RLLauthor@outlook.com and @RLL_author GO TO AMAZON KINDLE STORE AND TYPE RLL. YOU WILL FIND MY BOOKS.

Friday 25 March 2016

RECYCLING INEVITABLE INJURIES FOR WRITERS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

What the fucking fuck?!
   My right thumb was healing along nicely. Until today. I made it through most of the day. The light is fading as I type. What happened?
   If you start to run out of fingers and thumbs to injure, go back over old territory. Attack the thumbs again.
   And so...
   I succumbed to that occupational hazard of writers who struggle to defeat the papery office: the paper-cut. Aggravatingly, this slash is a good (bad) thumb-width below the slash that started this week-long chain-reaction of damage to my hands.
   This was over. Done with. My streak of bad luck slowed to a crawl of bad luck. I blame notes.
   Yes, I still write by hand. The skill may yet come in useful, here, in the Digital Age. I'd scribbled scribbly notes, and those were no good.
   Solution? Grab a slice of paper and scribble again, only more neatly and notelily. When I say slice of paper...
   The attack came with its own anaesthetic. I didn't feel the pain until later. When I noticed the sensation, I thought my recuperating wound had opened to the heavens once more. Alas, no.
   I just want it to end. The more care I take, the worse this gets. I was utterly careless with that hammer, and sustained no injuries.
   Hmm. Maybe more reckless, I should be.
   Yoda have I become, mmmmm. Use the Force, I must. Or concrete gloves. Those are bound to chafe. And adversely affect the piano.

Thursday 24 March 2016

INEVITABLE INJURY FOR WRITERS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

What's this?
   Surely, I'm running out of fingers to damage.
   Not so.
   And so...
   I didn't injure any fingers today. (The day is still running along nicely, though may turn nasty at any moment.)
   After blogging yesterday, though, safe in the knowledge that I'd be safe...
   I injured yet another finger.
   Mundane tasks cramp your typing. This is known.
   Damn it, today I took a hammer to a floorboard and knocked seven shades of shit out of three annoying nails.
   Not nails attached to my fingers. No. These nails cried out to be attached more securely to the floor. I obliged. Didn't hurt a single finger.
   One of those weeks. Reorganising files, hyperlinking, formatting, editing...
   All that comes back to me is the damage to fingers. Not toes. Fate spared those. So far.
   

Wednesday 23 March 2016

YET MORE INJURY FOR WRITERS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

When will this hell end? I'm now blogging daily, on the basis that I'll blog every day another finger takes a hit. Damn. I'm running out of fingers.
   The great hyperlinking war of 2016 was over. Until it started again. It's important to have many irons in the fire, so they say. Why, I don't know.
   I've not been in charge of fires all that often. Any old time I had to take a genuine iron to a genuine fire, I used one. But that was watching a fire, and had no connection with blacksmithery.
   Or with having loads of writing projects on the go.
   Stories lie in various stages of construction. Irons in the fire. I looked over the inventory, and saw a need to upgrade the front and back matter of those tales last night.
   More hyperlinking, shock horror.
   It isn't always about the writing. There are calls to revisit copyright law, alter formatting, adjust product descriptions, change file formats ENTIRELY...
   There's always more to writing than typing. Though typing is important. I say that having navigated my way through the murky swamp of voice recognition software.
   This is designed to annoy Scottish people.
   And so, I take an interest in guarding my typing digits as often and as well as humanly possible.
   If I don't blog tomorrow, my fingers are fine. Or they are all mangled.

Tuesday 22 March 2016

MORE INJURY FOR WRITERS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Another day, another injured digit.
   I suspect I'm on a quest to damage a finger or thumb each dawn. Some of those digits are definitely going to be mine.
   Despite the latest trauma, I republished seven times today. My recent formatting war with the back catalogue of prehistoric files forced something from the mirk.
   When that something surfaced from the depths, I went tsk. In the sense that I said fuck.


*

The project irresponsible is slim thriller. I've split the book into four chunks. Not hard to do - I wrote the book in four chunks.


And did those files in ancient time
Unfurl with ease upon the computer screen:
And was the formatting odd
On ev'ry effing paragraph seen!

