It’s a Mystery to Me

Posted on by
Comment

A little bit about the mystery novel I’ve been working on (or not working on) for the past year.

About a year ago, I started writing a mystery novel. It’s the same novel I mentioned in the entry titled “Writer’s Block Sucks” earlier in this blog. I haven’t added a word to it since then.

The book’s characters are very strong, based roughly on people I knew not too long ago. They were odd people with odd relationships, the kind of people who would be memorable in a novel. I haven’t seen these people in over two years now, but my memories of them are very clear — especially the memories about their unorthodox attitudes and behaviors. In recreating them for fiction, I changed them enough to avoid a lawsuit if the work ever got published. The similarities remain, but there’s not enough of them for any of the people to say, “Hey, she’s writing about me!” Even I’m in the book, changed enough to be barely recognizable. My character is both secondary protagonist (or sidekick) and suspect.

The protagonist or detective is completely fictional. From New York, he’s well-off and lives a comfortable Manhattan life. Yet his wealth is relatively new and he’s down-to-earth. He can mix well with all kinds of people. And the southwest town environment he’s in for this novel is a true test of his ability to adapt. His name is John and he’s a first-person narrator. In writing about the small town of Coyote Springs as seen through his eyes, I explain small, southwest towns like Wickenburg as seen by New Yorkers. It’s a view I had when I first came here, but is quickly fading as my memories of New York fade away. Part of what I’m trying to achieve in this work is to capture the wonder and disbelief I felt about the southwest years ago and document it for all time.

When I started this work, I wrote quickly with only a handful of notes to guide me. I knew who the characters were, I knew who was going to die, I knew who killed him, and I knew why the murder was committed. I also knew motives for a few other characters (red herrings). The words came quickly as I developed scene after scene. Some scenes did what they were required to do: provide background information and move the plot forward. Other scenes developed character relationships and shared information about the fictional setting with readers.

About 100 pages into the work, I stalled. And I remain stalled, to this day, right there.

A little writer’s block is normally nothing to be worried about. I’d had it before and I’ll have it again. I usually snap out of it within a few weeks, depending on what I have to write. If I’m writing a computer book, I snap out of it in a day or so — I have to if I expect to continue earning a living. But a work of fiction, with no buyer lined up for the finished product, is different. There’s no one prodding me for more pages, no one asking when the next chapter will come. There’s no milestone advance check dangling in front of me, like a carrot on a stick. There’s no real reason to finish.

But I wanted to finish this work. I wanted to try to get it published. I’d read a lot of mystery novels and I felt strongly that I could craft a story with characters, puzzle, and plot that was just as good as most of them — and better than quite a few. Still, I remained stalled.

I thought about what had gotten me started in the first place. It was a combination of things. One was the idea of killing someone I couldn’t really kill. No, I couldn’t murder someone I didn’t like, but I could, in writing, tell the story of how a fictional representation of that person was killed. And, along the way, I could entertain and educate readers. And write something other than computer how-to books and articles.

The other thing that motivated me to begin was a Stephen King book. No, it wasn’t one of his horror books. Although I was a big fan of Stephen King years and years ago — when his first novel, Carrie, came out, in fact — I hadn’t read any of his work in years. But while browsing the bookstore shelves, I came across a nonfiction book he’d written: On Writing. I bought it and devoured it (with my eyes, not my teeth) in just two days. It was an excellent motivator for me. It told the story of how he’d gotten started and the way he works. It then provided guidance for writers that didn’t talk about grammar or usage or any of the nonsense many writer’s guides go into. (If you can’t structure a sentence, you shouldn’t be a writer.) The other thing conspicuously missing from the book: exercises. Stephen King wasn’t leading a “how to write a novel” course. He was telling the reader about his experiences and what he thought worked. And, given his record, that’s something worth reading.

When I finished On Writing, I felt charged up and ready to go. And I did. I wrote about 100 pages in less than two weeks. But that was it.

I tried to analyze the problem. I knew I had scenes to write, but I was worried that the plot wasn’t progressing at a fast enough pace to keep the reader interested. I felt that the problem I was posing was too easy to solve, that the murderer would be too obvious. I made notes about other character relationships, building stronger motives for other characters. And when all that thought and note-taking didn’t help, I hopped onto Amazon.com, shopped around, and bought a few more books about writing. I hoped that some of them would motivate me.

