It’s All About Formatting

30 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by lebedusya1 in Writing as Collaborators

Tags

Adventure, Book, Collaborating, Fiction, Formatting, Publishing, Research, Self Publishing, Writing

Dear Readers,

In our previous posting, we spoke about delaying—but not belaying—publishing our final manuscript of Across the Doubtful Sea. We have certainly put a considerable amount of work into our writing, as it was, in part, a learning experience: what works in a collaboration, the topic of 18^th century south seas exploration, and, for one of us, it was her first novel. As we are nearing the final publication of Across, we’ve reached yet another important step in the process: formatting.

Our project is an entirely self-published book, meaning that we are not only the authors, editors, and publicists, but designers and formatters of our own book, as well. If we had decided to publish our book traditionally, the formatting would have been done for us by a professional working for the publishing company. Of course, we could have paid a professional anyway, as there are several publishing services for authors who’d rather “keep their sanity”—and we’re glad that they’re there—but, in our case, we were up for the challenge, and prefer completing the entire book ourselves.

An advantage of being authors in this decade is the availability of information through the internet—we are already making use of this by publishing online, and reaching you, our readers, and sharing our research and behind-the-scenes work through our blog, Facebook page, and twitter. As this has been a learning experience for us, the first thing we thought to look to for formatting was how-to book formatting guides. CreateSpace.com, the self-publishing site of Amazon that we will be using to publish Across the Doubtful Sea, has an easy to understand formatting guide for those using their site.

This guide has been incredibly helpful in building a structure for our book—in fact, as important as the research, creating the story, and writing the words. Why? The design and formatting of our book are, in a sense, the equivalent of giving a body to a soul. A book such as ours should have a proper format—a proper physical appearance to match what we believe to be a beautiful story. We read a number of articles on book formatting—some seemed to challenge first-time formatters, with titles such as “The Problem with Amateur Book Interiors,” but all gave solid advice as to how to avoid the common less-than-professional look of an independently published book.

As with any exterior, we need to have a cover that will both attract attention and provide a small taste of the book. As often as it is said that a book should not be judged by its cover, a good cover makes all the difference in the book’s appearance. For Across the Doubtful Sea, we’ve chosen a somewhat dramatic painting by William Hodges, A View of Cape Stephens in Cook’s Straits New Zealand with Waterspout, 1776, with kind permission of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. The picturesque aesthetics of the painting already set a tone for what the story itself may look and feel like. In a way, the cover for the book is the face, with readable expressions that interpret what is on the inside.

Before we began, we took a quick look at formatting styles of books in the 18^th century—the time period in which our story takes place—out of curiosity and to see what inspiration could be drawn from there. This also gave us the ability to pay particular attention to how a book is put together, rather than a printed manuscript directly from Microsoft word, as we are used to seeing. There are many styles of formatting, as well—for our book, we chose to include page numbers and the title at the top of each page.

Pagination for our book was when we realized how long our book really was, as a finalized, complete novel. Page numbering was the first real step in giving the manuscript physical form, along with the 52 chapters—we foolishly presumed earlier in the process that we might have stopped at 24, then 48, and then… And, as with any book with several chapters, it involves tedious, yet rewarding, work—we’re quite close to completing the project we began during the summer—but 52 chapters can promise that it won’t be a process to be rushed through. Meticulously following advice from the formatting guide, as well as the aforementioned articles about self-publishing, we placed after each chapter, and each chapter title was placed with the desired font and size. Correct margins also had to be set, keeping in mind that the pages would be bound as a book.

At this stage—even after reading through and editing the entire manuscript—there was a need for a final check on names and their continuity—after all, we invented or adapted languages for this book. Some things, even at this stage, had either been changed, or still needed to be—which is where we learned an important rule for the future—be careful when changing names! Because of words and terms used by the characters in Across, we’ve included a glossary of terms and names at the beginning. We want to take as much care in making sure that our readers understand words in the languages as we did in creating them.

Even now, there is still some work to do—polishing up, working on final font designs, and, then, dear readers, you will have the chance to take a look for yourselves.

Thank you, as always, for reading!

Delay (not Belay)

30 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by lebedusya1 in Research, Writing as Collaborators

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Adventure, Collaborating, Exploration, Fiction, Publishing, Research, Self Publishing, Writing

Dear Readers,

We had hoped to publish Across the Doubtful Sea at the beginning of December. It didn’t happen. Why?

