Tuesday 2nd December 2003
Man, did that suck....
Just when I had a few things worth mentioning, I got a headache for about ninety damned hours. I hate that. But, after a a couple thousand milligrammes of ibuprofin, acetaminophen, and codeine, along with dozens of cans of soda and SlimFast shakes [not a bad thing to 'eat' when you're not sure you're going to have time to digest anything before yarfing], I think I'm okay now. Probably. For the moment.
I could probably fill this up with nothing but weak comparisons for people who don't get these headaches--which is more people than people think, now that chronic migraine has become a diagnosis thrown about with all the credibility of ADD; but that never helps much. If you're really curious, women who have these things casually mention that they hurt far worse than labour pains. Which only serves to assure me that every feminist I've ever met was totally full of shit.
Anyway: the news.
Sixteen months after announcing the project, the company I've been outsourcing the merch through have finally gone public with books. Which is largely good news.
Specifically, the good news is that the books are real. Which is to say that they're identical to any trade paperback sold at Barnes&Noble. Including the price, which was my initial concern with this.
Which is to say that a trade paperback is, in most cases, under twenty bucks. In more extreme cases, they cost a little more; a six-hundred-page novel would be closer to thirty, simply because the pagecount has a lot to do with the printing cost in a case like this. But three- to four hundred pages will just slide in at US$19.99. Which is acceptable, in today's market.
So I got a final prototype for FC2K, because it was available, and because it happens to use a lot of different fonts. And it looks pretty good. The most glaring mistakes are mine--basic fuckups in formatting. The book was written into a 6*9inch format; the prototype is the dimensions of Whatever for Dummies, so a few things which looked pretty good in the dimensions I used for NotS got a little spaced out at 9.25*10.50, or whatever this is. It's nothing I can't go through, find, and fix; I've just had a headache for a few days.
Otherwise, it's not bad. Writing a new book into the format used here should work out to be pretty good. Which is the next step here.
I've got a fairly rough idea for the next book already. The roughest part was getting it to make sense, since it's almost supernatural. But I think I've got it figured out now, at least for myself. I don't mind writing a book which doesn't appear to work with the more common laws of the universe, as long as I personally get how it could. Whether I waste fifty pages explaining how and why it would be possible is something I haven't decided yet. So far, I just have a basic situation, a general idea what the last chapter will look like, and a working title.
I've also got a hunch that the thing could turn out to be fairly long. Technically, any story worth writing could be anywhere from twenty pages to two thousand; with something like this, I'll be surprised if I can mash it down under four hundred pages. Hopefully, I can keep it under six hundred.
Great. I'm not sure my headache's actually gone yet. I guess this is enough for now.
More later....
--Gremlin