The Continuing Adventures

So, a few of you may have checked out Remnants. This is my dystopian take on the Robin Hood tale, as inspired by this fabulous photo shoot right here from a few years ago, designed by my friend Grayson and shot by the talented Steven Bourelle of Bourelle Photography fame.

I've been doing NaNoWriMo for years, but Remnants was the first time I'd felt really inspired in a long time. I'm extremely thankful for the push it gave my imagination. With the flexibility the Wattpad platform provides, I may continue working on it for a while, fine-tuning it and coming up with fun iterations and edits.

The thing about writing for myself is, I get that freedom, and I'm enjoying it. So, I figured, for now, why not continue with the story? While I stuck with many traditional Robin Hood themes in the initial book, I want to expand on this world and keep going. So, today, I posted the first part of Remnants II, which I'm tentatively calling Broken Remnants.


These are just working titles for now, and perhaps as the story unfolds I will get a bit more creative. I want to focus on making it a trilogy, as I think that's a good format for a comprehensive tale. I'm not sure I'd do more than that in this world - I don't see it spinning endlessly into a series, though I guess since it's up to me, I can keep going for as long as it's fun.

I hope you enjoyed the first installment enough to keep going along with me. Thank you to everyone who has read and commented, whether publicly or privately. In this, I work for encouragement and love right now, and every little bit helps.

The cover is just a placeholder at this point as well, as I'm torn between different ideas for what to do. But, I wanted to have something in there, as even simple images can spark the imagination!

(Insert witty blog ending here). (No, seriously, I hate trying to end blog posts, I'm so bad at it. I get torn between something casual and non-committal, or something inspirational and overly-cheesy). (Should I be funny? I don't even know. Ugh.). (How do you even punctuate with parentheses?).

Cover Reveal: On Her Own Two Wheels!

Without further ado, I present: The cover for my first self-published novel, On Her Own Two Wheels! I incorporated as many suggestions as I could from my test subjects, so thank you so much to everyone who gave me feedback! I am extremely excited; this was one of the most difficult decisions to make, since all of the ideas I got were phenomenal, but I went with what I felt would show up best on Amazon, since that will be my primary outlet (until I make it big in publishing, of course! teehee!).

CreateSpace: The waiting is the hardest part

So, as of today, I've done the following:

Picked my cover; like, 100% settled on it

Submitted and approved the interior formatting

Received my promotional text

Corrected my cover when the wrong text was put on the back of it (I guess this was partially my fault though)

Waited.

Filled out the questionnaire for my promotional items (which now I'm wondering how long it'll take to get them and wondering why they didn't give me the questionnaire to fill out a little sooner).

Suffice to say, I'm getting a bit frustrated. Somehow, I had it in my head that this would be something like a 6 week process. Well, I started this process at the beginning August and we're now half-way through October. I kind of feel like my physical review copy should have been here about a week ago; and the last cover revision, which was really just fixing some text, somehow ended up taking over a week before that.

One thing I will say: My. Cover. Looks. Awesome. I really can't wait to show it off to the world. I'll be posting my cover reveal within the next day or two so stay tuned!

Another thing: I'm really glad I hired people to handle a lot of this stuff for me, because I think I'd get massively annoyed trying to figure it out myself. Sitting around toying with a word processor and other crappy software for hours is not my ideal pastime.

But on the other hand, I feel like this would be going faster if I were more involved. Maybe not? I don't know.

I have been feeling pretty antsy over the whole thing, though. I have barely written anything while I've been waiting for this process to move forward - I guess I kind of have target fixation. I have a kind of annoying habit where I like to work on just one thing at a time and give it my full attention. No grand multi-tasker am I. I feel incomplete if I start on something else before my original project is done. Plus, I feel like I'll forget something if my attention is too divided. But, then again, that's why I hired people to do these parts for me - so I'd have more time for other things. It's a conundrum that I need to work out.

So, now I just obsessively check my mailbox each day to see if my physical proof is here yet. I think I need to go check again just to be sure.

CreateSpace: The Next Steps

So, it's been a while. Sorry about that. Truth be told, though, there hasn't been tons to tell. It's tough being in the "hurry up and wait" phase, but I've found ways to pass the time (that haven't involved hitting "refresh" on my CreateSpace page every 5 minutes; no, really).

Well, we left off (I think) with me hitting "submit" on my questionnaire and specifications. I also uploaded my manuscript - that was a bit of a project, though. I write my novels in Scrivener, and to use the CreateSpace services, they recommend you upload your manuscript in Word. So I had to convert it over, which is an imperfect process, and then add some formatting elements to ensure the translation worked well. This leads me to a caveat: if you plan on using CreateSpace, it'd be a good idea to write your novel using Word to begin with, or at least use a program that converts to Word pretty easily. I love Scrivener, though, so I think I'll just build in the conversion to my expected workload in publishing a book with their tools (and work on learning how to do it right; I think I figured it out, but it took some fiddling and I still had to go through and double-check everything).

So, after all the submissions had been made on my end, I cooled my heels until the best day ever: my cover concepts came in.

I cannot tell you what an emotional experience that was. I know it's a little silly, but getting to see the cover ideas for my book, with the title and my name and everything, was one of the most exciting moments in this whole process.

Until I then had to agonize over which one I was going to pick.

I polled several people in my target demographic before making my decision. I got a lot of great input from folks, but ultimately I had to make a very tough choice. I can't wait til it launches and I can show it off!

CreateSpace uploads your cover concepts to your project toolbox, where you can view them and then select which one you want to use. You're allowed to request a certain number of changes or a third concept if you don't like either one. I requested a few changes to my chosen cover design, which I'm supposed to get back in another few days for final approval.

In addition to my covers, I also received the internal formatting file so I could review and make sure the page layouts were done correctly and looked good. This includes things like chapter headers, spacing, the little symbols between separate sections of the chapter (what're those called again?), etc. I got mine back and it was also AWESOME. It wasn't just a few random pages off of a PDF - it had my name on each page and the title of the book on each page, just like a real book. These are things that make me go "squee", people. It's things like these you don't even probably notice when you are reading, and it just tickles me.

I had to send in my initial approval of the internal formatting and will get a final review of it when they send me my physical review copy.

Finally, they also sent me my promotional text. This was something I really debated about doing - after all, I'm a writer, how tough can it be to do promotional text? But the truth is, I can't do stuff like that without feeling campy and ridiculous. It felt about 100% better to have someone do it for me, and I'm glad I did it. I didn't like all of the choices they made and I edited a few parts pretty heavily, but just having that launching point saved me hours of time agonizing over it myself. They did a pretty good job, though the concise-writer part of me just had to tweak it (srsly, there were quite a few run-on sentences, be on the lookout).

Sooo. My promotional text is all approved, my book cover is almost done, the internal formatting is completed. Next: Physical review copy, and then onward to my final approval and marketing products! Gah it's so exciting I just can't stand it!