Among the books I bought were books specifically about writing mysteries. I read a few of them right away. One of them said something that chilled me to the bone. It said that if you wrote without being fully prepared, you’d get about 95 to 100 pages into your story and stall. At the time, I didn’t know how far I’d gotten, but I whipped out my laptop and checked. 98 pages. Sheesh. How did he know?

All the books made one important assumption: that the murder had been committed before the novel opens. In fact, they all seemed to assume that the story opens at the scene of the crime, with the body still in place.

My mystery doesn’t start like that. In fact, 100 pages into the novel, the victim is still alive. I’ve been giving that a lot of thought. Why isn’t he dead yet? Why haven’t I killed him? My conclusion: I’m developing his character along with the others. I want the reader to feel like I do: that he deserves to die. But in reading these how-to books, I realize that may be a mistake. To make a reader care about solving the murder, you have to make him care either about the victim or about clearing the name of a suspect he likes. Although I’m establishing one character as a likable suspect, one that the reader doesn’t want to see as guilty, I shouldn’t waste pages making the victim so unlikable.

In looking at my notes, I realize that at least another 50 pages will go by before my victim dies. That’s something I need to fix.

Years ago, I had a friend who was passionate about becoming a fiction writer. She wrote short stories, novels, and other works of fiction after work. She frequented writer’s message boards on BBSes (before Internet mailing lists), and spoke up about what she believed. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a very good attitude about the business of writing. In her mind, editors were evil and their sole purpose in life was to destroy the work and moral of writers through extensive editing and rejection. When she quit her job to write full-time, I knew what the outcome would be. I was right: a year later, she was deep in debt and still hadn’t sold a single piece of work. I don’t know where she is now or what she’s doing, but I’m pretty sure she’s not making a living as a writer. Yet there was one thing I remember her saying, one piece of advice that I can’t argue with: “If you can’t go forward, go backwards.”

I don’t know if I understand that statement the way she meant it, but it does make sense to me. If you can’t continue a story, there must be something wrong with what went before it. Go back to previous pages and examine them. Where did the plot take the wrong turn? Tear out the bad pages and write new ones.

The idea of discarding something you’ve written is sometimes referred to as “killing your darlings.” It’s a fact of life: when you write something, you often fall in love with it. It’s difficult to discard it, never to use it again. But a real writer — a professional who cares about the final product — shouldn’t be so in love with her work that she doesn’t edit out what doesn’t work. So I need to do some editing.

I have a plan of attack on my novel that isn’t fully fleshed out yet. Basically, I plan to ruthlessly cut away scenes that aren’t moving the plot forward. Some of them can be salvaged. For example, there’s a scene where John is taken on a tour of the ranch. Later, he takes a horseback ride that covers some of the same territory. Some of the places he sees on both trips are important later in the novel. But do I need to talk about them twice? No. I can cut out his first tour and keep the later one (not written yet). I can use some of the descriptions I’ve already written when I write the new material.

Another goal: kill the victim by page 50. Now I know I just told you that all the how-to books say the book should open at the murder scene with the victim already dead. But I’m not writing a murder mystery that’s just a puzzle for the readers. My story is also in entertain and inform. To do the job properly, I need to develop relationships between characters. And I can’t do that if one of the main characters is dead. Besides, I believe that by bringing the narrator into the story before the murder, I’m giving readers a clearer vision of what the events leading up to the murder are. They see what’s going on because the narrator sees what’s going on. The facts aren’t brought forward solely by the detective having question and answer sessions with witnesses and suspects. Instead, the reader is in on the plot.

Besides, I’ve read plenty of mysteries that started out with a live victim, so there’s obviously more than one way to get the job done.

But although I write for a living, I don’t write mystery novels for a living. That means I need to take care of my day job — writing computer how-to books and articles and building a helicopter tour business — first. To further complicate my life, a tenant recently trashed a rental property I’m trying to sell, and I’ve been spending a lot of time there, cleaning up her mess and dealing with contractors. So I don’t think I’ll be writing much more about Coyote Springs over the next week or two.

But I’ll be thinking about it, and that’s the most important part of writing any complex plot.

Freebies

Posted on by
1

On why a professional writer should consider writing for free.

