A New Writing Project

I've been a semi-professional photographer for over 30 years.  Though I've published many photos during my career and written many articles illustrated with my shots, I've never ventured to write about the craft of photography.  Until now, that is.

What I'm about now is a book about landscape photography.  It will be a short work, perhaps 30-40 pages, with brief tips for making better landscape photos.  The intended audience is the amateur photographer with minimal experience who wants to achieve more professional-looking photos.  I'll illustrate the book with photos that underscore the tips.

My plan at the moment is to market the book myself, at least initially.  I'll first release it in a pdf version.  Later, after I've learned to use InDesign, I'll publish an ePub version that can be read on iPads and Nooks.

The principal points I'm making are that great and inspiring photos must be made, not merely taken, and that they depend more on the photographer's vision than on his or her equipment.  I'll give tips on how to go about making photos that inspire.  That, in fact, is what my tentative title states--Making Landscapes That Inspire.

I've already drafted the text and I'm now in the process of selecting and editing the photos I'll use to underscore my points.  I will soon set up a web site that I'll use for marketing the book.  At the same time, I'm practicing with InDesign to see how I can build great-looking layouts so the book will look its best.

I've not yet decided whether to include dynamic content in the ePub version of the book.  Frankly, I'm not sure what I would want that to look like.  I think dynamic content could be a very effective way of teaching photography, but given what I still need to learn about InDesign, I think it is something I'll take up after I've released the static versions.

If anybody has any suggestions for how to approach dynamic content, or has good examples to recommend, I'm all ears.  Please leave a comment.

Facing the Truth of Climate Change

The Hero of Gucci Gulch is a murder mystery set in the world of lobbyists, corporate representatives and members of Congress and their staffs.  It takes place on Capitol Hill--sometimes known as Gucci Gulch--for the prized brand of Italian leather often worn by the well-paid corporate lobbyists who patrol its halls. 

But the novel is much more than the story of murder, muggings and mayhem, though it has plenty of these.  It is set against the backdrop of the global challenge of climate change and the need for meaningful U.S. policy to address out-of-control carbon emissions into the environment.  It revolves around the struggles of environmental lobbyists to persuade a reluctant Congress to cap and trade legislation as a way to curb those emissions and bring the U.S. into better alignment with environmental actions being taken in much of the rest of the world.

The protagonist, Henry Wright, is an environmental lobbyist for a public interest organization.  He coordinates his work with Alicia Cummings, a pretty young intern.  But the impetuous intern gets too close to the nefarious secrets of the anti-environmental opposition.  When Henry finds her body in a lonely Washington garden, the investigation begins.

While the police slowly follow up false leads, Henry tries to assuage his grief by working members of Congress to support environmental legislation.  At the same time, he is drawn deeper and deeper into the murder investigation until at last his own life is put in danger.

Throughout, the story follows Henry's attempts to get a cap and trade bill passed over the objections of industry's heaviest polluters.  In the end, the book not only traces the chase to find the guilty but also the difficult path of facing up to global environmental challenges.

The book is available from Amazon.com and the CreateSpace eStore.  A Kindle edition is also available.

The Story Line of Gucci Gulch

The Hero of Gucci Gulch features Henry Wright, a milk-loathing dairy promoter turned environmentalist, who is naïve, unsure of himself, sometimes quirky.  Now he is caught in the political fight of his life—to get a climate change bill passed by a Congress riddled with the scheming pals of polluters.  But this test of his political skills is no match for his fight to escape his own seemingly inevitable death. The Hero of Gucci Gulch is set in the halls of Congress, where anti-environmental skullduggery mixes with mayhem to create exciting twists and turns sure to entice any fan of mysteries.  

Henry befriends Alicia Cummings, a pretty young intern whose passion for environmental justice matches his own. But youthful impetuosity leads her to ignore Henry’s warnings and she digs too deeply into the nefarious plans of the powerful opposition.  When Henry finds her strangled body in a lonely Washington garden, he becomes the number one murder suspect.  He tries to plow his anguish into his legislative campaign, but the unsolved murder weighs heavily on him and he can’t leave it alone.  He stumbles onto clues that point to his anti-environmental enemies, and when the police are slow to act he takes matters into his own hands.  His increasingly daring amateur investigation gets him crosswise with the police but he persists until violence and still more death force him to live on the run. Henry faces both personal threats and political challenges as he claws his way toward the surprising conclusion. 

