BOOK COVER

Can’t sleep so the best thing to do is fart about with photos in Picassa’s editing suite, and here I’ve discovered the book cover – after about a dozen attempts with different titles over the last few weeks. This is it…and I painted the butterflies; actually they were just marks made with a fancy new brush many years ago.

Yes, it's all go

Phew, I love that feeling when you’ve been pushing yourself and the work is moving, inch by inch down the page. I’m putting a collection together, mostly of new work, dragging poems in and cutting poems out; there is constant flux but at the end of every hour there is at least two poems edited and polished and formatted. I think I might be almost finished – only about ten to go, but some of them don’t have titles yet and are still in second draft…and every day I learn something more on the formatting front so the satisfaction from this project is very welcome.

I’ve changed the order many times and at one point had the contents typed up but now I’ve scrubbed that – it will be what it is when it’s ready, then I’ll type it up.

WORK IT, WORK IT

I thought I should look around at the Kindle poetry market just to get an idea of what’s on offer, so I spent 90 mins prowling the free and paying selections. There wasn’t anything I felt drawn enough to buy but I took about twenty freebies. Mostly, I just wanted to see what poetry looked like on my e-reader, which is a Galaxy-note phone, so hopefully that might be the smallest window that readers will use to read. I’d been wondering whether to run the poems on, one after another with just a small space between them but now I’ve paid attention I know I want a page break between each; it’s cleaner and sharper.

What did spring to mind is how the lines that don’t fit the space fall under to continue so change the shape of the poem and takes away all power that would’ve been in the end-lines. So, if I’m going to publish my work in this medium I need to choose the poems for their shape or re-write some of them – I can do that. I’ve counted 32 spaces for the longest line my e-reader can take.

I’ve also discovered how to make a space above and below lines – all those years looking at that window and never realising that the darker text down in the little window below showed you the result of tinkering with the numbers above! Oh, I love it when a plan comes together. Btw, this is in Word 2003, Format/paragraph…and I was talking about the little boxes in the ‘Spacing’ section. If you change the numbers in the boxes titled, ‘Special’ (up on the right) in the ‘Indentation’ section, you can set your paragraphs – I chose 0.9 and manually moved the first paragraph to stay square.

A couple of the poetry books I got today had formatting problems where they’d obviously used ‘Enter’ to space between poems, and their paragraphs were all over the place. This is the difference between writers being too much in a hurry to get their work ‘out there’ when they should be learning how to publish first. Unfortunately, none of the poetry I’ve looked at tonight in these free e-books is worth paying for, so if I was dithering about how I’d decide to share my collection I’m now sure I don’t want to be in that kind of company. I’m in this for the adventure – any money will be a bonus, but I am going to choose something above £2.50.

When deciding which books I fancied today, I read the comments and reviews and also noticed the spaces where the writer has a chance to inform and charm a buyer – I’ll be working on those sections too now.

Where I've Been - Two Worlds

I’ve been captured by time and am amazed to find I’ve been away for two weeks! No, I wasn’t writing like an imprisoned writer, or scribbling in dark cupboards: I was thinking – living too, and working but mostly thinking…and reading. I am full of the wonderful satisfaction that arrives when you finish a book; I finished two. I had The Hunger Games in my hands and became so enthralled with the character and the fact that I didn’t find a single complaint with the writing…and the story just carried me away. Fantastic read, truly wonderful. I’ve heard people slate the next two books so I don’t think I’ll fall into them just yet but I will eventually.

The other book that held me spellbound was a free e-book from Amazon Kindle called, A Sky of Red Poppies. All I can say is that if you have an e-reader download that book and read it, it is fabulous. I was immediately interested in the character, her story and the place – which is Iran during the time of the last Shah. Both of these books moved me to tears several times, and that, to me, is the test of great writing. There were some little problems with the formatting but nothing to spoil the reading. Actually I am amazed that that book is free; it’s worth full price, and if the author repairs all the missing spaces, run-on words etc, that book could settle pretty high in serious fiction.

