G's Adventures? Now! (2)

Part 1.

When we last left our intrepid hero, he was getting ready to ship his manuscript out. After writing a nifty dedication and acknowledgement page (again), he got down to work filling in the Submission Information Form, which is supposedly designed to help streamline the process of self-publishing.

So our intrepid hero sat his big fat ass down in front of the household computer and gots to commencing in filling out the form.

After filling in the following items in nothing flat: Book ID#, Author ID#, the pen name (Georgie B), the new title (Betrayed!), the size of the book, the classification (Fiction/General, Fiction/Erotica, and Fiction/Romance/General), he got immediately stuck on the next two items: About the Author and About the Book.

The "About the Author" for his first book, our hero found to be quite dry, dull and not to his liking. So he decided to pep it up for the next book. He managed, in exactly 205 words, his experiences writing in the chat rooms, writing two different blogs and explaining the content of the two blogs and what he currently does for a living

Serious note: if you're not sure if you can write flash and sub-flash fiction, please give the chat rooms a try. Because of the 750 word/4,000 character limit, it is an excellent training ground as it forces you to learn how to write a story with a beginning, a middle and an end within that word limit.

That took him about a half hour to create. The next item that our hero had to come up with (and for those of you who have done the query route in order to land an agent or publisher will completely sympathize with me on this) a short blurb describing what the book is about, in under 300 words.

Now one of the things that our hero cannot do well under normal circumstances (in all seriousness), let alone with a deadline, is write a brief synopsis on what the book/story is about. But, if he wanted to do things right and wanted to get a move on with things, he had to write that blurb.

So our hero wrote that blurb. In its entirety, here is that blurb.

Theirs was a doomed relationship that even a marriage couldn't fix. Ray was the antithesis of a hairdresser, Handsome, muscular, and a natural flirt, he was the solution to every woman's fantasies. Gwendolyn was a passionate young woman with a temper that ran as dark as her complexion. Desirable to both sexes, she was determined to find love, no matter what the consequences. Who would be first to betray their marital vows? Ray, who although enlightened about the world around him, still had those old fashioned values that made him a hot commodity. Gwendolyn, vivacious and passionate, had the looks and the body that could destroy anyone that got in her way of her ultimate goal. To be unconditionally loved. Can that particular end really justify the means?

Once he go that done, the next step was picking out a cover image. He thought, "well, how hard can this be?" Pretty much, it was damn well hard, and in the end, a waste of time.

Hard, as in it took our intrepid hero five hours spread out over two days to find the right pic (which was a man and a woman in an arduous embrace, with the woman looking at her cell phone at the same time). Infuriating, as in after submitting the form and manuscript, our hero was told "oh no, that wasn't part of our subscription plan to the website in question.' (serious note: I was pretty much pissed off about this and I let my contact person know in no uncertain terms what I thought about it. Not sure how bad this will ultimately poison the process, though)

So our hero got all of his stuff done and e-mailed it out. He did get a response, which you just read in the preceding paragraph, and responded to that the same day.

Our hero now is playing.....the.....slow.....waiting.....game.....as he sits and impatiently waits for the next phase of the process to commence: Setting up a call with the design team to plot out how the interior (palatino linotype) will look and how the cover will look (got a few ideas about that as well. no pic, but color and text).

Tune in next time, when you'll hear our intrepid hero say, "What do you mean I can't do that on television?"