-hand stores for cool broken stuff: how can this NOT be steampunk??     (here's the clean version of the video)

Modern Airships and Final Edits

Yesterday afternoon, I trundled into work to find a helicopter sitting on the lawn outside the building. One of our Omaha helicopters had just finished a mission, and the crew decided to drop by company headquarters. Upon spotting the aircraft, I burst into delighted squeals like a teenager girl meeting Justin Bieber. My brother, who had come along for the ride, obligingly snapped a few pictures as I clambered inside the helicopter, grinning like a fool.

This particular rotor wing is an A-Star which means the interior is about as big as what you'll find inside a Volkswagon. I am sitting behind the pilot seat (where the nurse would sit) and besides me is a seat for the medic. To the left of the pilot's seat is the patient's gurney. Needless to say, this is not a job for the overly tall or big-boned: I met the medic and he was maybe my height, if not shorter, and no heavier than 140lb with a brick in both hands. How they manage to get four people inside this A-Star is beyond me, but somehow it works!

Next step: getting to ride in one of these things. My work has a "ride along" program where I would go to the closest base and hang out with the crew for a shift. If they get a flight, I get to ride along. Hopefully in the next few months I can do this!

This week, my goal is to finish a final run-through of Steam on the Horizon in preparation for turning it over to a band of trusted friends to edit it for me. I know there are spelling errors, slightly confusing sentences, extra spaces, and little things scattered here and there which need correcting. In all reality, I could easily spend the next six months fiddling with areas, adding in extra details, and seeking the advice of others, but there comes a point when a piece of writing needs to be released from further tampering. When I taught writing, I advised my students, "A piece of writing is never truly finished: you can always do something more to it, so you just eventually need to let it go." I have gotten some wonderful feedback and assistance from people and have truly appreciated all the phenomenal people who have helped me. At this point, I feel like more assistance or advice would start moving the story out of my control, so it has come time to publish.

I am sure that in five years and several more books, I will look back on this first one and think, "Oh geeze, what was I thinking?" Writing is such a developmental process that I am interested in seeing what I will put together in ten years and how much my writing style will change. However, for my first book, I am pleasantly pleased with it and hope that others enjoy reading it.

Another task for this week is finalizing the summary and my bio. I have chosen this picture from the talented Guy Rish  to accompany my bio. Guy and I did a photoshoot at Joslyn Castle several months ago: this is a wonderful Victorian mansion in Omaha. You can see more pictures from this shoot on Guy's Flickr page.

So, the publishing date is drawing to a close, and I am becoming quite excited! The e-book will be relatively easy to put together: Amazon has a fairly simple layout for the e-book version that I should have no problem completing. The print book, however, has much more rigorous standards, and I will probably pay Amazon to format the book for me. Amazon's CreateSpace has several different packages for self-published authors, and the more you pay them the more work they will do for you. Since formatting the print book will be such a tricky process, I think it is worth the time and money to have Amazon do it for me.

It will be a momentous occasion when I finally hold a copy of Steam on the Horizon in my hands. However, I am cognizant that this is only half the battle and the next task of self-promotion will begin. In my work with my Indiegogo campaign, I discovered that Facebook ads worked the best. Using a variety of factors, I had a Facebook ad with a target audience of eight million people. For this next Facebook ad, I am thinking that a graphic picture of the Horizon and the tagline "99 cent steampunk novel!" would grab attention.

I also plan on doing a couple book signings around Omaha and will be canvasing independent bookstores to see if they will be willing to carry the book. Fairy Tale Costumes is one of our Omaha costumes stores that is quite popular with the steampunk group is open to holding a book signing, and it helps that I know Linda the owner. I have a general plan in mind for marketing, but for now my main focus is on getting the book done. Then, I figure out how to get people to buy it!  

Steampunk Hat, Part Deux

My first foray into hat-making has been an interesting creative journey. Thankfully, the second part of making my steampunk hat has been much smoother and easier. When I last left off, I had a simple red band that had taken over an hour of work to create. However, this was not nearly fancy enough. Clearly, tulle was needed and I found two yards of lovely red tulle with a slight shine to it that I wrapped around the hat. 

I quickly discovered that the tulle needed to be tacked down in some way, otherwise it would easily slip off. I solved this problem by sewing the tulle to the band, since the band is quite snug and it securely anchors the tulle in place. 

Thus finished, I slipped the hat band back on the hat and saw that it fit just fine! To form a cute little "poof" at the back of the hat, I put in a few stitches and pulled them taut to gather up part of the tulle. The result is a little tail of sort that looks quite fun. 

The resulting tulle effect looked good - I arranged it to be asymmetrical and pulled tulle over the top part of the hat on the right side. This was accidental in the beginning, but I liked the way it looked.  

Next, feathers! The local Hancock Fabric store had these lovely, fluffy beauties, just perfect for a proper steampunk ladies hat. Some experimenting proved that I had to trim them down to size, which is the reason my craft room looks like it was the epicenter for a mass parrot molting session. Little feathers are liberally scattered around the rest of my house, and I found a few of them floating in the toilet. 

Even with some trimming, the feathers still stuck out in a way that was not aesthetically pleasing. Nice, but not quite there yet.  

