Most of my writing energies have been expended in two places through much of the last couple weeks: working on The Lost Years and helping +Angela Kulig (my co-op partner) get her magnum opus Pigments of My Imagination (POMI) ready to go. I’m making pretty good headway on both; I’m working on Episode 9 of The Lost Years and we’ve got ARCs of POMI out to friendly faces. The wrinkle for the latter is that Angela is trying to get a paperback out alongside the eBooks. I’m not quite ready with the “automated extract eBook to typesetter” script, but it shouldn’t take too long. Since this is going to be a limited first edition, I just extracted the HTML from the EPUB and brought it into LibreOffice. Set up a few styles, with the fonts the way we want them, and (like the eBooks) we just need to include some boilerplate.
I’m still going through The Sorcerer’s Daughter, and hope to have it done very soon. I need to get it to the editor, etc., soon after. We’re talking about bundling the first three Accidental Sorcerers books into a single paperback, once the eBooks are out.
If I ever get to write fiction for a living, I’ll try not to write on vacation…
That's great about the script! I posted a query to the Ubuntu Forums on Google+ to ask about the best way to make EPUBs in Ubuntu, and got a half-dozen great answers (all of which I need to check out more thoroughly). Pandoc looks especially interesting, and someone included some LibreOffice tutorials. Of course, in my case, it's content first...
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to checking out the new releases!
Paperbacks: the final frontier.
ReplyDeleteKatherine, it occurred to me shortly after writing the post that I had 2/3 of the script already done: extract the CSS from the EPUB, tweak it to output typesetting commands, then use xsltproc to do the actual work! There will be some other fiddling required, of course, but that should get me 95% there. I export an EPUB from Scrivener, then open it in Sigil to replace the CSS and optimize everything (it supports regular expressions in search/replace, which makes things SO much faster). It's a pity you can't get it to work on your system; it's one of those rare programs that makes life easier on both newbie and advanced users. So get that content done!
ReplyDeleteTony, maybe hardcovers are the final frontier? But yeah, paperbacks are a major step forward. I'm looking forward to spending a bunch of $$$ (tax-deductible, of course, goes under "promotional expenses") to get copies to leave in public spaces.
It's important to have breaks when you do it for a living. Right now, it's sounds like you've packed your vacation with it. I hope it's fulfilling work, Larry!
ReplyDeleteIt is important to have breaks whether you do it for a living or not. Vacation should be a time when, well you're on vacation doing things you don't normally do or just plain relaxing. I think bundling the stories together as a paperback is a good idea. I think it's just a lovely feeling to hold a book that you've written yourself in your hands, I know I was thrilled to have I Know You Know as a paperback and even more thrilled when others asked me to sign their copy ^___^
ReplyDeleteJohn, Helen, at this point in my life, writing *is* relaxing. If/when I start doing it for a living, it may become something I need to escape from rather than escape to. I've mostly been writing on my new serial, which is a sort of escape from the other writing in a way. ;-) (I hope that makes some kind of sense.)
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