That was fast

     This post is a day late, but I'm not surprised.  My wonderfully subtle co-worker gave me his cold ... only twenty times worse.  Just in time for Christmas, no less.  So, I've been pretty miserable this past week.  Another upside to being an author:  I can take days off and not worry about the money I'm missing.  Anyway ...
     On Wednesday, I bit the bullet and payed someone to format my book.  Wrenched the money out of my bank account, sent of the document, and waited for an email.  Nothing.  Okay, whatever.  It was kind of late.  Next morning, I check my email, a few websites, still nothing.  Alrighty then.  About an hour after booting up the computer, I check my "work" email, and there it is.  They're done already.  What?!  You are kidding, right?  Nope.  Went to the site, checked my document.  All nice and formatted, no more weirdness.  Awesome!!! 
     Of course, being the paranoid person that I am, I need to read through the thing again, just to make sure it's as perfect as I can get it.  Then it's upload to Amazon!!  Should be interesting to see what happens after that.  Hopefully something will happen.  Just have to wait and see (not something I'm good at).
     Cover!!  Here ya go.  Hope you like it.

Thanks a million to Richard and Ashley Buxbaum at Antiques on Old Plank Road for letting me use it.  Not sure what I would have done if they hadn't.  :)

A tedious cover

     Merry Christmas to whoever happens to be out there!!  Sending love and good wishes. 
     I'm at work (for a little while anyway), catching up on a few games and doing some other completely unproductive things.  My sister is on a computer beside me, diligently working on (what I hope will be) the cover of my book.  I got permission to use the photograph I wanted.  Yippee!!  That was yesterday.  I already had in mind what I wanted for a cover, but, like the whole html formatting thing, I have no idea how to use any kind of photo editing program.  Enter my sister, who has made quite a few wonderful and drool-worthy forum siggies for me in the past.  (Actually, she keeps a lot of them to herself) 
     So, she's sitting there, bent over the desk, trying to fill in the white background that needs to be black.  It looks horrendously tedious and I'm not sure how long her eyes are going to make it before throwing a fit and calling it quits.  This is free, but I owe her another present.  :)
     Hopefully, I'll be able to post my cover soon.  Give you a bit of a sneak peek.  Looking at what's going on next door to me, I have the feeling it's going to be pretty awesome. 
     Thanks for reading and have a great holiday!
 

Cover, formatting, and some unrelated things

     I'm sitting at work, listening to Dire Straits, fairly bored.  Which is okay; I get a lot of other work done.  My driver is sick and doesn't believe that it harms his image at all if he lets me know it by hacking up a lung.  Sometimes, he becomes so pathetic, I don't know whether to feel sorry for him or smack him for being so obvious.
     Anyway, been searching forums and websites for tips and instructions on formatting my book for Kindle.  Finally got it out of submission format into something that looks more like a book.  Downloaded a DIY formatting program, spent twenty minutes putting my book into a file format it would accept, and finally uploaded.  Okay, let's see what it looks like.    ...     Yeah, not so good.  Alrighty, fix.
     Before I go on, I should probably tell you that I know zilch about html.  I know less than zilch about fixing something in html.  When my formatting program pulled up my book in html, it was an absolute, mind-boggling mess.  I sat there, staring at the screen.  "What the heck is this?"  Back to another forum with very long explanations of how to use html.  I didn't even want to start reading them.  My eyes recognized the words, but my brain had no idea what any of it meant.
     Bottom line:  I think I'll hire someone to format my book for Kindle.  It'll cost me, sure, but I've found a few places that are much less expensive than some other I found, and I really, really don't want to screw up my book.  I think I can probably do the cover by myself (as long as I don't try and get fancy by making it look three-dimensional or anything).  In the end, I think I will breathe much easier paying someone else to do a good job.