   Sometimes, bringing old stories into line with e-book conventions is easy. That's not the case with this fossil.
   However, I spotted something awkward - meaning it wasn't wrong.
   It was, infuriatingly, right. I speak of the gargoyle. There's a gargoyle in the book. And I researched the word gargoyle before I wrote the gargoyle into my tale.
   A gargoyle gurgles.
   If a gargoyle doesn't divert water away from a building, it isn't a gargoyle.
   Remembering this bit of research from the hinterland of yesteryear, over the hills and very far away, I did the obvious thing.
   I ran a search for the word in my published works.
   And I saw that, in at least three cases, I'd gone on to use the term incorrectly much later.
   This brings up an important point. If you must correct something in an e-book, run a check on all of your books. When factual errors creep in, as they must, they come not single spies, but in battalions.
   If you research gargoyles, and write properly about them, hell, that doesn't stop you from writing improperly about them later.
   Gargoyles crawled over my work like, er, gargoyles on a cathedral. And I'd let the definition drift. That loose masonry needed fixing.
   I fixed.
   On top of that, I'm from the last generation to be taught the use of whom. If you find yourself using the word in your writing, here's some handy advice.
   Kill it - kill it with fire.
   I went through my published work and checked for usage. The word has the odour of bottled creatures to it.
   Though I didn't use the word much, I had the advantage of knowing how to use it. I'd say that's the same as not using a scythe much, but professing great skill just the same.
   Raymond Chandler defended the word, but I am not here to defend Raymond Chandler.
   And so...
   Welcome, anatomically accurate gargoyles. Farewell, whom. It lingers in my blog posts, but no more in my fiction. Gargoyles and whom forced me to republish seven books today. Our world survived the tumult.

Monday 21 March 2016

INJURY FOR WRITERS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Recovering from feeling somewhat shitty, I slashed my thumb.
   That story has a sequel.
   Today, I punctured my other thumb. Yes, I'm blogging about running out of thumbs.
   At least I was instantly aware of this injury. A snake bit me. Special kind of snake, well-known to authors. A metal snake. Its fangs were the prongs of a staple.
   Make no mistake. There's no such thing as the Paperless Office. Paper leads to occupational hazards...
   Writers face slashing cuts from paper, and dangerous punctures from staples. I'll end up slipping on paper, and tumble to my doom 'neath a precariously-balanced pile o' books.
   Anyway. The great hyperlinking battle of 2016 is but a memory. A memory shot through with injuries, illness, grumpiness, and caffeine. (Which I almost added a fucking hashtag to. Thanks, Twitter.)
   I will now crawl to a quiet place and allow thumb regeneration to unfold with the speed of a tranquilised snail.
   On the bonus side, I just won a box of chocolates.

Saturday 19 March 2016

ILLNESS FOR WRITERS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Slow typing days.
   That's illness in a nutshell, for writers.
   I was assailed on three fronts. A fourth annoyed me.
   What can you do? Type on.

*

I staggered and stumbled around, feeling ghastly.
   Then another fun health-based encounter descended, and troubled me greatly.
   When will this hell be over?
    Oh, when hell freezes over.
   Third time's the charm. Well, fuck. This feeling low feels lower. The fun never stops. It simply intensifies.

*

And then. I noticed something else. I'd cut myself, at the base of my thumb. When? Don't know. How? Don't care. This was one of those tiny slashes...
   The kind of injury you don't feel at the time, as it occurs during business hours - when you are busy experiencing other things. Gradually, the tear deepens...
   Eventually, the cut splits open.

*

Bad enough that I was ill, feeling wretched from the second source of trouble, which added to the first, and...
   Feeling grim from the third source, which multiplied the effects of the first two ailments...
   But the fourth stab compounded the lot, leaving me with foreboding at what lay next on the menu.
   Every move I made seemed destined to aggravate the cut. Once I felt it, the damned thing screeched like the stump of a lopped-off arm. Vinegar, lemon juice, salt, and more salt, landed on the raw ravine.
   This was just taking the fucking piss.

*

There's no such thing as a day off, if you are a writer. Writers are always on the job.
   Even if you lie there, semi-comatose from that unexpected impact with a train that jumped the tracks and came in search of your left knee...
  The writer in you struggles to the pain-bedecked surface, wondering, vaguely, how to squeeze a story out of the situation.