The answer? Some tacky glue. I ran a bead of glue along the spine of the feathers, then held it in place with a ribbon around the hat. I let it dry overnight and was gratified to find that the feathers adhered nicely and now curve pleasantly around the hat. 

A final steampunk touch! As of now, I haven't quite figured out how I will attach the watch. Ideally, I would like to have a clasp system that allows me to remove the steampunk embellishing at will. I am a member of both a steampunk and a gaslamp society, and this hat is suitable for gaslamp minus the watch. I shall have to experiment with fasteners and see what I come up with. 

I spent a few hours today tidying up Chapter 12 and working on some minor issues. I've decided that the Horizon's selling price is 15,000 pounds. However, I need to track down some exact shipping costs for items such as flour, coal, nails during this time period. Based on my research, this will not be an easy task as prices varied wildly during this time. Today I found an excellent article about the shipping industry during the 19th century. Apparently 1854-1855 was a peak shipping time, thanks to the Crimean War. Information about shipping indexes was tracked during this time; however, the focus was on highest and lowest prices, so it is difficult to find out average prices for commodities. Also, there were a huge amount of variables such as the type of ship, the distance traveled, weather conditions, etc. I have a feeling that it is going to be quite hard for me to track down solid numbers!

My hopes are that in two weeks, I can have a proofreading party to polish up the final draft. However, I am plagued by "writer's fatigue" and assaulted with a deep-seated desire to just get the damned thing done and published. Keeping strong unto the end is proving to be enormously difficult, and I will be ruthlessly honest in admitting that I hate this stupid book right now. I know that all this is a perfectly normal part of the writing process, but I honestly want to just shove the manuscript in a drawer and not look at it for a few years. Although his name escapes me, I know there was one ancient Greek scholar that advised you should set aside a piece of writing for seventeen years before revising it again. As this point in time, that option sounds unbearably attractive! 

However, I will soldier on and get this book published as promised!

Steampunk Crafting Woes

Yes, I have not blogged for exactly a month. I shall make up for it with an amusing post which was almost entitled, "It Should Not Take An Hour To Make a Simple Hatband." This essentially sums up my evening: an attempt to take this plain little number and jazz it up with a snazzy red hatband.

My first problem is that apparently my hat was in dire need of a priest and some holy water, for it bore this label on its brim.

Hoping that merely removing the offending label and burning it was sufficient, I removed the tag and set to work crafting a simple red hatband. I had some leftover silky fabric from a blouse I chopped into a bolero and was looking forward to an easy ten minute crafting project. It started promisingly, and I was moving along quite fine...

...until I belatedly realized that my iron was set on maximum heat...

...which melted and warped the fabric, leaving the band too short to fit around the hat. Irritated but not undaunted, I sewed two pieces of red fabric together to make another band, realizing that I had sewed one inside to one outside. More irritated, I ripped out the seam, sewed the pieces together correctly, then realized...

..I had incorrectly sewn lengthwise. I muttered a few choice words, then ripped the seam out and managed to put together a decent hatband that fit all the way around the hat... 

...that sadly is not even and also has a funny lump on one side from an inside seam. However, enough decorations should cover up those minor problems. Next was time to delve into my "box 'o steampunk goodies" and dig out some gears. 

A friend of mine had given me an assorted box of steampunk odds and ends, and I was particularly happy to find a watch with a cracked face to add some nice roughness to the overall effect. Although all good steampunks should avoid the temptation to "glue some gears on it", I nevertheless reached for my superglue because my last attempts at soldering were completely ineffective, mainly because I had mistakenly grabbed my dad's woodburning kit instead of the soldering iron. 

Currently, the glue is setting and I will soon be wending my way to the local fabric store to buy a few yards of red tulle to hang off the back of the hat. Then I will have a completed costume for the next steampunk event. 

The writing process is ticking along nicely - I had a few more adjustments to make to the final chapter and some research to track down. Currently, I am searching for some specific examples of wooden ships circa 1850's and their costs for building and/or their sale costs. I tentatively set the Horizon's price at 20,000 pounds, but I have absolutely no idea if this is an accurate representation of what a comparable wooden sailing ship would cost in 1854. I also want to find some information on shipping prices during the 1850's: however, there are an abundance of variables which make it exceedingly difficult to know exactly how much one could expect to pay to send a ton of flour from England to Ireland. 

In the next few weeks, I expect to have the final draft ready for a final round of proofreading before it moves into the publishing stage. Artwork is being arranged, and then there is the fun process of setting up the manuscript via Amazon's specifications for publishing. The e-book format will not be a difficult process; however, setting it up for print copies will be challenging enough that I am seriously considering paying Amazon to do so for me. Amazon has a variety of packages for self-published writers, and if you are willing to fork over enough money, they will do much of the work for you. 

I have to admit, though, that I waver between excitement, frustration, and outright hatred of this novel of mine. Such varied feelings are perfectly normal, I am fully aware. However, there is that small but persistent voice that yowls, "Your book sucks and no one will enjoy it." On one hand, I wish I was back to writing full-time and not in the workforce. On the other hand, writing full-time means that I have to be at it hours every day. 

It will be interesting to see what kind of reception I receive post-publication. I could struggle to sell a hundred copies, or it could capture quite a bit of popularity. Since this is a series, I'm committed for the long-haul and I know my writing will develop and improve as the series progresses. We shall just have to see!