Deborah Woehr

In 1918, polite women didn’t walk into saloons to discuss ousting political figures. They didn’t have illicit affairs with a married man, much less a preacher. Myra Kelly did both these things.

While she didn’t succeed in getting self-proclaimed mayor, Seamus O’Flannery ousted from office, she did help Theodore Sonnet win the battle over the church he was building for the town of Prosperity. A mutual sexual attraction develops between Myra and Theo, which turns into a full-blown obsession when Theo’s family arrives in town.

Myra loses her job as a teacher after a nasty miscarriage betrays her affair to the O’Flannery clan. She is a marked woman now, but she is determined to get back at Theo for his deceit and the O’Flannerys for their treachery. Neither of these men know the boundlessness of her hatred until it is too late.

God’s Last Twilight is now available in both book and ebook format from my Lulu store. A big thanks to Michael and Sheila for their feedback about this story. You guys helped me make a decision that I’ve been pondering since I finished this story two years ago. I’ll send your copies in the mail soon.

Today is the first day of school for my boys. My husband called me an hour ago to tell me that he felt like an old man when he saw kids driving themselves to school. Yep. I felt that way two summers ago when I met cousins that I had never seen and who are now 20-something. After working with 20-somethings, I’ve come to accept and appreciate my age. Age and experience has its perks, too.

Anyway, my oldest is sitting in class right now while my youngest is still getting ready for his first day of junior high. Soon it will be very quiet in this house. My plans are to:

1. Go to the store
2. Get a newspaper (still job hunting)
3. Finish a scene I had started to rework yesterday for God’s Last Twilight.
4. Have what I want for lunch
6. Finish editing GLT so I can start designing the book tomorrow.
7. Finish the rewrite of another chapter in Prosperity.

Update: I finished the scene in GLT. The job prospects in the Bay Area are very low right now, which had me researching for writing-related careers. There are so many avenues for the writer today that it’s hard to figure out what I want to do. I’d like to do a little bit of everything. Perhaps I’ll get there eventually. Right now, I think it’s best to start off doing what I know how. With that, I’m going to work on my home page this week.

Both boys enjoyed their first day of school, although the youngest was upset over having homework on his first day.

This is where I screwed up. Lulu requires your page count to be divisble by four. Not a problem, I thought. I’ll just add a couple of pages to the back and one to the front to get the right number.

I succeeded with that, but the layout wasn’t what I had expected. First off, my title page was located on the second page instead of the very first. The anthology is divided into author sections, with the first page showing a picture of the author’s blog as well as a short bio. Some of these pages were printed on an even page, while others were printed on an odd page. It was not consistent.

At first I thought I was being anal (that happens sometimes). I flipped through a couple of anthologies I own and saw that they started each section on an odd page. My mistake was relying on what the computer showed me. Had I printed the entire manuscript out and pasted the pages together, I would have seen exactly where to insert a blank page. As it turned out, I inserted 20!

For novels, this is not a big deal. You can have your chapter headings on either page. But I’d like you to print out your manuscript anyway. Get out a glue stick and tack the pages together, starting with the title and copyright pages.

Make mock covers for the front and back of your book, while you’re at it, and add them to your manuscript. Inspect each page for its position. By the time you turn the last page, you’ll know what your book’s interior will look like. Take this time to perform a final copy edit.

Checklist

1. Is your title page the first thing you see when you open the cover?
2. If your book has a Table of Contents, does the first page land on an odd page? It should.
3. Are the chapter headings all the same size and font? Do they line up in the same position for each chapter throughout the book?
4. Are your fonts consistent throughout the book? Do they clash with or compliment each other?
5. Catch any typos that you didn’t notice before?
6. Does each page contain 30 lines or less? This is Lulu’s recommendation for 6×9 paperbacks.
7. Are there any orphans and widows on any of the pages?
8. Are your graphics in the right position on the page?
9. Are your headers consistent, including page numbering?

Now that you’ve checked over everything, it’s time to talk about book covers.

Most authors don’t use graphics in their novels. If you do, then you’ll need to convert them to grayscale in order to publish your book through Lulu’s Global Distribution program. I’ve yet to see a black and white graphic that looked good in print, even at 600dpi, but that’s what they want.

What Fonts Can I Use?

With Lulu, you can use any font you’d like for your book, as long as you embed them into your PDF file before uploading. I’ll include their font list below.

* Arial
* Book Antiqua
* Bookman Old Style
* Century
* Courier
* Garamond
* Palatino
* Tahoma
* Times New Roman
* Verdana
* Symbols

For the purpose of simplicity, I chose the Palatino font for the paperback version of WBA’s anthology. That way, I didn’t have to bother with the embedding process because I wanted to speed up the printing process.

Text Formatting

Below are the steps you need to take to optimize your pages for print. Prepare to ditch all of the rules you learned in typing class.

1. Change your straight quotes into curly quotes. In Word, select “AutoCorrect” from the Tools menu, followed by the “AutoSelect” tab. Make sure the “smart quotes” option is selected. Then press Okay. Make sure your quotes are facing the right way.