It was a hotly debated topic back when I started writing professionally and frequented BBS message bases (the precursors to Internet mailing lists). Some people argued that a professional writer should never write for free. In fact, one person even bragged about how much free work he turned down regularly. (Of course, he never bragged about the paid work he got, either.) Other people — including me — argued that to break into a writing career, you have to write for free, at least in the beginning. How else would you get the clips you need to establish yourself as a writer?

Clips are the beginning writer’s Holy Grail. A clip is an article or a story you have written for a magazine or other published document that has been “clipped” out to show other publishers or editors you want to write for. It’s proof that you have been published. The more clips you have, the more experience you can prove. You can then use those clips to impress the people who can get you better assignments.

Of course, the quality of a clip is just as important as the overall quantity of clips. A clip from, for example, Vogue, is worth about 50 clips from small press beauty newsletters that no one has ever heard of. So the argument that you should be paid for all of your writing does have some merit, since Vogue is far more likely to pay for your work than the sporadically published Betty’s Beauty News (if such a thing exists).

Back when I started, I was breaking into a new career that I had absolutely no formal training for. Heck, I was a financial analyst and former auditor with a degree in accounting! What did I know about journalism? I knew enough, it seems.

I knew back then that I needed clips to get started. I knew that no one would pay an unknown to write for them. So I knew I had to write a few freebies. And I did.

My first published article was for The Audit Advisor, a 12-page monthly newsletter for auditors, back in 1987. It was an article about auditing construction project budgets. I received two copies for my efforts. No money. But I had my first clip.

I wrote a few other articles for publications I can’t remember. Junky little publications. One was a writers’ newsletter. When I received my sample copy, I was appalled that my work had appeared in such a rag. It had obviously been “printed” on a photocopier. One that needed maintenance.

I got my next big break in 1989, when the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) offered me $10K to write a 4-1/2 day course about using computers for auditing. I had taught a few times for them — also for free, with permission and salary from the company I worked for at the time — and knew what they were looking for. I was also quite informed about personal computers, which were very new at the time, and how they could be used to simplify work while performing a financial audit. I asked for leave of absence from work, but they wouldn’t give it to me. So I resigned my $45K/year job (a huge amount of money in those days) and took the biggest gamble in my life: to start a new career as a writer.

I finished the course in the alloted amount of time and even taught it a few times for the IIA. They paid me to write spinoff products for it. I can’t remember what they were, but I have copies in my office somewhere. But I was not really a writer yet. I hadn’t paid enough dues, I didn’t have enough clips for what I wanted to write about: computers.

So I got to work and found some more small publications to start writing for. For free. One of them was one I cooked up: Macintosh Tips & Tricks. It was a monthly newsletter that lasted a few years in a number of formats. People paid to get it mailed to them, so I guess you can say I was being paid for my writing. But not enough.

So I supplemented my income with a job as a per diem computer trainer. I worked for two different companies. One paid pretty well; the other paid very well. It kept the mortgage paid and food on the table.

Oddly enough, my next big break was as a ghostwriter for a John Dvorak book. Dvorak was very big in the computer world back in the early nineties and his name sold books. So the publisher, Osborne/McGraw-Hill, had hired him and Bernard J. David to write a book called Dvorak’s Inside Track to the Mac. Of course, they didn’t actually write the books. They hired ghostwriters to do it. They split the chapters and farmed them out to a handful of people who were probably a lot like me: struggling to get started as writers. I got the Fonts chapter and finished it quickly. Bernard liked it so much, he gave me three more chapters. I made a whopping $500 per chapter. My name doesn’t appear on the cover, but it is in the second paragraph of the acknowledgments. A very big deal in those days.

I neglected to mention how I managed to make this connection. This is an odd story, too. I’d written a book proposal about using Macs for Telecommunications. I was rejected by the four or five publishers I sent it to. (Ted Nace at Peachpit Press wrote a kind letter saying that there wasn’t a big enough market for the book. The truth is, I was ahead of the time back in those days. A year later, telecommunications really took off.) But one of those publishers sent my proposal to an agent. The agent wanted to represent me, but I was unproven. (Not enough clips.) So he referred me to Bernard who wasn’t terribly pleased (at first) about having to give me a chapter of the book. The really odd part about it is that the agent never contacted me again. To this day, I’ve never been represented by an agent.

After that book, Bernard wanted to work with me again. We wrote The Mac Shareware Emporium for Brady Books. It didn’t do very well, primarily because another book on the same topic was published two months sooner (for reasons I won’t get into here) and it was heavily promoted on AOL. (AOL was just starting to gain momentum at the time and shareware was hot.) But I did have the ultimate clip: my name on the cover of a book.

