Success!

I have my first short story packaged and uploaded to http://kdp.amazon.com, ready to publish! Daniele Serra (www.multigrade.com) designed the cover art. The whole time I was complaining about the difficulty of packaging a story for Kindle, I just needed to follow the tutorial I'd bought to the very end. The tutorial is available at http://content.taleist.com and was created by Steven Lewis, a prolific and successful author/publisher of Kindle books. It is a peculiar habit of mine to think, "This task is instinctive. I can wing it." This usually leads to frustration; you would think I'd learn. The tutorial is very detailed and thorough, with downloadable exercises and demo videos. I used the html editing tool Steve uses for PC; a 30-day trial is available at http://www.e-texteditor.com/. It's better than the one I was using, because it opens the web preview in a pane next to your html pane and any changes you make to the html immediately show up in the web preview pane. The tutorial takes you from preparing your Word document for formatting, through packaging your e-book using Amazon's free mobi-creator software, to viewing it in your Kindle. Let me tell you, the moment I saw my story in my Kindle I did a happy dance in my computer chair! I even have the cover art in my Kindle! The one thing I want to do before publishing is find out how to put my short story in the Kindle Singles marketplace, so that shoppers looking for Singles can find it when browsing. I have two more short stories ready to format and publish after this. So I'm on my way!

Writing, Cover art, and Graphs

Wrote last night. Just a little but it was good. Very good. Love the quick dialogue between the brothers, Gilbert and Julian.

I learned last night that Alfred Hitchcock made a graph for each movie that showed the ups and downs he put the audience through. The script was the embodiment of the graph. I could do that with my novels. It would look sort of like a roller coaster. It would identify lags so I could fix them.

I told Dani his last design was perfect. (see Dani's portfolio at http://www.multigrade.it/). At first I thought the figure in the drawing needed to be greyed out a little because it fought for attention with the white-lettered title and my name. But when I toned the figure down in GIMP, I saw it made the whole design less dramatic. So I told him, keep it as it is. This 3rd fulfills our contract. He's expensive but worth it.

Tamara came over and I sketched out the cover idea for The Entrepreneur. A 1950s fridge and lots of shadow and I want it to look sketched, not photographic. Tamara is a versatile artist. I've seen her draw wildlife and I've seen her draw people with varying degrees of cartoonish license. She created a cast of characters, a redneck family that she writes into hilarious situations of their own making. She also writes an agony column in the guise of the family's matriarch, Meemaw Skaggs. You can see them here: http://www.theskaggs.com/index.html.