It will be up at Amazon within a couple days. When it’s live I will put a link here.
914 is part of a collection of short stories I had hoped to finish by now. Alas. My new plan is to release each (or small mini-collections) while I continue to work on the collection. This will give me time to revise the stories individually before dealing issues related to the collection.
The collection will be available both in ebook and on paper, the individual stories are electronic exclusively.
A note my workflow evolution. I composed 914 in Apple Notes, as always. But, this time I imported the copy into Pages so I could eventually export it to EPUB. Who knows how long KDP will allow EPUB? No matter, I’m taking advantage for now.
A small lesson learned was that EPUB doesn’t support headers or footers, so no pagination. This makes sense when one considers the resulting copy has to be reflowable.
Pages is not especially intuitive. I can imagine a day when it will be even more like Word. But, it’s manageable and that’s all I ask for today.
I’ve finished Part 1 of 914 and I’m pretty happy with it.
It seems our friends at Amazon’s KDP have given up on their MOBI file in favor of their new creation, KPF. For a writer, KPF is just the latest hurdle on the journey to getting what our work onto the KDP platform, but who am I to complain?
Then I thought of something. I composed 914 in my usual app, Apple Notes. Then, after reading about the demise of MOBI on March 18 I noticed that KDP will grudgingly accept an EPUB file. I recalled Apple’s Pages allowed for export to EPUB so I decided to export to Pages and then to EPUB. Part 1 of 914 is long for a short story (about 6,000 words) but simple in terms of layout. There are no sections or chapter headings and I don’t care much about widows and orphans for something that won’t appear on paper until my entire short story collection is done. So, I dumped the 914 copy into Pages, worked out pagination and a header, and now I’m down to editing. If the resulting file is really cool with the wise algos at KDP then I’m cool, too.
I had some ideas about the cover but I really don’t want to spend too much time on it. 914 is only one of a collection of short stories I decided to publish by itself. Why not? There’s no downside and it seems wise to keep up with how KDP’s machinery works as well as I can. Enter ChatGPT. Chat is all in and came up with two promising ideas in the snap of the finger. After I made a few corrections Chat said:
Great choice! I’ll modify the image to include a classic blue-and-yellow California plate with a slightly obscured number while keeping the overall aesthetic intact. I’ll get that done and share it with you shortly. I’ll start working on the modifications now. Once it’s ready, I’ll share the updated version with you.
And then, nothing. When I reached out this morning to check progress Chat said:
Good morning! I haven’t started editing the image yet, but I’ll get to work on it now. I’ll update you as soon as it’s ready!
At least he’s positive and enthusiastic. Who knew working with AI would feel exactly the same as working with a living, breathing artist?
I have been lucky enough to have the covers of my last three books created by Alba Escayo.
Alba holding her girl and a copy of JJM & the 1971 U.S. Open
No, we have never met.
No, we have never spoken on the telephone, or even by Zoom.
Yet, somehow, I feel that I know Alba. And I mean beyond her fabulous artwork. Writing, and especially writing books, is a rather lonely and isolating process. And, when you’re done writing, it always seems to come as a surprise that a book has no physical presence or look, beyond the words on the page.
I always respond to that moment with a slight twinge of panic. You see, every writer wants his work to be good and to look good. Some writers (and that includes me) want their words to both read nicely and also to look correctly , for lack of a better word, on the page. When words are kept together or held apart by a stylistically correct layout, they help to encourage the right spirit and heart from the reader. And, once a writer is aware of this fact, he simply can’t commit words to paper without caring about how they look.
But, the panic that I referred to earlier has to do with the cover. The person who said that you cannot judge a book by its cover was right and wrong at the same time. Especially for the self published writer, I think the connection between the writer and the cover artist is nothing less than critical. if the artist doesn’t know the writer, and doesn’t know the book, I just don’t see a way for the artist to create a cover that truly works with the book and its story.
The other day, I was trying to remember when I first crossed paths with Alba Escayo. It was a very long time ago. The subject of the book was golf. And, when I first heard from Alba she wrote of her fondness for her countryman, Seve Ballesteros. Reading about her passion for golf, a game that at the time I don’t believe she had even played, gave me great hope for the project. Later, when I saw her initial sketches, I knew she was perfect for that project and all the ones that will come after.
An early version of Cottonwood’s cover
Alba and I have created two books that revolve around golf. The first was John J. McDermott and the 1971 U.S. Open and the second was Cottonwood. Neither book would be as good as it is without her contribution. Alba’s covers made the book come alive before the reader even opened it. There is no way to place the value on the initial impact that a really great cover can give to a book so I won’t try.
There is also no way to place a value on Alba’s ongoing friendship or her endless patience with my sometimes peculiar visions, but I value both greatly. The depth and sensitivity of her art is fascinating. I can give her nothing more than a few words and get back beautiful images that make me want to use all of them rather than choose one over another.