Fast forward to today. Since leaving my full-time job, I’ve written or co-authored about 60 books. (Many of those are revisions to existing, long-lived titles.) I’ve also written hundreds of articles for magazines, newsletters, and Web sites. My published books collection (including translations) fills three shelves on a bookshelf and my clips, which I don’t even bother collecting anymore, fill a file storage box. You can see a list of everything I’ve bothered to list on my Web site’s Books and Articles pages.

So you might assume that I no longer write for free. Not so. I’m obviously writing this for free. (No one is going to pay to read the things that go on in my head and in my life.) And until recently, I wrote how-to pieces for publication on the Web.

Why? Well, the way I see it, there are two goals to writing. One goal is to make money. That’s why I expect to be paid for writing books and most articles. I have to earn a living. But the other goal is to establish yourself as an authority and spread your name around so people will look for the other things you’ve written.

For example, suppose I write an article about Faxing with Mac OS X Panther. The article gets read by a bunch of people. Some of them may have read other articles I’ve written. They like my writing style, they feel I know what I’m talking about, they think they could benefit from reading some of my other work. Like my books. So they go to the bookstore or log into Amazon.com and buy a book. And I just earned a little bit more money on book royalties. While it doesn’t really pay to have one person do this, it would be nice to have a thousand people do this. And with Web publishing, this is possible.

If you were reading carefully, you may have noticed that I used the phrase “until recently” when mentioning that I wrote how-to pieces for publication on the Web. I still do write these how-to pieces, but I’ve found Web sites that are willing to pay for them. So instead of writing them for free, hoping that readers will buy books to compensate me for this work, I can now be paid for the article. And one of these Web publishers is kind enough to put links for buying my books where the article appears. So a reader can succumb to impulse buying and order the book right then and there.

Will I still write how-to pieces for free? Yes. But only when I can’t write the same pieces for paying markets. After all, I do have to make a living. And the clips box is full.

House Guests: Feast or Famine

Posted on by
Comment

On how it seems to be everyone or no one when it comes to guests.

Mike and I moved to Arizona about eight years ago now and moved into our current house about nine months later. Both of our families still live back east — in New York, New Jersey, and Florida (where old New Yorkers go). None of them could understand why we’d made the move out west. We told them about the improved quality of life and the reduced cost of living. We told them about having horses and chickens, about seeing billions of stars in clear skies almost every night, about warm weather in the winter time. But it wasn’t until they started coming out here to visit that they began to understand.

They’d come alone or in pairs at first. Mike and I worked out of the house so two of our three bedrooms were home offices. Mike’s was the easiest to convert to a spare bedroom, with a futon that flattened out to a queen sized bed. My office was too full of computer equipment and related junk to make a good guest room. (Sometimes I even had trouble with it as an office.) People would come and stay a few days. Occasionally, they’d stay longer. Mike’s mom stayed 10 days once.

We had a flood of house guests one Christmas. Mike’s entire family came: mother, brother, sister, niece. No one wanted to share the part-time guest room with Mike’s mom, so we wound up sticking people all over the house and elsewhere. Mike’s niece on the queen-sized sofa bed in the upstairs den. Mike’s brother on the living room sofa. Mike’s sister — well, she wanted her own room, so we stuck her in the Log Wagon Inn. She wasn’t very happy with that, either, but frankly I’m not sure if anything would have made her happy.

When we moved the offices out of the house, we fixed up the two bedrooms. One of them became a full-time guest room, with a full-sized bed, dresser, night table, chair, and tiny bookshelf. We even cleared out most of the closet so guests could hang their clothes. The other room became a library, with bookshelves, Mike’s old desk, and that futon. It didn’t take much to turn that into a guest room when we needed it.

Oddly enough, we had very few visitors for a long time. (I think we were all still trying to recover from Mike’s family’s visit.) Mike’s cousin Ricky, who, like us, discovered the benefits of going west, lives in Seattle and visited regularly almost every year. He goes to the Gem and Mineral show in Tucson every winter and we can usually convince him to come with us to Quartzsite for a few days. We also had a friend from back east stop in for a few days. He was the perfect house guest because we hardly ever saw him. He’d get up, join us for coffee in the morning, then take his rental car out for the day. He’d return after dinner, spend some time chatting with us, and hit the sack. No need for us to miss work, plan day trips, and fret over meals.