My nephew

     Let's just say he's eclectic.  And, sometimes, overly cute.  Right now, he's sitting in front of the tv in his Tardis shirt, watching Mr. Bean.  An elaborate train track (partly made up of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books) surrounds him.  He likes Dr Who, original Loony Toons, Hairspray, Star Trek, Wallace And Gromit, and all things Pixar.  In the car, he sings along to Abba, Muse, The Raconteurs (Steady As She Goes is a favorite), and assorted show tunes.  He changes his underwear multiple times a day so that he can show off not only Lightning McQueen and Thomas the Train, but also Batman. 
     His train setups are completely crazy.  Some of the multi-layer bridges he creates rival things I've seen (briefly) in L.A.  He uses books, blocks, toys ... anything really.  The kid is one inventive little dude.  His attention span is usually about two seconds, but he can work on those track designs with the concentration of a NASA scientist.
     There's some store of boundless energy that he's managed to tap.  Wish I could get some.  From the moment he wakes up, he's awake, and running.  The kid never quits.  He runs, he jumps, he bounces, he's always doing something.  It can get a little wearing, really.  He eats whenever he has time, and drinks tons of milk, yet has practically no body fat.  I wonder how many calories he burns in a day?  It has to be thousands.
     What's the point here?  I dunno.  He's stubborn as all get-out, and horrendously contrary, but in the end, when he's being irritating, I just have to remind myself:  my nephew is one cool kid.

First blog post ... ever

     And of course it's days after I "started" this blog.  Sort of the way I am really:  not all that good at follow-through.  Anyway, here it is.  Better late than never, I suppose.

     Vampires are dead, in more ways than one.  They're certainly dead if you're trying to break into the genre.  Stories about the undead have always been fairly popular, though there are, like anything else, ups and downs.  You think they're pretty much over, and then something like Twilight comes along.  Suddenly, vampires are everywhere, and that's not necessarily good for everyone.
     I'll be honest:  I read the Twilight books too.  I've watched all the movies.  I liked them for a while, until I really started thinking about them, but that's another post (that I probably won't write; it's too long and involving).  The problem I've always had with them is that the main vampire characters are just so nice.  Something dark and scary, a girl's ultimate bad-boy fantasy, has been turned into a harmless guy who'll pick you up when you slip on the ice.  My favorite characters in the movies were always the bad guys.  Give me James or Riley any day; forget Edward.
     So, of course, wanting to correct this (at least a little), I wrote my own vampire story.  Not that he's a blood-thirsty killer or anything, but at least he drinks blood and isn't ashamed of it.  I thought I had it done, got one request for the full manuscript, and then a reject saying the middle needed work.  Okay, fix the middle.  Send it back, rejected.  Vampires are over.  Well, not really over, there are just wwaaaaayyyy too many of them. 
     A good part of a hopeful writer's time will inevitably be spent researching agents.  So I did, for hours and hours, day after day.  I went to blogs, I went to forums, I read interviews.  A frequently asked question was something along the lines of:  "What are you seeing too much of?", or "What don't you want to see anymore of?"  Answer:  Please stop sending me vampire stories.  After seeing that numerous times, I started to panic slightly.  I've got this book, I think it's good, there's probably nowhere in the market for it.  Oh goodie.
     Which brings me to Kindle, and also this blog.  I'd been thinking about it for a little while, now I'm going to take the plunge.  I've started changing my submission format into publishing format.  I will probably end up begging (or paying) someone else to change publishing format into Kindle format.  Just not confident enough in my skills to not completely screw it up.  And so, blogging.  Marketing strategy, ya know.  I have no clue what to blog about, and have therefore called this Random Musings in an effort to not limit myself.  If I did, I would most likely not be posting at all.
     So, first post is in.  I'm sure it's dry and boring.  Hopefully I'll get the hang of this and they'll start getting better.  Found this on my facebook page last week.  Pretty interesting.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/cityofglass/what-are-the-odds-that-exist-as-you-today-4eor
     I wonder what the odds are that anyone has read this.