Darn you, Australia!!!

     I am an admitted lover of tennis.  Current favorite player: Rafael Nadal.  I'm in the minority on this in my house.  My mom loves Federer, and my sister has decided to pick my player's main opposition, Djokovic. 
     The Australian Open was played over the past two weeks, ending on Sunday.  Well, Monday actually.  They're twenty hours ahead of where I live, and all of the big matches are played at night.  Unfortunately, that means that I've been living on East Australia Time for the past week.  The mens' final was an amazing marathon, that I stayed up for.  The whole thing.  Went to bed at 6:30 yesterday morning. 
     What's the point, you ask?  The point is that it's currently 3:57, and I'm wide awake.  Good time to work, I guess.  Re-editing what will probably be my next book on Kindle.  It's been a while since I last read it.  Has needed just a few little tweaks here and there.  It always surprises me when I find spelling mistakes.  I mean, between first draft, all the edits, me and my sister, it's amazing that there are still bad words.  The other bad thing (besides the time, I mean) is that I just headed into the climax of the book.  Looks like I'll be up a while longer.
     So, I poured myself a little more soda (decaf), and finished my ice cream break.  Time to get back to work.
     Speaking of ice cream and soda:  I really need to give the stuff up.  I've had enough persistent health issues without filling my body with junk.  February 1st seems like a good day to clean up my act.  Gives me a little time to put encouraging sticky notes everywhere and say goodbye to Diet Mountain Dew and things like brownies.  Just hope I don't go too overboard.  :)

Big gap, and author interview

     Yeah, it's been a little while.  Too long, really.  It's been a rough year, and it's not even February yet.  Anyway, things are looking up!  My author interview got posted today, on my birthday, no less!  http://jeanzbookreadnreview.blogspot.com/2012/01/author-interview-kirsten-zeller.html
Too cool!!  Hoping it will boost my sales a little, maybe get me some new followers on my blog and facebook pages. 
      Just finished putting the little edits into my second book.  I'm going to try sending it to some agents, but it will be just fine if no one picks it up.  I'm kinda funny I guess.  I love that my book is on Kindle, but I still want to be published traditionally.  Something about walking into a book store and seeing it there on the shelf.  I dunno.  Anyway, tallied up my words today and found out it's pretty short.  Might be too short for most publishers, so I won't get my hopes up.  Got a title.  Now I just have to come up with a cover.  Could be tough.
     Well, look for more posts, hopefully on a fairly regular basis.  Again, sorry about the gap.  Talk to ya later!

I'm live!!!!

Loaded the book last night; they loaded it this morning.  YAY!!!!!  So excited.  It's free to Amazon Prime members from the 6th to the 10th.  Please leave a review.  Good ones are awesome; intelligent critiques are just fine.  Part of my job is to learn where my weaknesses are and work on them; part of your job is to point them out.  ;)

http://www.amazon.com/Life-With-A-Vampire-ebook/dp/B006TOMC1Q/ref=sr_1_4?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1325806985&sr=1-4

Squeezing things in, the last week of the year

     Apparently, my family had some bad luck stored up at the end of last year.  Knowing that it was running out of time, 2011 decided to have my dad hit a moose, my mom get stuck in a driveway and scrape the side of her car on a tree, and kill the transmission in my sister's car.  Nice.  Actually, it started when that employee gave me his cold as a Christmas present.  *sigh*  Such is life, I guess.
     Slaved for days over my book, editing and re-editing.  When it was formatted, my double spacing between sentences turned into single spacing.  I'm a double space kinda girl, so I spent about, oh, six hours doing that.  Stayed up until four on a couple of days to get the sucker knocked out, then passed it to my sister for a final final edit.  She did that all of yesterday, so yippee, we're done.  Except ...
     We sent the book to my sister's kindle last night and found a few interesting things.  The website I had been editing on uses a format that's slightly wider than the kindle's.  My dedication lines were too wide, resulting in a bit of strange rearranging.  I also have some blank pages here and there at the end of chapters.  Hmmm ...  No idea how to fix that.  Sent an email; hopefully the format gurus will get back to me soon with a solution. 
     Other than that, it looks great.  The cover is a little dark on my sister's black and white kindle screen, but it still looks good.  I'm sure it will look awesome for those of you who have color.  Anyway, if things go well, I'll be uploading to Amazon at the end of the week.  I'll let ya know when it's out.

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.