My dad came for a visit with his wife, too. They actually came twice in the same year. The first time, I think they had some plane tickets they had to use up and decided to use them to see us. My dad hardly ever flies — he prefers to drive everywhere — but even he wasn’t prepared to drive from Florida. They spent a few days with us, then moved on to Las Vegas to spend a few days with distant members of her family. The second time, they went to Las Vegas, then came back to spend a few days with us.

Family PhotoThis year, the flood returned. My brother and his wife had been wanting to visit for a long time. I suggested that they come for Thanksgiving. Somehow the idea came up that it would be nice to have the whole family out, including my sister, mother, and stepfather. My mother and stepfather live in Florida (not near my father; that would be too weird) and don’t get up north to see my sister and brother in New Jersey very often. I made a bet with my brother that if I invited my mother, she wouldn’t come. I lost the bet. And my sister came, too. So for five days, I had all five of them in the house. It was the first time we made full use of both guest rooms. My sister was a good sport and slept on the living room sofa.

Julia & MildredThe flood continued, two days after the last of that group departed, Mike’s mom and her friend arrived. That was yesterday and they’re staying for a week. They’re both in their eighties and they move slowly. Very slowly. They have trouble with the four steps that lead down to the two guest rooms. Coming upstairs to admire the view from our den and our new bedroom furniture was like taking them on a trip to the top of K2. Well, maybe not that bad.

So here it is, December 3, and we’ve had almost nonstop house guests since November 20. It’s difficult for me. I’m basically a loner and need a certain amount of time to myself. I normally get that in the morning. I wake up around 4:30 AM, go downstairs, make coffee, and make Alex the Bird his breakfast. I have until 5:45, when Mike comes down, to write blog entries, organize my day, and put things into perspective. But with house guests, when I wake up and go down, Alex’s whistles and chattering wakes up the house guests. In no time at all, they’re wandering into the kitchen, complaining about how early we wake up (and go to sleep), and needing coffee, food, entertainment. And asking questions.

It’s the questions that are the toughest for me. It seems like a nonstop barrage of questions. Questions about Alex, questions about what they see outside the window, questions about little noises the house makes. Questions about breakfast, plans for the day, the temperature outside. Questions about Alex and Jack and the horses and the chickens. Questions about the neighbor’s dogs and horses and kids. Questions about things around the house that aren’t common in houses back east, like the garbage disposal and compactor. Questions about what I’m doing and what they can do to help.

It’s this last question that really kills me. I work efficiently, accustomed to doing things on my own, with no one in my way. Suddenly there are offers to help me. But to get the help they’re offering, I have to help them. For example, imagine this exchange:

“Do you want me to set the table for dinner?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

“Okay, where are the plates?”

I stop what I’m doing to open the cabinet.

A moment later: “And the silverware is in this drawer?” They open the wrong drawer.

“Next to that drawer.”

They open another wrong drawer.

I come over and open the right drawer.

“Oh. Which knives should I use?”

“I don’t care. Either one.”

A running narrative follows, concerning the pros and cons of steak knives over table knives, which are commonly known as butter knives in my family. I have to pay attention and make appropriate comments. I then have to verbally confirm that the table setter has made the correct choice, even though I just said I didn’t care which knives were selected.

“Do you have napkins?”

“The drawer under the silverware.”

“These are cloth napkins. Don’t you have paper?”

“Cloth is fine. We always use cloth.”

“But we don’t need cloth napkins. Don’t you have paper napkins?”

“Don’t you like cloth napkins?”

“Yeah, but we don’t use them at home.”

“Well we do. Use the cloth napkins.”

They put out the cloth napkins, commenting on how paper napkins are good enough for them and that it’s a lot of work to wash all those napkins. Then: “How about glasses? Where are they?”

“In the cabinet with the plates.”

“Oh, yeah.” They open the cabinet again. “Which ones should I use?”

“The big ones.”

“You mean the tall ones?””Yes, that’s fine.”

“There’s only six of them. There are seven of us. Are there any in the dishwasher?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, if there is, I can wash one. Then we’ll have enough.”

“You can use the short ones. There should be enough.”

“Well, it’s no bother to wash a glass if you have one in the dishwasher. Should I look?”

“Yeah. Go ahead.”

