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Don’t take MY word for it! (Again)

Another of my beta-readers weighs in. Getting SamuraiFrog’s approval was really huge to me. His tastes and mine intersect frequently, but we have enough areas of disagreement that I knew he wasn’t a sure thing, and he’s whip-smart, so if he doesn’t like something, he can tell you exactly why, with often brutal force and surgical precision. That he responded to the book as warmly as he did (while still making some useful observations along the way) is a definite boost in the confidence I feel for my own story.

And if you haven’t seen them yet, check out the book trailer and the cover art at ForgottenStars.net! This coming Wednesday I will post the complete Chapter One.

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From the Books: “Come Along With Me”, Shirley Jackson

After last week’s entry, a more positive extract, this time, from the same book: Shirley Jackson’s anthology Come Along With Me. This is from an essay titled “Notes for a Young Writer”. I don’t read a whole lot of writing advice these days, figuring that at this point in my life I’m either going to swim or sink whilst valiantly attempting to swim. This, though, is an old favorite of mine.

In the country of the story the writer is king. He makes all the rules, with the only reservation that he must not ask more than a readaer can reasonably grant. Remember, the reader is a very tough customer indeed, stubborn, dragging his feet, easily irritated. He will willingly agree to suspend disbelief for a time: he will go along with you if it is necessary for your story that you both assume temporarily that there rally is a Land of Oz, but he will not suspend reason, he will not agree, for any story ever written, that he can see the Land of Oz from his window. As a matter of fact, you would do well to picture your typical reader as someone lying in a hammock on a soft summer day, with children playing loudly near by, a television set and a radio both going at once, a sound truck blaring past in the street, birds singing and dogs barking; this fellow has a cool drink and a pillow for his head, and all you have to do with your story is catch his attention and hold it. Remember, your story is an uneasy bargain with your reader. Your end of the bargain is to play fair, and keep him interested, his end of the bargain is to keep reading. It is just terribly terribly easy to put a story down half-read and go off and do something else. Nevertheless, for as long as the story does go on you are the boss. You have the right to assume that the reader will accept the story on your own terms. You have the right to assume that the reader, however lazy, will exert some small intelligence while he is reading. Suppose you are writing a story about a castle. You do not need to describe every tower, every man at arms, every stone; your reader must bring his own complement of men at arms and towers; you need only describe one gardener to imply that the castle is well stocked with servants. In your stories, then, set your own landscape with its own horizons, put your characters in where you think they belong, and move them as you please.

The entire essay is well-worth tracking down, especially if you are in the company of a writer.

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Love Is All Around

Sk Waller and her love, Nettl, are finally able to get married.

We get a lot of stuff wrong in America, which makes it all the sweeter when we start getting certain things right. There are an awful lot of problems that I’m not sure we’re going to solve, but I can take a certain small amount of solace in the fact that we are slowly getting out of the business of legislating the business of love.

I can’t attend the ceremony in person, but if anyone there sees some kind of weird spirit-form lurking in a corner, and the spirit-form seems to be wearing overalls, that’s me.

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Something for Thursday

I saw this on Facebook the other night and it was immediately clear what this week’s entry had to be: this astonishing cover, featuring a small army of great musicians, of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” — which just happens to be my favorite Beach Boys song ever. (Yes, this might very well be by virtue of the song’s perfect placement at the end of Love, Actually.)

Here it is. Amazing!


More info on this cover here. This thing made me incredibly happy.

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And now…THE COVER!!!

Good day to you all, Star Warriors!

Of all the various concerns I had as I moved Stardancer toward publication, the one that was most worrisome to me was the problem of cover art. You see, while I like to think I have a decent eye for good visual art, when it comes to producing it, I’m about as untalented as a blind person playing hockey. In fact, if we started at the same time, I suspect you’d find a decent blind hockey player well before I produced a decent sketch, much less a painting or anything else of the sort. I can do stick figures, but that’s about it, and anyway, Randall Munroe now has the monopoly on cool stuff with stick figures.

So, I needed an artist. How was I going to get one? Well, one thing I’ve learned in my years working at a large store is that often times, for any non-obscure talent you need, there’s likely someone amongst your coworkers who has it. So I asked around, and thus discovered that a young woman named Natalie Golubski, who works in our store’s bakery, is actually a very talented visual artist. She agreed to do the cover illustration, and I think the results speak for themselves in her representation of Tariana Osono, the older of my two Princesses.

The next book will feature Margeth, the younger Princess, and the third…well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For now, without further ado, here are the front and back covers to Stardancer, complete with the back cover blurb which will spell out more of the plot details. Enjoy!

STARDANCER front cover
STARDANCER back cover
(Click through to view them on Flickr, where you can embiggen them.)

Tune in next week for a very juicy tidbit, when I post Chapter One in its entirety!

 

 

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Argleblargle

So, this morning I finished my first round of proofreading and minor edits on Princesses In SPACE!!! Stardancer (wow, it feels weird typing that after so many years of the working title), and it came time to upload the files. I’m using CreateSpace to create the book, and the process is pretty simple: when you’re done typing and formatting and whatnot, you export the innards of your book as a single PDF, which you then upload to CreateSpace for their “Review Process”. This process involves the CreateSpace folks looking over your file to make sure it meets their standards for printing. This is all about typographical and design stuff: do you have illustrations or text too far outside or inside their margins, will your fonts work on the page, et cetera. This process takes twenty-four hours or so, after which time they notify you that you’re either good to go or you need to do some tweaking.