2. Replace hyphens with em dashes. By default, Word replaces two dashes with a single em dash. If you need to convey a range (such as 2004-2007), use an en dash, which is a cross between a hyphen and an em dash. Do not put a space before or after these dashes.

Windows command for en dashes: Control-Minus (on the numeric keypad)
Mac command for en dashes: Option-Hyphen or Command-Minus

3. Ellipses. Add spaces between the letters and periods of all ellipses. Ex. a . . . a In Word, use the Nonbreaking Space with these commands:

Windows: Control-Shift-Space
Mac: Option-Space

4. Print Emphasis. We were all taught to underline our character’s thoughts as well as titles before we submit our manuscript to traditional publishers, who will then italicize the underlined words before they publish your book. Change every underlined word into italics.

5. Print Spaces Between Sentences. For print books, use a single space between every sentence and after colons. Use the Find/Replace feature to make this change.

6. First-Line Indents. Do not use the tab! Instead use the ruler or the paragraph format dialog box and set your indent to 1/4 or 3/8 of an inch.

7. Delete all hard returns. Using the Paragraph Format dialog box, set your spacing before and after all headlines and body text. Use 1.5 spacing between headlines and paragraphs as well as between paragraphs.

8. Set all paragraphs to justified format. Go to “Preferences” and select “Do full justification like WordPerfect 6.x for Windows.” Word should be able to squeeze and stretch the spaces between the words without making them look funky.

9. Check for Widows and Orphans. Select all of your text; check the Line and Page Breaks tab in the Paragraph Format menu; and click “Control Widows & Orphans option. Press Okay. Check each page to see if this worked. If not, you can combine paragraphs or insert a page break to eliminate the problem.

10. Use a Drop Cap to start each chapter. Select Drop Cap from the Format menu and click on the “Dropped” icon.

That was a mouthful, wasn’t it? Stay tuned because there’s more to come.

Lulu’s Policies

First, visit Lulu and read the Lulu Basics FAQ to learn about author rights, royalties, etc. Also check out their requirements for Global Distribution, which is what you’ll be using to distribute your book. Their instructions are very straightforward. However, if you have further questions, you can go to their forum, once you sign up.

The First Step in Creating Your Book (Once You’ve Written It)

In this segment, I’m going to talk briefly about editing, as many of you have talked about this subject in your own blogs in the recent past. Make sure your manuscript has been edited before you begin. Because any changes you make can affect the layout of your book.

Lulu has an excellent Editing Checklist. I recommend that you print it out first. Then read through everything in the Book Formatting FAQ. They base their instructions on the assumption that you use MS Word to write your books, so most of you should have no problems with PDF conversion. They give instructions on how to convert Open Office documents.

Next, download their book templates. Since you are writing a novel, download the 6×9 template for your manuscript and your book cover. At this point, I created a folder for these files on my computer to separate this project from my original manuscript.

Open the manuscript template and paste the contents of your original manuscript into the template. Save your new file as a .doc or .rtf and place it into your project folder.

Now, you are ready to format your text. I’ll cover that in tomorrow’s segment. In the meantime, if you have any questions (or suggestions, if you’ve published through Lulu), feel free to post a comment or send me an email.

When the power supply on my 4 year-old Mac decided to take a crap this weekend, I took advantage and wrote Chapter Nine of this novel. When I got my computer up and running again on Tuesday, I looked over what I’d written and promptly trashed it. The scene didn’t fit in with what I thought I had on the computer. But it felt so good to return to my writing again!

Prosperity is about an embattled psychic who finds herself stranded in a town full of ghosts. While you won’t find the novel written on this blog, I do provide excerpts,progress meters, and (in the future) links to other ghost-related sites/blogs.

I was sitting at my kitchen table when I found myself invisioning a woman standing on an island in the middle of Hell, searching for the soul of her dead husband. Black Roses was still a chapter or two away from being finished, but I had to jot this idea down in my notebook. I finished Black Roses, and then set to work on my new novel.

I had the heroine for my second novel, which I titled Hell’s Corner. I named her Amanda Thorne and her husband, Joel. The husband had been amped on crank and booze when he decided to drive, which resulted in him killing someone. An argument between Joel and her father over a new Camaro was the turning point where he decided to kill himself. The story begins with her trying to have a good time on a date two years later.

I drew up my antagonist, Malcolm Spechter, who was supposed to brainwash the citizens of Hell’s Corner into his church of black magic. Even though I’d bought books on the dark arts, I have no experience with practicing them. Therefore, I didn’t feel like I could write convincingly about the subject.

Then there were the problems with the characters. This time, there were too many of them. By the time Amanda arrived, I think I already had four different points of view. My plot was fragmenting.

Worse, my story bored the hell out of the people I let read it, one of them a literary agent I’d had an appointment with at a writer’s conference. He said that it “lacked grit.” I took my manuscript home, read it, and started from scratch.

I’ll give you the shorthand version. The character of Malcolm Spechter was removed, and the other characters put in the background where they belonged. I nixed the black magic theme as well as the title. My focused turned to Amanda.