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blogjournaldiary writer's blog journal diary weblog writer's web log |
by Hugh Cook |
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Section 155 Entry 0001. Date: 2005 July 21 Thursday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) So where am I at? In terms of my health, I'm in a recovery period following chemotherapy and radiation therapy, with a vitrectomy for the right eye still to come, maybe in September. In terms of my writing, I'm proofreading my way slowly through the final draft of my new novel, BAMBOO HORSES, picking up bloopers such as "some of the cards" for "some of the cars". I'm also busy finishing off a medical memoir, CANCER PATIENT, for which I currently have about 85,000 words. Some small parts still remain to be written from scratch, but most of the rest (and there's not all that much to do) just needs to be transcribed from hand-written journal entries. After I've got BAMBOO HORSES out of the way, I really want to concentrate on pulling together my ARC OF LIGHT poetry collection, and on writing TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, which is currently the working title (and may end up being the actual title) of the first book of the projected twelve-volume TALES OF OOLONG MORBLOCK series. Section 155 Entry 0002. Date: 2005 July 22 Friday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) A letter from Japan supplies me with baby Cornucopia's latest stats. At fifteen months of age her height is 77.1 centimeters, her weight 9.24 kilograms, the circumference of her head is 46.6 centimeters and her chest is 46.4 centimeters. If I read this correctly, she's allegedly bigger round the head than round the chest, which seems a little improbable. Still, that's what the letter says. My wife writes:-
We are doing our best under circumstances which are not entirely the easiest, going forward day by day toward the promise of the future. Section 155 Entry 0003. Date: 2005 July 24 Sunday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Today I finished proofreading my way through the final draft of BAMBOO HORSES. My next step was to convert the plain text draft to the Word document that I will ultimately (after reading through the text yet one more time) upload to lulu.com. I took a template I'd previously downloaded from lulu.com, a Word document called lulu_word_6x9.doc, which is a template for a paperback book six inches by nine inches. I renamed this bamboo-horses.doc. I opened it up and changed the font from Garamond 11 to Garamond 12. I checked FILE -> PAGE SETUP which showed me I already have a half inch margin all the way around and a gutter of 0.25 inches. I continued by choosing PAPER which showed me, that, yes, I already have a "Custom size" of width six inches and height nine inches. Satisfied with that, I pasted the plain text file into the Word document. Working with the Word document, I then selected the whole text and found "justify" on the toolbar and clicked on that to justify the text. My next job is going to be to go through and center everything that needs to be centered, such as chapter headings. I will also increase font sizes where appropriate, for example for the initial "Bamboo Horses" title. Then I'll read through the Word document just in case there are still more proofreading bloopers lurking inside it. INSERT -> BREAK -> PAGE BREAK allows me to insert a page break where I want one. (I don't use Word very often so I don't automatically know how to do simple things such as inserting a page break.) I replace the double hyphen marks ("--") that I've been using for a dash with an em dash. (INSERT -> SYMBOL then find the em dash ... damn! For some reason I can't get "search and replace" to work on this. I hate Word! I'll just have to go through the manuscript and change each and every occurrence of "--" to an em dash. Double damn! Now even my ordinary "find" function isn't working under Word ... Fixed the problem by closing down Word and restarting it, and managed to replace 186 occurences of double hyphens with em dashes. But, given that I'm running Microsoft's software on Microsoft's operating system, I really feel I shouldn't have this problem. Font sizes. I ended up choosing 18 for the title and then 14 for other things I wanted to enlarge, such as the heading "Disclaimer" and "Chapter One" and so forth. I decided to start each chapter on a new page and to leave two blank lines at the top of any page which was starting a new chapter. The lulu.com template has been arranged so page numbers show up at the bottom of the pages, and it seems my BAMBOO HORSES text runs to 392 pages. For some technical reason involved with printing, page numbers should divide evenly by four. According to my calculator, 392/4 is 98, an even division. But I'm going to go for the "ISBN Plus" package which means I have to leave a page blank for the ISBN number to be printed on it. And that page is ... what? Maybe one of the web pages I've copied from lulu.com will tell me ... "When you purchase the ISBN Plus expanded distribution service, it might take six or more weeks for your book to hit an online bookshelf." "Purchase the ISBN Plus service and a copy of your book. A copy of your book will automatically be added to your cart along with the ISBN Plus service. This copy will be printed within 5 business days and shipped to you