We had the manuscript . Its 52 chapters had been through two complete drafts and many little subdrafts, along the way, by mid-November.

If we had been willing to be part of the older book-writing world, we would now have begun the long and painful process of trying to interest a publisher (through an agent, if we could persuade one to take us on, or not, which was much more likely). Because we decided to publish the book ourselves, however, we entered a new and even more complicated universe, in which we were not only authors, but editors, sub-publishers, and publicists, as well. It has provided a wonderful “behind the scenes” education, but it has taken a good deal more time that we had ever imagined.

We were still in the editing stage when we decided to become publicists. That way, we hoped to begin to build an interested audience some months before the appearance of our first book. “So we need a blog,” we said to each other, “and Facebook. And Twitter. To start.”

WordPress provided the basic blog, for free. (Without sounding like we’re receiving a commission, we can also recommend them enthusiastically: very smart, creative people and very easy to deal with.) The basic blog, however, suggested that, if we were serious, and looked upon our work as part of a greater commercial enterprise (our 19^th-century author ancestors, like Scott and Dickens, would certainly have said that it should be and that, while art for the sake of art was nice, profits were nice, too), we would need a “domain name”. This would then allow us to list ourselves as http://www.Doubtfulsea.com. So we bought—or, rather, rented–one, for a year (renewable).

Then, there was the matter of setting up the blog. Fortunately, one of us has electronic art at her highly-talented fingertips and, after a few tries, produced the beautiful site on which you are currently reading us. (Those tries included picking and replacing an appropriate background image, as well as type face—tricky against the image–and formatting.)

After that, we had to figure just how many posts we could do, balancing them against the rest of our lives. We had read about people who began a blog as a way of talking about a project and eventually found that time for the project was gradually completely consumed by the blog, so we decided that we would do one post per week—but—every week, without fail. So far, we’ve managed to do this from the very beginning: this is post #16 and it will even appear during Christmas week. (Readers who currently struggle to maintain blogs have our permission to roll their eyes and say, “Just wait!” under their breaths, if necessary.)

Then there was Facebook, which came a little later. It was easy to set up, as it was more basic, but it came with the same hunger for posts. The point was exposure, of us and our ideas and thoughts and experiences. This meant, we decided, doing what we were already doing with our blog and so we were committed to two posts per week, one for Doubtfulsea.com and the other for Thedoubtfulseaseries@facebook.com.

So that we didn’t repeat ourselves, we decided that the blog would deal specifically with the Doubtful Sea series (including the other two planned volumes, Empire of the Isles and Beyond the Doubtful Sea) and further books in other series (we already have a complete first draft of one and half of another). We would devote our Facebook page to essays and discussions about reading and writing and creating in general—ours and other authors’.

At the same time, we added Twitter. This was—and is—much trickier. The common wisdom was that you should use it to advertise only 20% of the time and devote the rest to catchy sayings, thoughts, and images from our daily lives. So far, we feel that we haven’t used it enough for anything and, once the book is actually published, we’ve decided to do a lot more research in how to employ it more successfully.

Then we thought the manuscript was ready for the next step.

We are fervent book people, and one of us has even written a scholarly article on a 19^th-century Irish poet publishing his first book (a disaster and most copies were eventually recycled for trunk linings), but we had no idea of what we were getting ourselves into.

As modern people, we began with internet research, of course. We typed in “self-publishing”, and quickly discovered that there were multitudes of people eager to help us out there, some for a price, others for free, others for free, but with sales pitches thrown in. We quickly learned, however, that there was a longer process ahead of us than we had ever thought.

First, after surveying the field of self-publishing services, we decided that we would use Amazon, in part because of its access to Kindle, in part because of its liberal profit-sharing policy. (A hint: if you are following our path, be sure to do a little extra research, when you do your googling to pick a publisher, and type in “reviews of ________________________” to try to provide a more balanced view than the self-publishing service is willing to provide.)