The sad remnants of the Racquet Club of Palm Springs courtesy of Google Earth or something like it
Tennis thing is an unusual book. But, I told you how lucky I am when it comes to cover art. It turns out that both Alba and I took up tennis at about the same time, she and her girl on the clay courts of Spain and me on whatever SoCal hardcourt will put up with me. For Tennis thing I gave her an odd starting point, the long-abandoned Racquet Club of Palm Springs. The club first opened by in 1934 and it was owned by actors Charles Farrell and Ralph Bellamy. I’m tempted to go into a lot of boring detail about the club and its history and sad decline but I will resist since I’m just trying to show how little I can get away with giving Alba and still get fantastic artwork.
From that visual hunch Alba came up with this:
No, this is not quite the final version of the paperback’s cover but you get the idea. How did she manage to get the precise feel of my book? I will never know yet I am ecstatic with the result. It makes me want to write a better book next time just so I can work with Alba Escayo again.
I’ve been making good progress on my new book, especially considering the hodgepodge of software I’ve been using.
I wrote my first book in Microsoft Word and it was a harrowing and creativity-sapping process. Word is like a huge Swiss Army knife of a word processor. A knife with a shit-ton of tools can be impressive. You look at it wondering how many tools there are and whether you’re likely to use most (or any) of them.
Then you realize the damn thing’s heavy. Then you realize that using any of the tools except the main blade is a fiddly and frustrating experience.
In the end, you leave the knife at home more than you use it.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful that Word exists. The choices made by the folks who created it result in a benchmark product. I would never refer to Word as a bad piece of software. It’s simply a bit of software that’s unsuited to the creative flow of my writing.
A while back, I was prattling on about Ulysses and iA Writer. Later, I discovered and used Bear for a while. I deemed each of them as interesting but not quite useful enough. Each design is good at pretty much keeping out of the writer’s way.
It’s the issue of sync that settled the matter, and not in favor of iA Writer, Ulysses or even Bear.
Each of those platforms rely on iCloud for sync. That’s OK if the writer uses the same Apple ID across all devices and the iTunes Store. There’s the problem for me. Also, I think the software companies should use their own system and servers for sync rather than relying on iCloud.
I think WorkFlowy does sync right. Their ingeniously simple software is truly web-based, syncing by username, seamlessly.
I encourage those folks to develop WorkFlowy for Writers and let me know when it gets to beta. If they can build on the way WorkFlowy works and apply it to the work of long-form writing it would be a real game changer.
The software I’ve chosen to write my book in is Apple’s very own Notes. File organization is simple and straightforward. You can choose your own font and basic formatting is a snap. I will continue to use Word as the destination software (and archived backup) for the eventual manuscript. Importantly, documents created in Notes paste cleanly into Word without any weird or unexpected formatting problems. Notes also syncs both immediately and perfectly across all devices, as one would expect of one of Apple’s own creations operating in their own ecosystem. The UI is clean and uncluttered and this helps me to focus on what I’m working on.
I’m glad to be watching that hodgepodge of software vanish into my rearview mirror. I’m also glad there are software folks out there who are trying to make the challenge of writing easier and I’m really happy Apple did such a marvelous job with Notes.
I’m preparing it for submission to a handful of publishers and it turns out they don’t fancy looking at books that are already in the throes of a self-publishing campaign.
I’m quite certain that’s where my book will end up and that’s OK by me. I’m glad I wrote it. It took a lot longer than I had hoped but I learned so much about the kind of long-form writing thought that a novel requires that I now regard the span of time as something of a necessity. That’s another way of saying I’m a slow learner.
I had written a great deal over a very long period of time before I decided to write a novel. Now that I’ve done it, I want to do another and to do a better job of it. I can look back on my book and can see it clearly for its good and bad. Something about writing it broke away a kind of resistance that had set in to that kind of writing ambition. Suddenly, writing a book seemed like something I could do and do with meaningful results.
I think often of Steve Earle’s dark years in Amsterdam when he was addicted to heroin. When he had finally clawed his way back into the light, he had a creative boom of sorts, making records and writing books and plays with a speed and intensity he never showed before. He attributed the burst of work to his release from smack.
Even though I wrote for both pay and fun I avoided the idea of writing a book until I hit my 50s. Rather than being addicted to heroin I had instead succumbed to the belief that I didn’t have anything to offer; that I wasn’t that kind of writer. It turns out that I am…
So, I’m grateful that I simply had the idea to write my book. Obviously and as always, it is the idea that made everything possible.
Now I have another idea and it’s led me start writing my second next novel.
Here’s hoping it moves along faster than the first one.
Paul Cervantes 