They attempt to open the dishwasher, but it’s latched. “I can’t get this open. How do you open it?”

Get the idea? Obviously, I’d rather not have help that requires so much help to get. And frankly, it bugs me that there needs to be so much conversation over what I think are trivial things. The cloth napkins are a perfect example. Almost every single house guest this year has made a big deal over my napkins. They aren’t anything special. They’re restaurant style cloth napkins that I throw into the laundry with the rest of my dirty wash and fold when they come out of the dryer. I don’t iron them, I don’t starch them. It takes only a few moments extra to deal with them and they’re so much nicer than paper. Why wouldn’t I use cloth napkins if I like them? Why make a big deal about them? Why ask so many questions?

I guess my stress level is beginning to show.

Anyway, Mike and I rate guests on their maintenance level. The less maintenance a guest requires, the more pleasant the guest is to have in the house. So far this year, my mother and stepfather have rated highest. We just stuck them in the guest room, showed them where the towels were, and let them do their thing. They made their own breakfast, went on their own day trips, and even set the table without asking questions. They got a high rating. My sister also rated pretty high, although she didn’t do much in the way of entertaining herself. My brother and his wife were down a bit on the scale. Too many questions! And I don’t think they would have done anything without someone taking the lead. And Mike’s mom and her friend will definitely rate very low. Mike’s mom has already asked more questions in three hours of waking time than my whole family combined. And we really can’t expect them to entertain themselves when they have so much trouble just walking around.

Ah, I hear my house guests stirring down below. Time to put up the decaf coffee and debate what’s for breakfast.

People are Pigs

Posted on by
Comment

A tenant moves out and I am amazed by the way some people live.

She was not the perfect tenant. She often paid her rent late and always seemed to have some excuse involving a health problem. Yet there was a brand new car in her driveway this year, a hot tub in the backyard, and I often saw her going into the tanning salon. Obviously, her priorities were screwed up.

But she never complained about things being broken or asked us to come fix something for her. There may be two reasons for this, as I learned yesterday. Either she never used anything (like the stove) or she had everything fixed herself, just so I wouldn’t have to come into the house.

I didn’t bother her. I’m not the kind of person to snoop on my tenants. They have their lives, I have mine. Pay rent on time and I’ll leave you alone. Pay rent late and I’ll charge a late fee and leave you alone. I got a lot of late fees out of Lisa. But probably not enough to cover the damage she did to my house.

The house is a two bedroom, two bath house that shares a triple lot with a small apartment building I also own. (The apartment building contains four fully furnished studios.) It’s actually quite a nice little house, with a big, long room that comprises the living room, dining area, and kitchen and two smaller rooms, each with their own bath. The kitchen is full of cabinets and has a nice pantry. I didn’t recall there being a dishwasher, but yesterday I saw a portable dishwasher rolled to one side.

Destroyed RugsLisa and her teenage son and their dog(s) trashed the place. First of all, it appears that either Lisa didn’t own a vacuum cleaner or she didn’t know how to use one. I’ve never seen dust bunnies as large as the ones on that living room carpet. But it doesn’t really matter that much. Their dog(s) had done a real number on the carpet. Evidently Lisa decided to keep the backyard clean by letting her dog shit in the house. On the carpet. Although the carpet hadn’t been in great condition when she moved in, at least it was clean. Now it’s ready for the trash heap. And the house reeks of animal smell. Fortunately, the kitchen floor, which I’d replaced before she moved in, survived her abuse. The back bedroom’s carpet, which was also new when she moved in three and a half years ago, may be salvageable. It depends on how often the dog visited Lisa’s son.

Checkerboard WallLisa’s son is obviously a decorator-in-training. He gave each wall in his bedroom a different paint scheme. The big wall is now a black and white checkerboard, with squares about 12 inches on each side. The back wall is painted dark red with playing cards tacked up onto it. And the other big wall looks as if it were the victim of an experiment with squeeze bottles of paint. Oh, and I almost forgot about the shiny CDs tacked neatly onto the entire ceiling. They also neglected to remove much of their kitchen trash. The pantry is half full of food and garbage. The cabinets have McDonald’s catsup packets and related fast-food paraphernalia in them. The refrigerator is partially stocked with groceries.

