Tara Maya's Tales

Io9 has a great piece on 15 science fiction and fantasy books the publishers rejected. Damn. I just knew spies told publishers to reject me. Which leads a pundit at PC World to suggest four things the publishing industry should change: 1. Stop belittling or dismissing self-publishing. By thinking of self-published books in the same way you think of proposals, you can learn to view the self-publishing market for what it is: a farm program that is the key to your salvation. 2. Think about a book in the same way that a cloud-based service thinks about its product -- always a work in progress and never finished. Most nonfiction and even some fiction should be rereleased frequently with improvements, corrections and updates. 3. Stop thinking that a book is a bound stack of paper. A book has no physical form. It's a collection of ideas. It's intellectual property. You don't sell tree pulp. You sell stories and information, and you should sell it in any form and in any medium t...

The baby was sick last night (=no sleep) and it's a gray, rainy day. Result: depression. There's an online service to track your mood I belong to called Moodscope . My only problem is that I only feel motivated to use it when, as now, my mood suddenly dips low. When I'm happy, I don't bother. As a result, the picture of my "average" mood is skewed. I awoke to a message I had to redo my cover. In fact, I ended up having to redo the interior as well. I don't think it looks as good. But that may be just because I'm depressed. I've learned not to trust my own self-evaluations when I'm depressed. I can't even stand to look at my blog right now. It's so ugly I just want to delete the whole thing. (I won't.) I'm also experiencing "buyer's remorse" or, in this case, "self publisher's remorse" where I wish I had never put my book out there because I will only humiliate myself in public, blah yada blah. I won...

So here was my To Do List: - Final edit on Word File/apply editor's corrections -Write author's bio -Learn InDesign -Format file in InDesign -Figure out page # of final document to calculate cover art template -Find or ReDo cover art -Upload interior PDF and cover art PDF to CreateSpace And here's what I have left to do: - Order Proof copy - Correct Proof copy - Upload corrections - Go live with print book Yeah, that whole "Learn InDesign" took a wee bit longer than expected. Go figure. I took a crash course by signing up for a month's worth ($25) of training videos at Lynda.com. I watched hours worth of videos and followed along on my own files. Great site, it saved my butt. Also, I never did find my file for the cover art for the print book (which, unlike the ebook cover, included the spine and back copy). I had to redo it. Fortunately, I did still have the front/ebook cover. Now I'm waiting to hear back from Amazon to hear if my PDFs were formatted corr...

I think I did it... I actually managed to format my book in InDesign! Yeah! More on that tomorrow. Plus, maybe another Intrepid Writer comic. I now have a clean PDF file for all of you who want a free copy to review. I'm looking forward to taking a break from formatting and ISBNs and all that good stuff and having time to catch up on all the blogs I haven't been able to read in the last week.

There are times I want to write something truly DEEP. And then there's the rest of the time. I just want to write something fun. Yeah, I know the battle between the four-armed rakshasa and the two-headed dragon isn't profound soul-wrenching stuff, but it would make for great eye-candy in the film version. Special effects! Explosions! Hot babes in chain-mail bikinis and bare-chested hunks waving swords! Add a kickass soundtrack. Sometimes I like to write books that would be best watched drunk. Is that so wrong?

I wanted to do some xtranormal vids, like Zoe Who? but I haven't come up with anything yet. While doodling storyboard ideas, I came up with this comic. I have a couple of episodes, but I won't post them all at once. (I don't know why it's so small. Help?)