*

My task was to republish all of my books. When I removed material from one volume on the grounds of exclusivity, I added bonus material and increased the word-count.
   So?
   I believe in transparency in publishing. My Amazon product descriptions all list the word-count. I use the blurb in the back matter of my books, to plug all those works.
   And so...
   Altering a book's wordage means fixing the blurb AND fixing the blurb in the back matter.
   Ill, I worked my way through this drudgery, feeling terrific. (A lie was told there, surely.)
   I updated ToC, blurb, a few descriptive sections here, there...
   Hell, I even added what amounts to a money-back guarantee. If you bought the book in error, take the refund. I don't want your money if the product didn't satisfy you.
   Slow typing days. That's illness in a nutshell, for writers. Remedy. Type on. As fast as you can. If that means typing slowly, hey, at least it's typing.
   I'm much better today. That's not to say I'm feeling great. Excuse me, while I take my caffeine-based medicine.

Sunday 13 March 2016

REPUBLISHING KINDLE BOOKS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Once a story is out there, I like to say I've cut loose of it.
   For reasons technical and strange, I often go back and republish a book. If a change occurs in the front or back matter of a story, I am forced to republish all my books.
   Change.
   So it went. Amazon changed the way it did business, paying out borrowing fees for books on a page-by-page basis.
   I didn't trouble myself too much over the statistics, as Amazon's Bookshelf service rolled over and croaked. It ran almost as fast as frozen treacle. I couldn't access the bookshelf, to run a test on a file.
   My Amazon Bookshelf contains live books and books to come. There are a few empty shells for testing.
   I try out awkward formatting techniques on the shellfish books, and my failures fail to make it into the finished products.


*

When the bookshelf blipped into existence again, I accidentally found myself staring at pages read. This system showed a book with two pages read.
   So the reader browsed free books, made it beyond the cover, and stopped dead on the title page.
   Without knowing why, I hazarded the best worst guess. My holdover from the days of paper publishing didn't go down well.
   There's no place for blank pages in an e-book unless you are up to something clever in the staging of the plot.
   I'd cut the opening of each book. Cover. Title page. Copyright page.
   And the Table of Contents is cut down. I don't publish books with hyperlinks like this...

CHAPTER ONE.
CHAPTER TWO.
CHAPTER THREE.
CHAPTER FOUR.
CHAPTER FIVE.
CHAPTER SIX.
CHAPTER SEVEN.
CHAPTER EIGHT.
CHAPTER NINE.
CHAPTER TEN.
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
CHAPTER TWELVE.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.
CHAPTER NINETEEN.

   And so on, and on, and on, down to the 36th chapter stored under a locker belonging to Davey Jones. I was stuck with that formatting initially, as I had a problem producing a sawn-off Table of Contents without glitching the hell out of the e-book.
   But I learned. Kill your glitches. With fire.
   Divide your book into sections and put those at the start.

ONE. SPRING ONIONS.
TWO. SUMMER STOCK.
THREE. AUTUMN IN OLD NEW YORK.
FOUR. WINTER BLUES.

   Then link through to mini-lists of chapters later.
   On seeing that statistic about page two, I revamped all the books. I just combined the title page with the copyright page. No big deal. Yes, I republished. And I killed off a page in each book.
   (Though I saw scope for shortening the Table of Contents in one book, and that generated two mini-lists further in.)
   And I tested out-of-book hyperlinks while I was there. Found defunct links. Killed those off.
   Yes. Cut loose of your work once it is done. But, for technical reasons, go back in and fix things. Will readers stop DEAD on the title page because it has the title page and copyright nonsense on it?
   Maybe. But I removed something that irked me for a while. The title page, sitting there, all alone.
   That wasn't the beef. I had to format the follow-up copyright page in a peculiar way to avoid an invisible gremlin.
   With two pages rolled into one, that glitch never surfaces - and the need for awkward formatting vanishes.


*

Beyond all that...
   When I say I republish books...yes, I mean update. I don't unpublish the book and then publish again as a new edition. Only copyright incidents or defamatory statements lead down that thorny path.


*

After writing this blog post, I republished my books yet again. I hadn't taken account of the way Amazon operates, and a one-word fix in the back matter solved that.
   Always cut loose of your work. But check the front matter, the back matter, and the product description every now and again. And review hyperlinks that lead out of the book to the vastness of the interwebs. If the links don't lead there, remove or revise.


