Hello, Everyone,

I’m still alive and doing pretty well. As of August 24th, I have been smoke-free for one month. This is a major milestone for me, as I was not able to stay away from the cigarettes for longer than a week. I’ve been writing like crazy, although I haven’t touched Shades of Evil since I returned home from my father’s funeral. That and the e-cigarettes are helping. I’ll talk more about my writing in another post, hopefully before the month leaves us. Hope you all are doing well and enjoying your summer.

Deb

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As I mentioned in my last post, I have been researching the e-cigarette as an alternative to traditional smoking. Blu Cigs won over the scores of other brands on the market for several reasons. Price was the first major factor. The glowing reviews from scores of heavy smokers that have said that they haven’t touched a traditional cigarette since they started “vaping” with the Blu Cigs was the second.

There’s one thing I realized when I experimented with the XHale 02 (see link below), and it makes me feel very stupid now. If you decide to switch from traditional cigarettes to e-cigarettes, you must stop smoking cigarettes immediately. Otherwise, you risk overdosing on nicotine and giving yourself a heart attack (like the patch). I read posts from several people in the e-cigarette forums that they alternated between the two.

I smoked my last cigarette on Saturday, July 24, 2010 at approximately 10am. My Blu Cigs package arrived shortly after that. Once I figured out how to put the e-cigarette together and charged everything, I took my first puff. I’ve since had a few cravings for traditional cigarettes, but all I have to do is puff on the Blu Cig and I’m okay. I can sit in front of my husband while he’s puffing away on his cigarette, and I’m okay. It’s wonderful to be able to “smoke” at my computer again.

This morning, I took a drag off the Blu Cig in front of my sons and blew the water vapor in their direction. The vapor dissipated within a foot away from me. When I asked them if they could smell anything from the e-cig, they said they couldn’t. So, I feel totally comfortable “smoking” inside the house.

I had my husband try the tobacco-flavored Blu Cig. He wasn’t sure what to make of it. He’s very pleased that I’ve made the switch. I told him that I want to throw out all of the ashtrays on August 31st. That gives him over a month to get himself mentally prepared.

My Experience with the XHale 02 E-Cigarette
My Experience with Blue Cigs, Day 1

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My father was diagnosed with emphysema and COPD in January of 2006, when he went to see the doctor over a bout with pneumonia. He had tried to quit smoking a few times while I was growing up, but always went back to it. He was finally able to quit when the doctor told him that he was going to die.

I’ll never forget the sight of him when I went down to Austin to see my parents. He looked like a walking, smiling skeleton when he picked me up from the airport. He was always a skinny guy, but I had never seen him look this bad. My gut instinct told me that he had maybe two to five years before he would succumb.

The sight of him in that airport continues to haunt me, as does the coughing fits that I heard at night while my children and I were staying at my parents’ house. We were never particularly close, but we got along better as adults. He tried to encourage me to quit, telling me how he filled a water bottle full of cigarettes and set them on the counter as a deterrent. That, and the doctor’s prognosis worked for him.

It didn’t work for me. Over the next couple of years, I would try the Chantix pill in 2008 and the cold turkey method in April of 2009. Neither worked. The longest I’ve been able to stop is a week.

I called my parents on Christmas Day. The first thing my father said to me was, “Get off those goddamned cigarettes, Deb. Please. I love you very much.” He went on to say that he thought I had emphysema, due to my smoker’s cough. That conversation haunts me more now than it ever did.

At any rate, his condition continued to worsen to the point where he could barely walk across the kitchen for a glass of water without getting winded. My mother had to help him do the most basic things that he had done all of his life. The last time I spoke with him was on his birthday this past January. I could hear the effort it took to breathe, much less talk.

My mother’s birthday and Father’s Day fall during the same week. I called her to wish her a happy birthday and to ask how Dad was doing. She told me that he was in the hospital so the doctors could adjust his medication. We were both under the impression that he would be home by the weekend. When I called on Father’s Day and no one was home, I got a bad feeling. I left a message for him, which he never got to hear.

My mother called me that night and told me that the doctor had asked him about the DNR option. Then she said that he was moved to a hospice center. She told me that he had six months left and that hospice was preparing him to go home to die. He held on for a week before he passed away on June 25, 2010 at 1:30am.

My brother and I got the news while we were standing at the gate, getting ready to board the plane. I was glad that he died before I got there because I did not want to see him in that condition. The last time I saw my father was in June of 2008. He had put on weight and was looking better. That was the way I wanted to remember my father.

It was strange walking out into the Austin airport and not seeing him standing there. Instead, my mother, my sister and my aunt were there. It was even weirder walking into my parents’ house and getting confronted by the silence. My father was a dominant force and always had to be in the middle of everything, whether we wanted him to be or not. All of us were in shock because we couldn’t believe how fast he went. But we were also relieved, especially for my mother.

Ever since my grandparents got sick and died, my parents had always talked about the quality of life. They felt that if they were not leading their normal quality of life, then it was time to go. I have the same attitude.