Advice from various sites had convinced us that we needed to have an ISBN. Why we—or anyone—might need it would require a separate post, but, in brief, it forever identifies the book as yours, as well as providing potential sellers with a convenient stock number, among other reasons. Only one is needed per book, but, if, as in our case, we wanted to use e-book form, as well, then we needed two—and, if we wanted it available on other media, like phones, we would need more. The main supplier, Bowker, has a deal for a pack of 10, and we decided to use that.

On the actual formatting of the book, we’ll refer you to the upcoming post on our Facebook page, which talks in some detail about everything from proofreading and correcting to number of words on the page to placement of the text on the page. We will say something about the cover, however.

We were doing research on Pacific exploration when we happened upon the work of William Hodges, who was the main artist on Captain Cook’s second Pacific voyage. We quickly realized that one of Hodges’ paintings, often called “The Waterspout”, was absolutely perfect. We traced it to the National Maritime Museum in London, inquired, and found out how to rent the image (dealing with the very kind and helpful Emma Lefley, who is the Image Librarian—what a wonderful job!). It had to be formatted to become the front and back covers, of course—but see our Facebook page for that.

We said, at the beginning of this post, that we had had a “behind the scenes” education. And that it had taken more time and energy than we had ever imagined. It would be more accurate, in fact, to say that we are continuing to have that education. We had known about the back-and-forth aspect of author and publisher and its complications from the experience not only of 19^th-century authors, but also from the correspondence of Tolkien and Unwin from 1936 on, but there was so much more. A professional publisher would handle renting the cover image, the actual physical creation of the book, and the advertising, all of which is now in our hands. Sometimes, it has seemed like more work than writing that first novel, but it has, on the whole, been a wonderful experience and we’ll be talking more about it in future blogs.

Thanks, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC

Frigates

16 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by lebedusya1 in Heroes, Military History, Research

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Adventure, Exploration, French Navy, Frigate, History, Napoleonic, Research, Royal Navy, Sea, Warship, Writing

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as ever.

In this post, we want to add a bit more about the ship used by our European protagonists and antagonists, in the Doubtful Sea series, the frigate.

For a brief but convenient history of the vessel, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigate, but, in short, as you can see, a frigate is a three-masted warship.

Unlike the bigger ships, those used in the large-scale fleet actions

like HMS Victory

or its French counterparts

their armament was much lighter, ranging in number of guns from the upper twenties to the low forties. Here, for example, is a French forty-gun ship.

And a comparable English one.

These ships were designed to be fast and maneuverable, acting as scouts for fleets of the bigger ships, but also as warships on their own, in blockades and in actions against enemy ships of about their own class.

After the American Revolution, the United States Navy began with six of these frigates, including the USS Constitution.

(For a useful article on these, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_six_Frigates_of_the _United_States_Navy. On these ships and others, see Mark Lardas, American Light and Medium Frigates, 1794-1836 and American Heavy Frigates, 1794-1826, For US frigates from their inception through the War of 1812, see Henry E. Gruppe, The Frigates.)

First in fighting the Barbary pirates off the North African coast and then against the British Royal Navy in the War of 1812, these ships and their captains and crews earned the new navy a reputation for seamanship, gunnery, and their sound design and construction.

(For the US Navy in the wars against the Barbary pirates, see Gregory Fremont-Barnes, The Wars of the Barbary Pirates, Richard Zacks, The Pirate Coast, Mark Lardas, Decatur’s Bold and Daring Act, and Frederick C. Leiner, The End of Barbary Terror. A recent popular history of the US Navy in the War of 1812 on the high seas is Stephen Budiansky, Perilous Fight.)

As far as we know, there is only one of the larger ships which survives: HMS Victory, in Portsmouth harbor, on the south coast of England.

There is one original US frigate, the USS Constitution, which is located in Boston harbor. It is still in commission, being the oldest ship in the US Navy. See the website: www.history.mil/ussconstitution/index.html for further information.

In the UK, there are two frigates, HMS Trincomalee,

which may be visited at Hartlepool. See the website at: www.hms-trincomalee.co.uk.

And HMS Unicorn, its sister-ship. The Unicorn is unusual in that, unlike the Trincomalee, is has not been restored as an active warship. Instead, it has been brought back to its state when it was out of commission and stored (said to be “in ordinary” in naval language) to be used as a store ship—or even a prison ship, like these, in Portsmouth harbor.