for your approval". "You will receive an email walking you through the next steps for pricing and approving your book. While you wait for your first copy, you can set the retail price." "You receive the first copy, make sure everything is correct and either: • Approve the book on Lulu. • Deny the book and reassign the ISBN." Okay, here we are:- "The last page of your book must be completely blank. Our expanded distribution printer will print your ISBN barcode, a quality control identifier number and "Printed in the USA" on this blank page. If your last page is not blank, enough blank pages will be added to the end of your book to make its page count divisible by 4." I think I'll add three blank pages to the front, which I hope will mean one blank leaf which you turn over and see the text starting on page four on the right. And I'll add one blank page to the end. Okay ... fooled around with the Word document and ended up with 396 pages, which divides by four to make 99. If 392 of these pages have text on them then 142,297 words should work out at about 363 words a page, which sounds about right to me. Note for future reference: I now have the book title, "Bamboo Horses", on page three of the Word document. Later ... Belatedly realized that by adding page breaks at the end of chapters I'm going to increase the total number of pages, so I'll have to take a look at the "number of pages" issue once again, when I've finished going through the manuscript. Final page count ended up being 420, which divides neatly by four, making 105 sets of four. Section 155 Entry 0004. Date: 2005 July 25 Monday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) The members of a certain minority have a tendency to occasionally explode. On exploding, they become glorsts, glorsts being similar to ghosts. The key difference is that glorsts can act on the material world with about ten percent of their living strength, and often do so with malevolent inent. This is the premise I've settled on for TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, the first book in the projected TALES OF OOLONG MORBLOCK series. The minority involved is the astrally enabled, who constitute two percent of the city state of Oolong Morblock, a city which presents a facade of neon lights to the modern world, but which has complex gothic foundations from which crocodile impulses can sometimes escape, with devastating effects. The astrally enabled are referred to as "astrals", or, as hostility toward them increases, as "glorsts". My first big fantasy series, the ten books of the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS series, was driven by the Cold War. I get intermittent questions about whether I'm going to continue the series, and my answer tends to be no. Chiefly because the Cold War is over so the underlying dynamo is gone. My new idea, the idea of glorsts and glorsting ("glorsting" being the explosive self-destruction of a human being which results in the formation of a glorst) seems to me to be just a couple of steps sideways from history as we are living it now, complex and volatile in a satisfactory way. I've already begun work on plotting and writing TO WAKE AND FIND THE DREAMER. Meantime, I continue with the drudgery of proofreading my way through the final text of BAMBOO HORSES, with a little help from Microsoft's Word, but not much. At a certain point, Word threw in the towel, claiming that there were too many spelling and grammar errors for these to be displayed any more. Which strikes me as gutless nonsense. I have over a gigabyte of memory on the machine I'm working on. How can I possibly have run out of memory? At the same time, I'm pressing ahead with CANCER PATIENT, and am coming close to having a full text for this medical memoir. Meantime, on the medical front, I'm taking daily exercise to try to build up my slightly depleted body - the big muscles in my thighs being the portion of my anatomy which has taken the biggest hit - and I've made an appointment with a dentist. I need to get my tooth fixed, the tooth I broke back in ... when was it? February, I think, just before starting chemotherapy. My dentist put in a temporary filling, promising it would last for some months, and that he would fix it promptly if it didn't last. And he told me to come back when "other issues" had been dealt with. Well, having been through chemotherapy and radiation therapy, I've more or less got the "other issues" behind me, at least, I think, for the purposes of having dental work. My repaired tooth - I think I'm going to end up having a cap to repair it - is going to be, for me, a significant step back on the road to normality. |
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Hugh Cook's published novels include PLAGUE SUMMER, THE SHIFT and the ten volumes of the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS series. For background information on the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS series see:- CHRONICLES This site include a map of the milieu of the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS (the world of THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER, aka WIZARD WAR, and so on.) For the map,see: MILIEU MAP Hugh Cook has some comments about the writing of the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS series in his diary at: WIZARD WAR |
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