Update

The family is back from the hospital. We were there for quite some time because our little baby was too small to ride home safely in the car seat, something that might not have mattered except we live over an hour away from the hospital. So we had to wait a few days until it was safe to take her home. She is now sleeping soundly in her new crib.

My wife is also doing well. She and the baby are both troopers, having put up with a barrage of medical procedures. For my part, I mostly changed diapers, rubbed sore shoulders, and looked forward to being able to change my clothes. Since the baby came a month early, I was not yet packed for the hospital, and even if I had been, I probably would not have anticipated how long the stay would be. I have finally, just now, been able to clean up completely and feel civilized again.

It’s interesting, though, that when you have a newborn daughter, a lot of inconveniences become miniscule. I have had to go days without proper hygiene before (for archaeological reasons), but I have never before been so little bothered by it. Also, the lack of sleep, though it taxed me physically, never led to the irritation it normally would.

Anyway, our family is mostly moved in. Since the baby wanted to make her arrival before the end of , our Christmas ornaments are still up, so we’ll be taking those down tomorrow. I’ll also spend my spare time in the evening, between diaper changes, on my project, which is getting Jake and the Dynamo ready for a re-release. I’ll let you know how I progress.

Also, if anyone wants to plug a potential cover artist, now is the time. (Yes, the cover will be changing.)

I have baby pictures, but I’m going to restrain myself from posting them. I’ve shown pictures of my wife on here a few times, but I think it best to exercise caution when it comes to pasting small children’s photos on the open web. So no pictures for now.

Update

Mommy and baby are both doing well.

Baby caught us by surprise. She was due near the end of January and was hitting all her tests and milestones just right, but she decided to make her surprise debut before the end of the year.

She’s technically premature but she has passed all the medical tests and she latches and feeds without difficulty. So it seems she really was ready to come out. She’s quite tiny, but so is her mama.

We planned for as natural a birth as possible, but since the baby was premature and in breach, we had to have a c-section. Mom is of course in pain but is recovering as well as could be expected. She and baby are cuddled up right now as I write this.

Neither of us has slept much, of course, though I’ve probably snatched more sleep than she has. We might be out of the hospital as early as tomorrow. Because the baby’s so small, she has to be tested in our car safety seat tonight. She’s a really calm baby, but the test will almost certainly make her fussy.

Update

Wife having baby. I’m probably going silent for the next few days.

Merry Christmas

I have a movie review coming soon, but I’ve had trouble getting to it. I spent today doing several needful things around the house, including assembling the crib for the new baby.

My wife, who’s a nurse, got an emergency call into work, so after she left, I went ahead and prepared the ham we’re having tomorrow for Christmas dinner. Unfortunately, she has to work on Christmas day, but she’s supposed to have tomorrow off, so we’re planning to have our Christmas celebration then. Of course, it’s just the three of us this year, but fortunately, we have a lot of fun together when it’s just the two of us.

Where I’m at, it’s well after nine now that I’m done with my tasks, so I intend to spend what time I have remaining on my manuscript, which has been time-consuming, but which is also nearing completion.

Part of the reason it’s time-consuming is that it’s increasingly obvious that my laptop is on its last legs. I’ve known that for years, but I’m probably not going to be able to put off replacing it much longer. It took about half an hour to get it to turn on without crashing so I could write this. Even so, one of my favorite shortcuts, Ctrl + Left Arrow, has mysteriously stopped working even though the left arrow key and the control key are clearly both operational … I might reboot again when I’m done writing this to see what happens.

Replacing this computer isn’t really in the budget right now, but even my wife has agreed that this machine is ridiculously slow and unreliable.

In any case, merry Christmas, and although I’ll have a review later, maybe on Christmas day, for now, enjoy this image of Christmasy magical girls.

Book Update: ‘Jake and the Dynamo’ and Sequel Forthcoming

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I am working on preparing books for publication, and as always, these things take more time than I anticipate. In fact, in my available time, I have been doing almost nothing else. But that’s okay because I want to make sure I do this process right and get together everything I need for a successful roll-out.

My ambitious plan at present is to have five books published in 2021. If I can’t meet that, I should at least have four. I’ll definitely have three. The three is a given.

The first will be Jake and the Dynamo which will appear with a revised text and brand new packaging. The second will be its sequel. The third will be Rag & Muffin. I’ll announce the others later.

Anyway, one of my other goals is to post here more regularly, so look for consistent content as we move forward.

Self-Publishing: The Legend Continues

I am planning to re-release Jake and the Dynamo in the near future and to release its sequel soon afterwards. To that end, I recently purchased the cheapest refurbished MacBook I could get so I could download and buy Vellum, the software generally agreed to be about the only program for formatting self-published books for all platforms, and also the only eBook editing software that isn’t aggravating to use.

It’s darn expensive, though. I’m thinking I might offer to format others’ self-published books for them to make back some of the cost. I offer reasonable rates.

