Ripley's World coming soon

My non-fiction home care book is taking longer than expected, for various reasons, but mostly because I have moved into a "needs work" house.  I am doing a complete remodel on that, and doing all the work myself, and currently using a bathroom as my temporary kitchen, so there is some urgency to keep work moving along.  But because the home care book is dragging, I have decided to shift my writing focus back to Ripley's World, and expect to have it up on amazon before the end of November.

Writing on Ripley's World has resumed

   I have started writing again after a few years of taking care of my elderly parents 24/7, and Ripley's World is the primary beneficiary.  I had finished a draft years ago that was too short -- about 50,000 words.  Over the last four or five months I outlined a longer version, with a new subplot, a major makeover of one of the characters, and more complete development of the plot.  I've also attended to details that better link the evolution of the main characters and the Samsara world with the other novels in the series.  The current rewrite has added about 15,000 words, bringing the total length to a bit over 65,000 words (within the range for a proper, albeit short, novel).

   I should be finished with a complete draft by early August, and then plan to write a book chronicling my home care experiences (yes, non-fiction), a book that should bring in significant revenues (and what struggling writer can't use some sustaining income?).  Pushing Twilight:  Home Care for Parents in Their Final Years.  That should not take more than a couple of months, as I will be working from about 400 single-spaced pages of daily medical and care logs (four years worth).  When that is complete, I will be able to put fresh eyes on the Ripley's World draft for a final polish.

  After that, the Daughtry's World early prequel beckons, and perhaps after that, the Samsara sequel.

Cover art

Creating cover art for my novels has definitely been a learning experience.  The first two covers were "painted" using Corel Painter 11 and then the individual parts were assembled using Adobe Photoshop Elements.  The third cover (for Dreams of the Iklax) also used both of those apps, but more with Photoshop; the spacecraft was done in Corel Painter and everything else with Photoshop.  The fourth cover (for Night Frost) was created entirely with Photoshop, using lots of layers.

The painting/brush tools in Photoshop are not as sophisticated as those in Painter, but they do the job.  The Corel app has a steep learning curve!

I've started the cover for Ripley's World, which is demanding more artistic creativity; I'm back to using Corel Painter in conjunction with Photoshop, often shifting back and forth between the two apps.  I intend to post progress on this new cover on www.telomeremedia.com after each major element is completed: ocean/sky, beach, tree, Ripley and her AI, and then the final product.

I'm using a Wacom Intuos4 graphics tablet as my primary input device with both Corel Painter and Photoshop.  It's very nice.

Thanks for visiting, Chris

Samsara's Einstein spaceship design

Much of Samsara is set on the spherical spaceship, the "Einstein."  I didn't get far in writing before realizing that I would have to first design the ship in some detail in order to describe what was going on inside it, and to do so consistently throughout the story.  The following schematics established the basic design; the rest is in my head.  All views are from the top except the second page (side view).
 - Chris

On creating a Kindle e-book

Converting a novel from a word processing file to a Kindle e-book turned out to be both easier and more difficult that I had at first imagined.  I use a Mac and Apple's "Pages" word processing app, both of which I like very much.  But the challenge of converting to the EPUB e-book format, from some instructions I found online, seemed Byzantine in the extreme (perhaps because they really wanted you to use their conversion service).  I dreamed writer's block.

The big break came soon after when Apple updated Pages with the capability to export a word processing document to EPUB format, ostensibly so that people could read their word processing documents on their iPads.  So I bought a new version of Pages and then discovered that Kindles could not display EPUB files.  Bummer.  Then I discovered that amazon could convert EPUB files to their own Kindle format.  Hooray!  And they had a "KindlePreviewer" app to see how your converted EPUB file would look on Kindle.

So off I went, full of new optimism.

Unfortunately, I discovered that the double conversion process was not as articulate as advertised, a feeling echoed in a forum frequented by other Kindle converters.  In went the nicely formatted novel and out the other end came something only vaguely recognizable.  Centered section breaks (3 dots) were centered sometimes and left justified sometimes.  Text would appear in one size for awhile and then inexplicably appear in a larger font for one or two paragraphs before reverting to the former size.  The table of contents disappeared.  Bold text turned into regular, sometimes.

I couldn't see any obvious reason for any of this.  I turned on the invisibles and noticed I had ended some paragraphs with one or more spaces, so I went through the whole novel and deleted all of those.  I changed all the centered headings and breaks to left-justified.  I converted the whole novel to a different font, made the size of everything bigger, and then smaller again.

I converted and previewed close to 20 different versions of the word processing file before getting something plain but consistent, that worked.  A compromise to be sure, but it was presentable.

Amazon likes HTML, I learned.  Since I hand coded two other web sites (e.g. www.dtvprimer.com), I briefly considered coding whole novels in HTML before regaining my sanity, especially after reading that e-reader HTML is not the same as web site HTML.  On the other hand, if it would give me control . . .

But that's a challenge for the future.  In the meantime, plain is fine for fiction.  It's the words that count.

I'm hoping the conversion apps will soon be jacked up with little of my fictional AI mojo.

-chris