Destroyed WallMy cleaning woman, who is due to arrive at the house at 8 AM today, will probably have a heart attack and die on the spot when she sees the mess she faces. The carpet cleaning guy already told me there isn’t much he can do. The painter will have a good laugh over the checkerboard, right before telling me that it’ll need three coats of paint to cover up. And I’m just praying that the place isn’t as big as it looks when the carpet replacement people come to measure. The cheapest carpet available in town is $17.50 per yard installed.

And Lisa? Disappeared. She left no forwarding address; I’m sure she realizes she’ll never see a cent of her security deposit. I’ll make a half-hearted attempt to track her down and get a small claims court case going against her. Then, with judgment in hand, I’ll wait on line behind the dozens of other people she owes money to, including the phone company, which turned off her phone last month, and the Town of Wickenburg, who was ready to turn off her electricity this week. And maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll get the court to garnish her wages — if she ever gets a job — so I can see some of the money I’ll be pouring into that house this month.

If anyone in Wickenburg is reading this and knows who I’m talking about, you obviously know Lisa. But if there are any landlords in Wickenburg who are wondering just who this nightmare tenant is, call me and I’ll give you a full name. People like this don’t belong in Wickenburg and we should consider it our duty to keep them out.

But then again, how often did Lisa use one of the town’s two cash advance businesses to get up the cash to pay her rent? And what does that say about Wickenburg?

Do It Yourself Layout

Posted on by
2

How and why I lay out my own books.

I do layout for most of my books. That means I submit finished pages to my editors. What they see on the page is what the book will look like when printed.

I write the book as I lay it out, in Adobe InDesign CS. InDesign is an incredibly powerful page layout program, but I use only a fraction of its features. I start with a template that has all the elements of page design. I use text boxes to position text in the appropriate place. I actually type the text right into the text box — I don’t use InDesign’s separate text editing window. I use styles for paragraphs and characters. I’ve even taken advantage of InDesign’s nested styles to automatically format text like numbers in numbered steps and bullets in bulleted lists. That saves a lot of time and ensures consistent formatting.

I create figures using screenshot software on my “test mule” computer. That’s the computer I run the software on while I write about it on my production computer. My Macintosh test mule is an eMac; my Windows test mule is a Dell Dimension PC. Both are networked to my production computer, a dual processor Macintosh G5. I pull the screenshots over to the G5, open them with Photoshop, and run an action on them to convert them to grayscale (or CMYK, depending on the book) and save them as uncompressed Macintosh-format TIFF files with 72 dpi resolution. Then I literally drag the image icons from a Finder window to the InDesign document. I downsize them to fit, which also enhances resolution, and drag them into position. Then I use InDesign’s library feature to insert a pre-formatted caption, which I fill in for each screen shot. This is probably the most time-consuming part of layout. No, that’s not true. Callouts — those little lines that run from labels to exact positions on a screen shot — take far more time to do. I have InDesign library elements for other items, too, like thumbtabs (for my Visual QuickStart Guides) and callout lines (for my Visual QuickPro Guides).

I write each book a chapter at a time. When a chapter is finished, I create a PDF format file of its pages that includes printers marks such as registration marks and cut marks. (Can’t remember the exact names of these things.) I then upload the PDF file to an FTP site where my copy editor and production editor can download them. There’s a workflow over at my publisher’s place that varies depending on the editors assigned. What I see at the end of the process is printed pages that have been marked up by both editors. I get them a few chapters at a time via UPS. I normally take care of the edits in the afternoon, after submitting a chapter for the day. (I try to do a chapter a day for revisions and a chapter every two days for new titles.)

I review the edits and make about 98% of the changes that are requested. Most changes are of a typographical nature — I have a habit of repeating words and leaving characters out of words — but some are of a layout nature — rewrapping text to prevent widows, moving a callout up two points to improve spacing, etc. And of course, there are always a few grammatical errors that need fixing. (I wasn’t an English major!) Any time I don’t make a requested change, I note the reason why on the marked up pages. I don’t ignore a change without good reason. Then I print the manuscript and send it back to the editor with the markups. If the production editor is a freelancer, I usually have to print up a second copy for him or her. It usually takes about 30 minutes to turn around edits for a chapter, so I can knock them off quickly. The final InDesign and TIFF files get FTPed to the production editor or, if he or she requests it, put on a CD. The production editor sometimes puts a few finishing touches on the final files.

