Brilliant Blurb!

Uploaded to Blurb Saturday afternoon - received before midday today. To-be-proofed copies of 'Drink with a dead man' plus an anthology of my favourite stories from the past nine years.

Bloody incompetent Blurb!!!

They tell me after I have wasted weeks going backwards and forwards that Bookify 'does not do black and white text' and since I cannot see the final half a dozen pages onscreen then I should just delete them!
No matter that the denoument is on the final, missing page!!!

Still hiccups, but I've changed my mind ... again

A relatively short amount of time hunting for possible images and I came up with this - an amalgamation of two long-ago photos, both taken in Orkney, which is relevant.

More black surrounds and enhances it ... but the price is still being mis-quoted ... grrr!!

Best laid plans ...

I have today successfully uploaded my NaNoWriMo2011 novel, after help from Blurb to overcome a hiccup and then solving further problems because I don't know how to create transparent jpgs so at the last minute changed to what had been plan A for the cover.

BUT on hitting 'order now' I found the price of the book was being stated at £32.95 and not the £9.95 quoted on the beginning page.   Another hiccup no doubt but minorly frustrating - vanity certainly doesn't stretch THAT far!

Playing with covers again

Having almost completed the first draft of last November's NaNoWriMo novel, and had extremely useful advice from the Blurb Help Team, I'm shortly going to upload this as a proof copy.   It'll be a 6" x 9" Trade book, running to some 360 pages, and at £11+P&P (~£7) it's not a cheap way of producing books but such is vanity.
The final background colour of the cover might change - this worked as a mock up and I quite like it but other colours might, with experiment, look better (and the ships will be the same size ...)

Write 1 Sub 1 - week 7 report

Subbed 6 altogether - another Hon.mention with Jo Prescott, 'Circle of Celebration (words AND pictures) to MuDJoB for April, 2 to PigeonBike for a Chapbook, one of which was rejected & the other pending, and a first for me, 'Bastard' to Lily Childs' Friday Prediction. River of Stones accepted 'My Grandmother's tablecloth' for their 'Book of Stones'. Bridie 5 had another 3500 words added and I proofed and pressed the 'publish' button on my NaNoWriMo novel so have 4 books available on Blurb, which feels very good indeed.

Books on Blurb

All four of my books are now available on Blurb - all proof-read - and 'One that got away' completely re-designed.
15 page previews for each - just click on the image
And for the next month or so they'll be sold at cost, i.e. I'm not adding any profit onto the basic price just yet.
And I thank all my Six Sentence and Thinking Ten friends for their support, without which none of this would have been possible ...

15/28

Thoughts of black and silver  - a wedding invitation and what I'm going to wear
Thoughts of adding burnt sienna to Paynes grey to make the colour of the clouds at noon
Thoughts of red - the red of my novel I was notified today has been despatched from Blurb,
and of the wine I can just this minute hear being uncorked - whatever goes with sausages.

Book covers

Christmas story, Bad sex, and Blurb

Went to 6S this morning in expectation of posting a nicely linked - and full of potential futures - Christmas story , following on from Bill Lapham's tale but found it abuzz with Bad Sex following Gita's  email and Khaalidah's  challenge.

However, I eventually recovered and spent the rest of the day more or less successfully uploading 'Reunion' and 'Theme for a Summer' to Blurb, having also finalised covered for these and for 'Holding steady.'   They come out at ~60 pages each, (18,000 and 15,000 words approximately).

Sooner or later I must think about Christmas preparations ...

.

One that got away - now revised and corrected

One that got away - now revised and corrected - next time I will do better ...

Do have to say I was impressed with the paper and quality of the printing and with the speed of delivery (printed in the Netherlands for the UK market)

Blurb - errors in 'One that got away'

Received this just now - hurrah!! - and it looks lovely at first glance but there are a number of errors, some my fault and some not.


Frequently I corrected places where apostrophe'd words such as don't and he'd at the ends of lines had been split, only for them to have been changed back.

Type size:  deceptive on screen as it is a lot larger in actuality, and there are some size changes which crept in as a result of me trying to avoid widows and orphans or better fit onto a page.

As soon as I can work out how to remove it from the published site without losing the whole thing I'll re-edit before publishing again.

NaNoWriMo Day 25

My husband has read as far as page 50, AND says he's enjoying it. 


Stopping writing NaNo has enabled me to do other useful things - as well as soaking the fruit for a Dundee cake and hand-washing some winter jumpers and paying the Visa bill I have published on Blurb 'One that got away' - see above.   Only ordered one copy to see what the quality etc is like, but there are books by others I shall order next time - up to three for £3.99 p&p