Anyway, I still need to get new cover art, so there is still no projected release date. I am also revising the text, and though this might seem like excessive editing, I want people to get the best, and a somewhat different, product from what was released previously. Interior illustrations will be the same as in the previous version.

Back in Action

Sorry I’ve been so quiet of late. I do not have a lot of content at the moment simply because I’ve been busy with other things. I’m in the midst of a time-consuming project, but I hope that, once I’m done with it, I will have some definite updates on the release of both volume 1 and volume 2 of Jake and the Dynamo. Basically, I’m working on the getting these books back to market after my publisher had to close its doors.

I’ve also managed to find a little time to start watching My-HiME again. I planned to make that my next review, but then other things intervened and my watching of it went on hiatus. I should, however, be able to talk about that and a few other titles in the near future.

Writing ..

Spending the evening writng. That is all.

The State of the eBook Exploration

So, I’ve been exploring the subject of how to get into self-publishing and generate my own professional-looking books. General agreement is that the best software for doing this is Vellum, though that has both a prohibitive price ($250 for the full package), and it only runs on a Mac.

Besides that, there is a slew of open-source programs that, altogether, will probably accomplish the same tasks but with considerably more difficulty for the end-user.

Adding to these difficulties, my laptop is now extremely out of date. I’m still running Windows 7 and much of the software I would like to try will only run on Windows 8 or later. This includes Amazon’s free Kindle eBook generator.

When I started exploring this, I naïvely thought at first that I might not have too much difficulty. As it turns out, eBooks are packages of CSS and XHTML files. I saw some authors complaining that most of the software aside from Vellum requires some coding knowledge, and I thought to myself, “Hold on, I can write CSS and HTML.”

So I took an eBook generated in Vellum and pulled it open using an open-source EPUB editor called Sigil, and I didn’t have too much difficulty figuring out how it was built. Not only that, but I thought to myself that, by editing the code directly, I could probably create a much cleaner, more compact file with fewer <div>s and without all the unused CSS rules. I could stick to readable web-safe fonts too. Small file size, after all, is important to sales and royalties since Amazon takes its slice based on file size.

So I started editing the first volume of Jake and the Dynamo in Sigil, and while I could indeed make a slim file with a lot of the same cosmetic features typical of a professionally generated eBook, it was incredibly time-consuming, basically requiring me to insert and edit each paragraph individually (mostly to make sure the italics were in the right places). With a judicious selection of web-safe font stacks, the existing images, and some proper HTML semantics, presto, the result was what you see in the header.

The result looks good in Sigil. But that’s the important part—in Sigil. I opened it with another program and started seeing problems, such as my drop-caps wandering all over the page (and I don’t know why; the CSS for my drop-caps is very similar to how WordPress does it).

But the biggest mess came from Amazon, which insists on a proprietary filetype, MOBI. I made the conversion to MOBI using Calibre, which I can only use in an older version because the latest doesn’t work on Windows 7, and the result was a complete mess. Most especially, either the MOBI filetype or Calibre (not sure which) doesn’t like a lot of my CSS; the kind of stuff I’d do on the web to make sure images resize while keeping their proportions, or to stylize certain tags, apparently doesn’t work in Amazon’s eBooks.

I’ve been needing for some time to update my computer, and that need has become more apparent over the last few days as I’ve repeatedly tried to run software that simply won’t run on my antiquated system. What I’m thinking at present is that I might go ahead and shell out for a refurbished Macbook and a copy of Vellum, and then continue to plod along with my current system for everything else as long as possible. Meanwhile, I’ll add a laptop-update fund to the monthly budget.

Update on the State of ‘Jake and the Dynamo’

I have all but finally decided to self-publish Jake and the Dynamo, which was my original intention with the series anyway. This is admittedly a self-own, but I’m having a hard time getting a publisher to acknowledge my existence—and I don’t mean accept my manuscript; I really mean acknowledge my existence. I think something serious has happened to the industry in the last decade because I used to be able to collect polite, pre-formatted rejection slips. Now I can’t even get a “you suck so don’t write to us again.”

I’m currently swimming in a bewildering array of advice, much of it obviously bad or exploitative, about how to move forward with this. I will certainly have to commission cover art, for which I have some leads, and also format the manuscript. I’m assuming the latter task will require learning some new software, though I’m unsure of that as of yet. My former publisher used Vellum, I think, but that’s only available on Mac, and I don’t have one. At the very least, I know something about web and document accessibility, which will probably help.

So that’s what I’m up to right now, which is part of why the content here is so slim. I really want to get the first two volumes of Jake and the Dynamo available in the near future; the first needs republished, and the second needs to be published for the first time. I am in the midst of the draft of the third. I don’t want to be too hasty and have a bad roll-out when a little more legwork could produce a better product (and more sales, of course).

Rag & Muffin is currently on an editor’s desk, and the requested wait period has not closed, but considering how things are going, I expect that it will (about three months now) without my existence having been acknowledged. At that point, I will consider self-publishing it as well, though I might attempt more submissions first.