The first novel in a series featuring the lobbyist amateur sleuth is rich with Washington and political insider details and explorations of environmental policy and the need for climate change legislation . It will appeal to mystery fans, environmentalists and lovers of political intrigue alike.  But climate change-deniers should probably not apply!

The Hero of Gucci Gulch is available at Amazon.com and in the CreateSpace eStore.  A Kindle edition is in the works.  I'll announce it here when it becomes available.

And Now Available on Amazon.com!

Today I discovered that The Hero of Gucci Gulch, my murder mystery novel set on Capitol Hill, is available for sale on Amazon.com.  They had promised it would become available in five to seven days; they made it in one!   It is even available for free shipping by Prime, if you subscribe to that service, so you can have a copy by Monday if you order today.

As I said in my last post, the book will also be available in a Kindle version, but converting the file will take me a while so I can't yet predict when that edition will be ready.

At Last I'm Published

My murder mystery, The Hero of Gucci Gulch, passed all of CreateSpace's hoops as well as my own critical review (for the umpteenth time) and I approved it for release yesterday.  So now it's published!

Copies can be purchased immediately at the CreateSpace eStore.  It takes CreateSpace another week to release it on the Amazon.com web site, where it will be more readily available to the buying public.  A Kindle edition is also in the works, but that involves a fair bit of reworking of the text to make it readable in the scalable Kindle format.  However, because Kindle reaches a different audience--and a large one at that--I will make the necessary changes and get it posted there as soon as possible.

You can read the synopsis and my bio statement at the CreateSpace site.

On Ice

Today I'm in a holding pattern.  I've submitted The Hero of Gucci Gulch, my murder mystery novel, to CreateSpace for review and it passed all their tests.  Then I ordered a review copy, paying extra to have it delivered quickly.  It is due to come today.

But will it come?  Yesterday we caught the tail end of a major snowstorm that afflicted much of the east coast.  We did not get the predicted 10" of snow--at least, not so I can tell with it blowing around in the high winds.  But we did get maybe 5".  Why is this important?  Because it will disrupt package deliveries. 

The book is coming via UPS.  I live atop a fairly steep hill and have an unplowed, gravel driveway.  UPS will not come up my driveway when it has snowed any amount and certainly not through the drifts that have accumulated in the driveway.  Instead, they will fling my packages at the foot of my mailbox.  That is, if they come at all.

And if my book does arrive today, as expected, then the issue is whether it will pass muster.  The small  photo of the cover I viewed on-line suggested that the book title may be shifted somewhat to the left of the page.  If so, I'll want to repair the cover and send the book back through the review and reprinting process, something I would be very unhappy to do because of the delays it will entail.

But until the book arrives, I don't really know what I'm faced with.  I want to release it for publication so I can start marketing it and--I hope--generating royalties.  But I also want it to look right.  So, until the physical copy arrives, I'm literally on ice.

How I Write

Writers have all manner of ways to turn out words.  Many, in the current era, employ the keyboards on their laptops or desktop computers.  A few dictate directly in Dragon Naturally Speaking and then edit their dictation.  Probably even fewer--like historian David McCulloch--resort to the time-honored practice of  banging the keys of a standard typewriter.  I myself used an upright Royal, as well as an Underwood, for years, churning out hundreds of pages of text that became articles, monographs, books and a Ph.D. dissertation.

But I do none of that now.  I am, I must confess, a lover of fountain pens.  There is something about the intimate relationship of ink, paper and thought that seems only achievable when hand writing with a good pen.  And so, when I write anything of substance--and this includes my novels--my invariable practice is to first set down my words in curive script.  Lengthy documents--again, my novels are a case in point--I then dictate into Dragon Naturally Speaking, which converts them into computer-editable text.  Dragon has gotten to the point where it is proably 99 percent accurate, so this is a quick and easy way to make the ink to digital conversion.  From there, I print out the text and begin the process of seemingly endless edits until it is polished to my satisfaction.