Here’s the Unicorn—

You can find out more about it at its website: www.frigateunicorn.org

There is one more frigate, one we have mentioned briefly in an earlier post. It is not an original, but a very impressive reproduction, the French frigate L’Hermione.

For an English-language website on this very impressive ship, see: www.hermione2015.com.

We hope that you’ve enjoyed this post. Within the next week or so, we expect to have the first novel in our series, Across the Doubtful Sea published on Amazon/Kindle. If you find our posts interesting, we hope that you find our novel even more so!

As always, thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

Research

09 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by lebedusya1 in Narrative Methods, Research, Terra Australis, Writing as Collaborators

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Exploration, Fiction, French Navy, History, Napoleonic, Research, Royal Navy, Sea, South Pacific, Terra Australis, Warship, Writing

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

In this post, we want to talk a little about research. We’ve already shown you bits and pieces of what the world of Terra Australis and its peoples look like to us—and we hope to you– but we want to add a bit about some of our sources.

As we’ve said in an earlier blog, the idea of setting our Doubtful Sea series mainly in the Calm Sea (Pacific in our world) and on Terra Australis (which only exists as the forbidding Antarctica for us), was just a lark, a spur of the moment thing. We had already known a little about the French admiral and Pacific explorer, de Bougainville. Most of what we knew about him, however, came from his early career as an aide de camp to the Marquis de Montcalm, the commander of French regular troops in New France during the bulk of the French and Indian War (1756-59). (He left behind journals of that time, which have been published in English as Adventure in the Wilderness, translated by Edward P. Hamilton and published by the University of Oklahoma Press.)

And we were aware of Captain Cook, who was also involved in that war and even must have sat across the St. Lawrence River from de Bougainville at the siege of Quebec, in 1759, although neither would have been aware of the other at the time.

So what then? Lots of conversation first, based upon nothing more than our imaginations. Who would our characters be? Where would our characters go? What might happen to them?

As we talked, we began to see that, now that we had a very general idea of the beginnings of a book—and, soon, a series– we needed to know more—lots more. And here was where our plan to base our new, alternative world on the actual later 18^th century of the actual world quite easily supplied a great deal of useful knowledge. We embarked upon a period of research even as we began to write a draft of the first chapters.

Because we knew so little, our questions to ourselves could have seemed as endless as the Pacific to those first explorers, but we quickly found that they could easily be grouped into a small series of main categories:

18^th-century European Pacific exploration
the French and English navies of the time
the history of Polynesian exploration and colonization of the Pacific
Terra Australis/Antarctica
languages/cultures as models for Pacific protagonists/antagonists

And this research quickly proved helpful in two directions. First, it began to answer our questions about the 5 categories. Second, the answers would inspire us, not only to ask further questions, but to further creativity.

It was important, however, to feel a certain wariness about research. One of us, some years ago, began work on a novel, called Swallows Wintering, set during the American Revolution. Chapters were written, and things seemed to be humming along, but then there was a question and everything stopped for more research. And more research. And then everything stopped for good. Insecurity triumphed, perhaps? A lack of conviction disguised as a need for further sources and greater “authenticity”? (And here we might want to consider just how much “authenticity”—maybe “accuracy to the time” would be a better way of saying this—one needs even in an historical novel. You don’t want to have an Elizabethan using safety matches, as we once read in a mystery set in the late 16^th century, but, perhaps it’s possible to suggest a period without being slavish about it? This is, we think, worthy of a long essay on its own!)

With that previous experience in mind, perhaps it was just as well that we decided not to write an actual historical novel, although we can certainly see that there are lots of possibilities there (we might cite our ancestor-collaborators, Nordhoff/Hall, and their series on the Bounty mutiny and its consequences, for an example). By making this an alternative world, we could use whatever we liked from our world, but never feel quite so bound as one might in a work of historical fiction.

We are both very visual people (and, we suspect, so is our audience), so, as we wrote and assembled a little library of what appeared useful books, we really began by spending hours on Google images. We searched for everything from “Antarctica” to “Versailles”, from “catamaran” to “frigate”, from “Cape Horn” to “Captain Cook” and much more besides, gathering several hundred illustrations, a few of which have appeared in our previous blog entries. (And one of which will appear, thanks to the good folk of the National Maritime Museum in London, on the cover of Across the Doubtful Sea in just a week or two.)

