Welcome to the first installment of G's Adventures? Now!, where you'll be able to follow our intrepid hero as he embarks down the psychedelic brick road and trips to his ultimate destination of self-publishing his second completed work called Betrayed.
We first meet our intrepid hero at the dining room table as he's putting the finishing touches on the forty-nine page manuscript that will be turned into a professionally published product.
"Finished!!!" he yells triumphantly.
"What are you yelling about now?" asks his puzzled wife.
"Ummm....sorry about that. I finally finished one of my short stories, that's all."
"Well, keep it down."
"Okay."
He then spends the next couple of days thinking about what he wants do next. Having learned a very valuable lesson on frivolous spending, he's determined to purchase only what he needs and nothing else. After making the necessary phone calls and purchasing the package he wanted, he trips off to the credit union to withdraw the necessary funds (note: our hero has an automatic deduction from his bi-weekly paycheck to cover such thing frivolous things like self-publishing and not-so-frivolous things like the house taxes) in order to pay for the product.
After getting the money, downloading the form, and sending it off, our hero sits back down at the computer, and gets to work on the second round of editing (having learned a valuable lesson with his first book) plus writing a dedication page and an acknowledgement page (again, learning a valuable lesson from the first book, in that one should always have his ducks in a row before sending off the manuscript, because fixing errors later, cost money).
With the second round of editing, in addition to the spelling and grammar check, our intrepid hero took some advice from a few of the books he was reading of late (most notably Swords of Talera) and decided to tighten up the appearance of the pages, so as to make it more seamless, instead of looking like this post.
To his horror, after tightening up the appearance of the manuscript, his story shrunk from a more-than-minimum forty-nine pages to a less-than-minimum forty-four pages. Quickly shooting off an e-mail to the consultant and asking if the minimum requirement could include the dedication and acknowledgement pages or if they were separate issues from the manuscript (found out one day later that it wasn't) our intrepid hero was faced with about a four day window at the most, to add five more pages to the story.
I'm happy to inform everyone that our intrepid hero sat back down at his computer (after taking a couple of long walks to carefully think things through) and rose to the challenge. He found three spots in which he could properly expand and thus make the story flow a little bit better.
Note: if you're using a different type of word processing program, like Microsoft's Works Word Processing, which is basically a stripped down version of Word, a page written on that, is not a page written in Word. If you write two and half pages in Works and copy/paste it to Word, it shrinks down to about a page and three quarters. Thus, our intrepid hero had to write about seven pages of story which after inserting into Word, wound up bringing the page count to forty-eight and a half.
Our intrepid hero has once again, turned a potential disaster of wasting a sizable chunk of change, into actually getting the proper bang for the buck.
Thank you for reading this exciting and thrilling pilot episode of G's Adventures? Now! and stay tuned for upcoming episodes that will give you thrills, chills, and spills!
~~~~~~~~~~~
Update (6/5): My notebook fried out last night, which caused some unfortunate consequences to my blog and writing. First, my blog reading will be very sporadic as although I follow about 45 blogs, I only have about 30 through Google reader, but I will try my very best to track down any blogs that I don't follow and follow. If you just started reading my blog and I just started visiting yours, please don't worry if I don't show for a brief period of time. As soon as I get things straightned out, I'll be back. Lastly, the wonderful dedication and acknowledgement that I wrote, I neglected to save on my floppy (but I did save the most recent version of my story). Thus, I will have to rewrite these two bad boys from scratch.
Friday, June 5, 2009
12 comments:
Go on, give me your best shot. I can take it. If I couldn't, I wouldn't have created this wonderful little blog that you decided to grace with your presence today.
About that comment moderation thingy: While yes, it does say up above I can take it, I only use it to prevent the occasional miscreant from leaving thoughtless and/or clueless comments.
So remember, all of your comments are greatly appreciated and all answers will be given that personal touch that you come to expect and enjoy.
G. B. Miller
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I'm laughing but wincing too. Sounds like you're learning a lot in this process though.
ReplyDeleteI hope there will be some good cliffhangers to look forward to in G's Adventures! I'm sure this "novel" hero will save the day :)
ReplyDeleteHey - welcome to my world (I work for a commercial printer. You did indeed save money by getting it in good order first.)
ReplyDeleteHave a good weekend, Intrepid Hero!
Charles: Let me tell you, am I ever learning about the process. On the first one, I spent money that in hindsight I didn't need to, so all I'm doing is spending only what I need to spend.
ReplyDeleteGlad I made you laugh. I figured if I'm gonna write about publishing my second book, I might as well poke fun at myself while doing it.
Septembermom: Oh absolutely. I plan on having our intrepid hero dust off that book blog of his (the one that's been sitting around untouched since January) and give it strange little updates as we go along.
Lynn: And boy did I ever. Because it was a learning process, I spent about $110 or so doing a couple of revisions.
And you too as well.
Double space. That is what I did in school to make my papers longer.
ReplyDeleteActually, when you send off a manuscript to an agent or publisher, one of the requirements is that the manuscript must be double spaced with at least a 12 point font.
ReplyDeleteIn this instance though, when the manuscript gets re-formatted, it still has to meet the minimum requirement of 48 pages.
I was able to tack on 4 1/2 pages of dialouge pluse a dedication and a acknnowledgement page as well, bringing my total page count to 51.
How many copies of this will you make?
ReplyDeleteThe company works on the principle of P.O.D. (print on demand), so the only hard copies will be the ones I purchase to sell through my blog and in person.
ReplyDeleteCongrats on anotehr completed project. That must feel great!!
ReplyDeleteIt does.
ReplyDeleteThis I actually finished re-writing earlier this year, but because it fell short of the minimum needed, I spent a stressed out week because not only did I need to pump it up, but I wanted to do it without appearing too gratuitous with sex.
Once you're all done it's nice to have a bunch of nail-biting tension n heart-racing last second work to squeeze in under the deadline, while relying on modern technology to shut you down n delete what was already done.
ReplyDeleteI feel like this at work every single day!
Modern technology is such a blast these days. I basically spent this weekend choosing an image(s) for my cover, re-writing a dedication and acknowledgement page, and cleaning up the story one last time.
ReplyDelete