When I finalize a chapter, I also create a finalized PDF and upload it to the FTP site for the indexer. Sometimes, if the book is on a tight deadline, the indexer will work on draft pages. This is usually pretty safe, especially for revisions, since pages rarely have significant changes from draft to final. When the indexer has indexed all chapters, she submits a Word or RTF file to me via e-mail. I then pour the index into an Index template and reformat it to fit the number of pages allotted. Sometimes that means making the font size really small — my last book had 7.2/8.2 font for index entries. Other times, that means making font size and leading normal but increasing the spacing between paragraphs or above headings. The book’s total page count has to be evenly divisible by 8, and it’s my job to make sure I submit exactly the right number of pages. Fortunately, Peachpit is not normally page count driven. A book can be as long or as short as it needs to be — as long as the total number of pages is divisible by 8. That’s great for me, because I can write just what I need to.

Generally speaking, it takes about a week from the time I finish all chapters in my first draft to the time the final files and index are ready to send to the printer. It then takes about three weeks from the time the files get to the printer to the time I see a printed copy of the book. Add another week for copies to get to stores and you have a 4-week turnaround from finished manuscript to book available in stores. Obviously, this is the greatest benefit of doing my own layout. Let’s face it, computer how-to books are extremely time sensitive. To get a book out quickly, you have to prepare it quickly. I have a knack for doing my job quickly and since I don’t have to depend on someone else at the publisher to do time-consuming layout, each book can be turned around very quickly.

There are other benefits to doing my own layout. It’s great for me because I have a lot more control over my work and can write in a way that takes advantage of the book’s layout. I also get a bit higher royalty rate to compensate me for my additional work and the cost of labor I’ve saved my publisher. It’s great for my editors because they can see the “final” product as they are editing. So if the layout isn’t quite right — for example, a figure would be better on one page than another or could be improved with a callout — they can tell me and I can fix it as part of the editing process. Otherwise, the book would have to go through multiple editing processes, each of them handled by someone different who may or may not care about the quality of the book. I’m the author of my books and I care about all of them, so I do my absolute best to make sure they’re something I’d be proud to have my name on.

Peachpit, to my knowledge, is the only publisher that allows authors to handle what they call “packaging.” And they won’t let all authors do it. You have to prove that you have the ability to handle layout to their standards. I’ve been doing layout for my own books since 1996 and have produced over 40 titles for them, so I’m proven.

Other publishers don’t work this way at all. In fact, they are completely opposed to the suggestion that an author layout out the book. The reason: they are worried about losing control over the book’s contents. They don’t seem to understand that they do get final possession of the manuscript’s files and can make any changes they like before sending the manuscript to the printer.

One of my other publishers, in fact, has an extremely complex production process. First the author writes the manuscript using a Word template that has macros built in for formatting. Some of the macros work, others don’t. The author is required to insert special codes in the manuscript to signal certain types of styles. Meanwhile, the author creates screenshots, which are supposed to be submitted as full screen images. The author is supposed to print each one and mark where the image should be cropped. (I refuse to do that because it wastes time and paper and relies on a production person to get the cropping right. I send cropped images and I don’t even bother printing them anymore. Nobody complains. Frankly, I think they’re relieved that I’ve spared them this extra work.) From the author, the Word file and images go to a copy editor and a technical editor. The copy editor uses Word’s change tracking feature to mark up the manuscript and insert all the codes the author has either neglected to insert or inserted wrong. The Word file then goes back to the author for review. The author further messes up the file by using the change tracking feature to accept or reject changes. The author also gets comments from the technical editor and changes the Word file to make necessary corrections. A production editor gets it next and incorporates the copy editor and author changes to finalize the file. Then it goes into production, where it’s converted into a Ventura Publishing file (I kid you not) with the images inserted. The images are usually in-line images, meaning that text doesn’t wrap around them. It also means that the images might not appear where the author thinks they should. (But that doesn’t seem to matter much.) The author gets “proofs” of these pages, in print, and is required to mark them up and send them back to the publisher. About 10% of the author’s suggestions are incorporated into the final pages. To be fair, any change that corrects an error goes in but any change that tweaks the layout is basically ignored. The book eventually makes it to the printer where it is printed and sent out. Time elapsed from completion of first draft to printed copies: 8 to 12 weeks.

Is the quality of a book better when a professional publishing staff takes it from manuscript draft to printed book than when an author takes it most of the way? I don’t think so. But I also think that quality isn’t the most important aspect of book production to some publishers. But that’s a topic for another blog entry.