Why do I write this way?  Writing by hand introduces white space into my thoughts and allows them to develop and mellow while they are in process.  Often, I will find my characters and plot evolving from one sentence to the next, something that might less readily occur if I were typing at rapid speed (which I am well capable of doing).  Frankly, I relish the time to allow my thoughts to ripen, something that the more relaxed pace of hand writing permits, even encourages.  And, I enjoy the tactile sensation of the ink flowing from the pen's nib onto quality paper.  It is one of life's genuine pleasures; why should I deny it to myself?

What works best for you may be different.  There is, in the end, no right or wrong way to write, just a variety of ways that work for each writer.  After all, it's the quality of the writing--the strength, clarity and sensitivity of expression--that really matter.  How you get there doesn't.

Publishing Through CreateSpace

Amazon.com's self-publishing arm, called CreateSpace, turns out to be a suprisingly easy and affordable way to publish a book.  At least, that's been my experience so far.  CreateSpace gives you two options: do your own text and cover layout or hire their experts to do it for you.  If you are able to carefully format your text in Microsoft Word, you can do it yourself.  That's the option I chose, which is the free option.  Amazon then makes its money from sales of your book on-line.

The same is true for your book's cover.  You can choose one of their standard cover templates and add your title information; you can pay their experts to design a cover for you; or you can develop your own in a photo editing program such as Photoshop using the layout template CreateSpace provides.  Since I am somewhat Photoshop-adept, I chose the latter option.

The hardest part of the process, frankly, is getting your text formatted.  I chose a 6X9" book format, which is the one recommended by CreateSpace for best distribution and sales.   To accommodate it, I changed the page size of my document in Word.  This necessitated reviewing all of the page breaks and eliminating the resulting widows and orphans.  This was eased, I later discovered, by turning on the widows and orphans feature in Word, something that would have saved me considerable time--not to mention several read-throughs--had I done it earlier.  Numbering the pages also turned out to be something of a challenge; numbers kept popping up on blank pages and in other places where they were unwanted.  I had to insert special breaks in the text, sometimes seemingly at random, until all the page numbers ended up where intended.

Once I had my text formatted the way CreateSpace needs to get it, I converted it to a pdf file--the preferred method for uploading to CreateSpace, though apparently they will also take Word files.  I filled out the background information needed--title, author, choice of ISBN option and where I want my royalties deposited--then uploaded my text for review.  In a matter of minutes, the text is returned in a form you can scan on-line for errors.  The review, in fact, will tell you whether or not your text passed CreateSpace's tests.  Mine did, with one minor error.

While your text is being reviewed and approved, it's on to the cover.  This is uploaded as a pdf file also.  It must meet CreateSpace's specifications for layout and spine thickness (which depends on the number of words and the choice of paper color).  This too is reviewed by CreateSpace.

That's where The Hero of Gucci Gulch stands now--waiting for final review.  Once I get approval--a matter of a day or less, in my brief experience--then I'll order a single print copy for final inspection of the book as produced.  If all is then OK, I'll release it for publication. 

This process has proven to be very quick.  I've spent three days getting the text laid out in final form and through the review process at CreateSpace twice.  Now I'm down to waiting to order and receive the first hard copy.  I'll let you know how that goes.

Publishing My Novel

Over the last several years, I've been polishing a mystery novel--The Hero of Gucci Gulch--that I started now several years back.  Or, in reality, it has mostly been lying about untouched because I did not know how to go about getting it published.  But recently, my friend and cousin Jim Crawford, under the pen name of Mokuri, published a short volume of poems by Li Po via Amazon's CreateSpace. This gave me the idea that I would be far better off using this free service to get my book out to the world than fretting over the difficulty and costs of publishing it by other means.

CreateSpace is a print-on-demand service that sells books when purchased via Amazon.com and by offers them to other booksellers and libraries in the U.S. and Europe.  Books can also be made available in Kindle editions.  Although you can pay CreateSpace to set up your book for you, it is quite possible to submit a final edited text and cover design of your own making.  The cost of doing it yourself is nothing.

Books can be printed in any size, include color illustrations and artwork if desired, and run to any length--short or long.

Royalties can be paid out automatically to your bank account or sent via check.  A user dashboard allows you to check in and watch your royalties as they accumulate.

There are many other epublishing services out there, but most that I've found charge fees for even basic services--sometimes astonishly high fees!  While my book has not yet been published, it is in the queue for review and may be available in a few days.

I'll announce it here when it appears.