*

Here I am, publishing again. Updating. One of the problems with hyperlinking to a book on the Kindle Store is that the link leads to a particular region.
   Unless you make use of a linking service. I decided to add Universal Links to the back matter in my products. No matter where you are in the Vast Uncaring Void, clicking the link takes you to the nearest Amazon site.
   I tested a service called BookLinker. Creating a link, I clicked and went through to Amazon. Then I sent the same link to Some Foreigners, to see where the link led them.
   It all worked out.


*

On top of that, my resuscitation work on slim thriller continues. Somewhere along the way, slim*thriller lost its asterisk.
   More importantly, excerpts from the novel had to go from my collected edition...
   Yes, that's a Universal Link.
   The collection houses blog posts that I won't remove from this blog, so Amazon exclusivity is ruled out. I want slim thriller to run in Kindle Direct Publishing when the time comes, and that meant sacrificing the excerpts...
   I cut 5,000 words from the short story collection, but threw in a story from inventory...adding 10,000 words. Elaborate updating occurred.
   In addition, I threw in a new section at the front of the book. A short piece, outlining the refundability of Kindle books. If I write a story that's not for you, grab yourself a refund.
   I'll be rolling that refund policy note out to all my products, as I set up more Universal Links in the back matter.

*

There you have it. I republished a book today. Cut material that had to go. Injected more material, to keep the word-count up. Killed routine glitches. Added a refund policy. Threw in extra hyperlinks.
   Cut loose of your stories. But remember to maintain them.




   

Tuesday 1 March 2016

SLIM*THRILLER: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Awkward half-arsed technical considerations prevented publication of SLIM*THRILLER. Problems. That's what I meant to say.
   I tried my best, and worst, to overcome the technical difficulties. The story makes use of diagrams and maps built using drawing shapes in Microsoft Word.
   Those diagrams weren't supported in Amazon Kindle. Now they seem to be. Not entirely to my satisfaction, but at least each map is no longer visible only as a black rectangle.
   I tried all sorts of tricks, dodges, pieces of legerdemain, sleight of programming, and nonsense.
   Every year, since I started putting out Kindle books, I returned to the unloved monster and tried to build up its strength with kind words and acts of computer magic.
   No go.
   Until now. All writing is experimentation. And so. Whether or not the maps, clues, diagrams, and buildings are supported...
   The repellent fact remains. Even breaking the story into four volumes, the files are unwieldy. Just trying to preview one book broke Amazon.
   It doesn't matter if I use the Microsoft material or if I generate my own image files off those earlier diagrams. There's a lot of stuff on file. And I'll go purple in the face on top of the blue that's already there, if I try yet another annual review and trudge nowhere.
   So, what to do?
   My solution is to restructure the tale so that it survives without those images. I'll drop hyperlinks in there, leading from the story to a dedicated blog. That blog will house the original visuals, recreated as bonus material.
   Result? The files drop drastically in size, and I can preview my books before they go on sale - without snapping the Amazon Bookshelf under the crushing weight of what went before.
   It's a fiddly solution. No more and no less fiddly than all of the other so-called solutions I tried, it's true. We'll see how it goes.
   If it means publishing, I'm all for that. The writing lab survives each blast. And that's the main thing.
   Upshot? I have a story sitting at a loose end. My INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS contains excerpts from SLIM*THRILLER, running to 5,000 words...
   If I want SLIM*THRILLER to appear in Kindle Direct Publishing, that material has to go from the INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS. Exclusivity, and all that.
   I'll drop my loose end story in there as a replacement. The new piece is 10,000 words long. Readers get more for their cash in buying a slightly-expanded anthology.
   Why must SLIM*THRILLER feature in KDP, with its exclusivity terms? Even with all the diagrams farmed out to a dedicated site, the files are still long...
   The story is divided into four sections. Breaking the book into four volumes is a neat solution. Will the public go for that? All writing is experimentation. Self-publishing is a mad science lab. Quite right, too.
   If I put the book in KDP, I can offer the first volume free. Will a serialised approach work? Only one way to find out.
   It's better to publish a mad science experiment than leave it lurking on a hard drive for want of perfect technical solutions.
   Time to use the technical solutions left to me, now that I've exhausted all of the others.
   This means revisiting the story again. Much to do. Recreating maps. Setting up an easily-accessible blog site. Revising INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS. Publishing one massive story in four volumes of 100,000 words each, give or take.
   Annual review of SLIM*THRILLER. The last one. I'm for publishing the damned thing within the year.