He’s been gone for almost a month now, and I find myself feeling bittersweet about the whole thing. I keep hearing that conversation at Christmas. I look at my two boys and think: I don’t want to put them through what my mother went through. It’s time to quit. It’s time my husband quit, too. I’m currently researching the e-cigarette and its success rate with heavy smokers.

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After months of tinkering with the Thesis framework, I decided that I wasn’t happy with it. Not that Thesis is a poor framework. Far from it. The problem is, I just haven’t mastered the fine art of coding and decided that I don’t really want to. I’d rather write actual words and create eye-catching designs rather than fiddle with HTML, CSS and PHP. With that thought in mind, I began looking for an alternative to Thesis.

I’ve known about Headway for as long as I’ve known about Thesis. I no longer remember why I chose Thesis over Headway, a “drag and drop” framework that has garnered some good reviews. Maybe it was because I was impressed by how large the Thesis community was, as well as the sheer number of glowing reviews. On Thursday I found myself checking out the popular WordPress theme frameworks once again because I not only wanted to improve the look and feel of my blogs, but I also wanted to give my husband’s website a more professional appearance. Up until Thursday, I had been using a modified version of a free theme for his site, which isn’t always a good thing.

I found a great article from Aaron Brazell, where he reviews some of the top WordPress theme frameworks. While he didn’t consider Frugal to be one of the top frameworks, I followed the link to the site to check it out for myself. Based on the size of their community, I’d say that this company is relatively new.

The first thing I did was check the showcase of themes from other customers and was delighted to find that Men with Pens uses Frugal with awesome results. After reading more testimonials and watching the tutorials, I decided to give this framework a try for my husband’s website. I figured that if it didn’t work, I could always ask for my money back.

Because you have 600+ customizations available to you, the interface is daunting at first. Once you figure out where everything is, designing your site becomes less time consuming. What I really like about Frugal is that you can design through the interface or you can go into the backend and change the code to suit your needs.

The result turned out much better than I expected and with minor frustrations, most of which I was able to solve either by watching the tutorials or experimenting with the settings. My husband’s website looks professional now. I was so thrilled with what I was able to accomplish with his site that I decided to work on mine. I still have to tweak the footer a bit, but I consider the overall design project for this blog done . . . at long last.

Update: Well, everything was going fine until I decided to install a plugin that broke my theme. Until I can figure out how to fix that, I’ve reverted back to the Thesis theme.

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This novel is nowhere near complete yet, but I’m happy to say that I surpassed the 40K milestone last Sunday. I still need to work on my descriptions, and I still need to flesh out the antagonist some more. I’m making progress, albeit slowly. Due to some other projects, I haven’t worked on this story at all this week. Sundays tend to be my best day to write. So, I’ll aim to reach 50K tomorrow.

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While the cover is beautiful, it doesn’t depict what this book is really about . . . a mother trying to keep her family safe from the H5N1 influenza pandemic. I found this book sitting on the shelf at my local B&N, immediately mistook it for a mainstream fiction novel and picked it up anyway because I sometimes read that genre. The synopsis hooked me, since I love stories about pandemics and how people cope with them.

The Things That Keep Us Here had me riveted from the very first page. Not only did I want to find out if Ann and her family survive the pandemic, but I wanted to know if the government was able to come up with a vaccine or a cure before civilization got wiped out. The most powerful moment in the book (at least for me) came during the height of the pandemic. Ann and her neighborhood were living without power and in constant fear that they would come down with the virus. While Carla Buckley conveyed Ann’s fear through her unrelenting obsession with cleanliness and isolation, I didn’t quite feel the sense of Ann’s terror until her best friend came to her door one night, very sick and wanting Ann to take care of her baby son, who may be carrying the same virus as his mother.

What would you do in a situation like that, with your spouse and children looking on and expecting you to show some compassion and kindness? Would you let that woman and her child through your front door, or leave them standing outside in the snow to fend for themselves?

Although this book didn’t have nearly the raw emotional power of The Stand, it was good in its own right. I enjoyed reading from two POV’s, Ann’s and her estranged husband Peter’s. Buckley succeeded in making this story as realistic as possible, both from a scientific point of view as well as the human point of view. Recommended.

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Alan Rinzler posted a great article about character development, using a technique from James Scott Bell’s The Art of War for Writers, called voice journaling. His article inspired me to practice with the characters I’m writing about.

I figured that I would start off with the easiest character first, since I already know a lot about her.

My name is Amanda Colbain, and I have an unusual life. People have told me that I’m striking with my blond hair, dark brown eyes and a naturally perpetual grin. Some of them have learned to become afraid of me because I know who they are without them having to tell me. Their secrets and intentions flow into my mind like oily slime. To them, I’m a dangerous woman. Perhaps I am, although I gain no sense of power from their fear. I call it my survival mechanism.