…and, this is just the kind of thing that makes me spend more time thinking about all the little details of formatting an e-book and publishing it yourself; I don’t want to have any of those problems in any book I publish.

ARE WE THERE YET?

I’m full of vim and have set about building my new platform – got caught up in template design on blogs and Twitter; I now have two blogs so I’ll keep one for general life and focus the other on poetry and the building of the book for publication but there might be some crossover but no matter. This is fun. I can’t quite get the hang of Google+ but I suppose it’ll come as I get used to the territory. Technology is not my field and I only know what I need to know so building this document for the Smashwords formatting will definitely tax this poor old brain…but I look forward to the day I can push my notes on how I did it in a dumbed-down version – other writers will love me. I’ve already came up against a wall, where the advice says to ‘uncheck most of the boxes’ in a Word setting, which made me bluster, ‘MOST? WHICH boxes exactly?’

I’m glad I’m not in a hurry, or that I haven’t left this to the last minute – this must be the first time in my life that I’m preparing to be prepared! Usually I leave everything to the last minute and tell myself that I work well with deadlines, and I do on the writing front. But in technical territory it’s best not to do that, so every day I read a little, think a lot and put it all away. There are only about five poems that need real work so by the time they’re done and I’ve chosen the order I should know what I’m doing…I know how to do the nuclear thing, the pasting into Notepad to clear the document of Word formatting, and then to past the clean document back to Word again and begin adding only what is necessary and in the right way. I’m almost there.

NIGHT THOUGHTS

I’ve been using a full page diary to write a poem a day, and it worked until last month. I’ve fallen off the wagon and lost my rhythm, though I’ve got to admit that a poem a day for all that time is pretty damn good so I’m not complaining or berating myself…and I’m very happy with the work that’s already tucked away. A poem a day doesn’t mean that they’re in any way finished: they are absolute first draft with no crossings out – no real pause for thought, just pushed out like a baby in the last phase of labour, then left to live. Some are now being worked on for this Kindle project, some earlier creations are finished and in the process of being polished. There are a few political poems written a few years ago that have languished in a lonely file that seem to fit with the voice of this collection.

And here I am at 2am, musing on poetry when I should be trying to sleep. I hate wasting time sleeping and yet I like waking in that snuggling position, testing my eyes to see if I’m really awake or if I can slip off for another hour. My character is an enigma even to me. When I lie down to sleep I know my mind will saunter off looking for the title of that little poem about the cream jug; it just won’t come, and that’s unusual for me – though I do often change titles further down the line when I’m in a tinkering phase. But I want it to open this collection so I’d better think on. Yes, I’m going to do that now.

Coming back to these notes and have mashed that little ‘jug’ poem into something else – yes, this is one of my habits; I just love mixing and matching and shoving bits of work together to create happy accidents and new wild work. All the poetry files have been raided so now I have to finish and polish and choose the finalists. Meanwhile, I’ve been reading over at Smashwords, investigating their instructions for publishing and they’re much more detailed than Kindle. The poems aren’t ready yet so there is plenty of time to study and build the document into the right format for publishing. So, it’s all just rolling right along and I’ll get there in the end.

SHARING

I’m alive with the sound of Buffy, festing in my ears, on my eyes. I rise half-way through Season 3 for dark chocolate-coated ginger biscuits to follow all the porridge and toast. There is barely a world outside though light seeps lightly through my curtains; it hovers over rooftops across the road, still, though will be gone soon. On this day I slept ‘til two, catching up on all the lost – I hate that sleeping eats into my time off but I don’t care, now that I’m satisfied, sated and expectant of more Buffy.

much later...

A midnight feast was had, folks and oh how the pleasure still lingers. Imagine a little pack of six oatcake crackers, a tub of Philadelphia cream cheese and a small tin of pineapple chunks…ahhhhh. I had to use up the oatcakes because I’m supposed to be going on Atkins next week – well that’s my excuse…I didn’t have to top them with half an inch of cream cheese and pineapple though, but I did and heavenly does not quite capture the taste and the crunchy texture and the afterglow of the fruit. Ahhh, I say again, aaahhhhhhhhhhh.