As well, we extended our on-line research to include articles on Polynesian and Inuit history and languages and cultures, the religions of the Pacific, the writing system of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), along with material on real Pacific explorers like La Perouse and Wallis, and the bibliographies attached to those pieces gave us more ideas for further research. (We are aware, of course, of the danger of unsubstantiated or even wrong material on the internet, but, because we were—and are—engaged in work s of alternative- world fiction, rather than historical scholarship or even historical fiction, this was not an active concern.)

In our own reading, we very much enjoy learning about earlier authors and how they wrote their books. And so, in these posts, we want to provide you, our readers, with information which, before you read our first book, we hope will entice you to do so and, after you’ve read it, will help you to see something of how we wrote it.

We intend, after Across the Doubtful Sea appears, to include a complete bibliography—including a list of websites and their addresses we found useful or just too interesting not to read (and everyone who surfs the web knows the dangers of this)—in our blog, but, for now, here are a few books we found particularly stimulating/useful. As we said in an earlier post, we experienced some difficulty in our research, owing to the period in which we were working, the 1750s to about 1790. There was plenty of material for the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793-1815, but much less easily available for this earlier time. Our advantage in alternative writing, however, stood us in good stead here: we didn’t feel that we had to be accurate down to the last fact, and we could use what we learned from this slightly later time to flesh out what we could discover of the earlier time. So, for example, the Osprey books on Napoleonic naval wars—books like Terry Crowdy’s French Warship Crews 1789-1805, or Gregory Fremont-Barnes’ Nelson’s Officers and Midshipmen and Nelson’s Sailors, or Chris Henry’s Napoleonic Naval Armaments 1792-1815–proved very helpful in getting a general sense of life on board the warships of that world. We would add, from a Time/Life series, Henry Gruppe’s The Frigates, as well as books like Iain Dickie et al., Fighting Techniques of Naval Warfare 1190BC to the Present, Nicholas Blake and Richard Lawrence’s The Illustrated Companion to Nelson’s Navy, and Brian Lavery’s Nelson’s Navy.

As for Pacific exploration, an easy read is Alistair MacLean’s Captain Cook (with Peter Beaglehole’s more scholarly work for those who want to learn more). For two different views of its consequences for the native cultures and peoples , we would recommend Alan Moorehead’s The Fatal Impact: The Invasion of the South Pacific 1767-1840 and Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific. For a more general view, we would add the relevant portions of Erik Newby’s The Rand McNally World Atlas of Exploration.

This has been a long entry, and we never intend to overwhelm our readers, so we’ll end here for the present, with promise of more, both on books and on websites, in our next.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Villainous Vessels

02 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by lebedusya1 in Imaginary History, Military History, Villains

≈ 1 Comment

Dear Readers,

Welcome!

In this post, we want to add something to our former one about the Atuk, the mysterious villains who inhabit the center of Terra Australis.

The name Atuk amavi’o, in the language of their enemies, the Matan’a’e amavi’o, means “people of the cold” and, although their interior and warmer-weather dress may echo Ottoman/Persian clothes, their winter look reflects their icy outer world. Their warships also suit that world.

We had originally imagined them as looking like real galleys from the history of our world, the sort used by the Ottoman and their Venetian, Spanish, and other European enemies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

These are long, graceful vessels, powered by oars for battle and in-shore maneuvering, but by large, triangular sails—called “lateen sails”—for longer distances.

Originally, these were built like ancient classical warships, with bronze rams on their prows.

Increasingly, with the development of gunpowder, the Ottoman and their enemies turned to shipboard artillery. This was commonly mounted on the forecastle (the front) of their ships, to fight their battles.

In the world we’ve created, however, the Atuk have not made the shift to cannon. In contrast to classical warships, though, they don’t employ the old ramming attack.

In fact, although the basic structure and outline of their ships may be based upon Mediterranean galleys, we have made a significant change. Oars and sails are there, but these have been combined with something from the world of ice. Imagine ships—galleys—made from the frozen sea itself.

As for their armament, well, dear readers, that’s for you to discover in Across the Doubtful Sea, when it appears on Amazon/Kindle in early December.

Thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure romance fantasy

Monthly Archives: December 2014

It’s All About Formatting

Delay (not Belay)

Frigates

Research

Villainous Vessels