After that point, you can do one of two things: Order another proof copy, in which case they send you a copy of the book to go over again, or approve the proof for publication. If you do more proofing and you find things to change, you have to then make a new PDF and re-upload it so they can do the Review Process again.

So, this morning I reached the point where I was ready to re-upload the new PDF of the book’s guts. However…I screwed this up, and actually initiated the Review Process without uploading anything new. So they’re reviewing the files they’ve already reviewed once before, and I have to wait twenty-four hours for this because there’s no mechanism for canceling this process. It would be nice if they gave you a ten-minute window, say, in which to cancel the review if you uploaded the wrong thing; or, maybe, have warning pop up along the lines of, “You have no uploaded any new interior files since the last review process. Do you wish to continue with the Review on the already-existing and uploaded files?”

As the title of the post says: Argleblargle!

Look, this isn’t a huge deal, really. It isn’t. But I’m at the point in this project where days matter. I’m releasing five weeks from tomorrow, and it takes about a week to get the review copy. So losing a day of production work actually hurts at this point…I want to be able to finalize the book by the 24th of this month, so I can upload the final revised contents (if I have to make any more corrections) and then be able to get things rolling so I can have my beta-reader and family-and-friend copies in hand before I officially release on the 12th of next month. This is the point where losing a day is not a good thing. Not fatal, either, but still: Argleblargle!

(Oh, and don’t forget to visit ForgottenStars.net tomorrow for the Big! Cover Art! Reveal!. But you won’t forget, because you’re awesome, and I’ll remind you tomorrow anyway.)

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But don’t take MY word for it!

Jason Bennion speaks about a subject near and dear to my heart: my book!

He was/is one of my beta-readers, and he provided a lot of useful comment regarding various matters within the book’s pages. In fact, I was on the fence about one entire scene until he commented favorably upon it, so that scene stayed. Anyway, hopefully that whets the appetite a whee bit!

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Sentential Links

Linkage!

:: Overalls should be large enough to wear a cable knit sweater UNDER them. Overalls should have wide enough legs to go OVER boots, not tuck into boots. (Agreed! Oh, and scarves go perfectly with overalls. I love my scarf collection and am planning to add to it.)

:: One of the shows I used to watch religiously was MASH. Indeed, I liked it so much, I’d often watch the summer reruns. But somewhere about season 8, I stopped watching the reruns. This article by Ken Levine, who wrote for the show in the later years, touches on why; they started, generally inadvertently, recycling plotlines. Why would I need to watch the rerun when the story itself was being replicated? (We don’t rewatch stuff a whole lot here, and I always get a bit antsy when binge watching. There’s always something new to find, but we do rewatch things once in a while. As for M*A*S*H, that show’s a bit fuzzy for me. I literally grew up with it; it was on the air my entire childhood until, I think, fifth or sixth grade. By the time I knew what it was about, I think it had gone on too long, and I never felt a great deal of fondness for it. Later on, though, in high school, I discovered through syndicated reruns that the early seasons really were all kinds of brilliant. Oddly, apparently there was a huge M*A*S*H craze at my college the year before I got there, and everybody was watching the reruns at 6:30 or something like that. Weird. This was over by the time I got there. Oh, and this seems as good a time as any to bring up a usual complaint: Where the hell is Season Three of Once and Again?! It has never been released in any format. I do worry that some worthy items will slip through various cracks and never be seen again.)

:: It deeply bothers me that we’ve basically erased all of the cultural gains made by The Cosby Show and a well-off suburban black family is suddenly a big mystery again, and too many white critics can’t relate to it if Dre isn’t trying to get the family to out-black themselves every week. (Speaking of teevee…I hadn’t even heard of Black-ish until this post. Shows how much attention I pay to teevee seasons at the outset; we only attend to returning shows we already watch, and then we wait to see what’s highly-regarded and/or becomes a hit. This was we avoid the “Hey, this is good! Annnnd…it’s canceled!” thing. I’m hearing good things about this show all of a sudden, though, and if it survives, we may check it out.)

:: What a tawdry, mean, ugly, unhappy time that was.

And it’s not just the reminders of what it was like back then.

It’s learning there was even more tawdriness, meanness, ugliness, and unhappiness than I remembered.

Or ever knew.

Like the sudden, sharp rise in the price of meat.

:: I watch HOUSE and believe I have whatever mystery ailment the patient of the week has. My doctor then assures me that bleeding out of my eyes is normal, just drink a glass of water. (This is funny because, in light of Roger’s quote above, we’ve been watching/rewatching HOUSE on and off for the last few months. We didn’t watch the show regularly until its seventh season; before that it was something we occasionally watched and enjoyed but never paid much attention to. Now we are picking up on some of the standard story beats, and of course, House’s lack of social skill is quite legendary and the dialog is whip-smart. Of course, there is a danger with HOUSE that sometimes we watch it expecting a fun medical mystery…and then it’s one of the sad ones where the patient dies. It’s good to have a comedy or two in the back pocket.)

:: She was a high-school boy’s dream and my mother’s worst nightmare, a five-foot-three gymnast who styled herself after the “Like a Virgin”-era Madonna. I can’t remember how or when we first met — in fact, I really only remember a handful of moments I shared with her — but there was chemistry between us.

:: From a storytelling standpoint, I’ll take The Mummy every time. (Michael May is blogging about horror movies all month long. Check it out!)

:: I am interested in the story possibilities of such a moment as this.

More next week!

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ForgottenStars.net

The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer

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