Others latch on to me because of what they feel that I can give them: solace or power. The former involves missing and/or dead friends or relatives. The latter involves questions about cheating spouses or fortunes. It’s the latter that I resent because they know the answer and are too afraid to deal with the reality of their situation. I’m not a fortune teller and don’t like being used.

Because of the latter issue, I try to keep a lid on my clairvoyant ability and always have. As I grew up, my friends would always joke to each other and call me The Clapper because I was able to find their lost keys or shoes. It was little things, while I was growing up. Then, after my first husband tried to stab me to death, it turned into something more.

Next, I sketched Randy Lorenz, Amanda’s adversary.

My name is Randy Lorenz, and I have no real place in this universe. None of the kids at school seemed to notice me, not that I made any real effort to get to know any of them. They would have made me their bitch, like mom and dad did at home. I don’t count unless I’m doing somebody’s bidding, whether it’s taking out the garbage or hiding bodies.

The only body I really wanted to bury was Amanda Christine’s. The stupid bitch has no reason to exist, except to be a constant reminder of why I don’t matter to my dad. She is the star of the family, the one who is supposed to be important and do great things. That’s what Dad always said. He has nothing nice to say to me. To him I’m a shit for brains who will die in prison.

I hate her and her self-importance. Her husband obviously hated her, too, because he tried to kill her. I know because I was there. Dad instructed me to stop it but I didn’t. I stood in the background and watched the guy raise the knife up and down. She never screamed. When it was over and he left, I took my time walking up to the grave where she had been standing. I didn’t have to touch her to know that she was dead.

I shouldn’t have called 9-1-1. What I should have done is left the cemetery and let Dad find her that night or the next morning. If I had done that, she would have stayed dead. Of course, he might have killed me and for some reason unknown to me, I wanted to live. She disappeared four years after her old man was found dead at a bar. I figured she was gone for good, but I figured wrong.

The bitch decided to come collect the fortune that should have been mine. Dad had awarded it all to her and her fucking retarded brother. Because she was the anointed one. God, I hate her.

As I reached the middle of the second draft of SOE, I realized that Randy wasn’t the true villain. He was a spineless wimp, who tried to act tough by intimidating Amanda and her new family. His actions set off a chain of events that became not only his undoing but others as well.

I had so much fun with the journaling process that I decided to get the book to see what other tips Bell has to offer in his book.

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Converting my blog into a book is something that I’ve wanted to do for at least three years. But I couldn’t find a converter that worked properly, so I set the idea aside to work on my other projects and forgot about it until I discovered FastPencil. I decided to give it a try.

The first step involved connecting to my blog by entering my username and password. You can also use your RSS feed, if you’re not comfortable giving out your personal information. I went with the former option and waited for a solid 10 minutes while it imported all of my posts.

The Good Part

After that process finished, the screen showed a listing of every blog post that I had made. I’m able to drag posts in whatever order I decide to put them in, which is great because I’d like to categorize the posts for easier reading.

I’m able to export the file onto my computer in .txt format for editing and customized layout in InDesign. Or, I can edit them online with the word processing tool if I want to perform basic changes.

The PDF conversion took about 15 to 20 minutes because I had over 1,000 pages, which included a nicely formatted Table of Contents as well as chapter bookmarks.

The Bad Part

The software imported my posts just fine, but not the reader comments! If I want to include those, I’ll have to perform a manual copy and paste for all of my posts. That’s a big time waster.

Also, some of the formatting got stripped. That wasn’t a big deal with short posts. With long, heavily formatted posts, it’s a disaster because I have to indicate where the paragraphs breaks are and figure out how I’m going to place the screenshots or images in their original places.

I have a lot of images on this blog, but not all of them came through with the import. The ones that did come were attached to the post chapter. I attempted the drag-and-drop method and hit two obstacles: the image plopping down where it wanted to go and becoming blurry when I tried to resize it. This problem reminded me too much of my struggles with Word.

After clicking on the image, I discovered that I could change the float position and drag the graphic position between the title and the content sections for a few of the posts. I found this feature very limiting. Worse, it didn’t always work.

Conclusion

This feature isn’t terrible, but there is plenty of room for improvement, especially where images are concerned.

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FastPencil is another self-publishing service company that plans to rival Lulu with its simplicity. For instance, you don’t have to wade through pages and pages of material to figure out how to self-publish your book or ebook. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing yet. I’ll know once I finish the final draft of Shades of Evil and start their process.

Four Big Reasons Why I Signed Up at FastPencil

1. Ebook Conversion and Distribution: Writers can publish their books in ePub or PDF format with or without DRM. Kindle formatting is available, once you buy the distribution package. You can also download their app for the iPhone. As of this date, Lulu does not offer Kindle formatting, which is very stupid on their part.

2. Convert Your Blog into a Book: You can import your blog directly by entering your user information or use the RSS feed. I’ve wanted to do this for several years but couldn’t find a program to work correctly. There are some glitches, which I will discuss in another post.

3. Social Network Interface: This feature allows writers to invite their colleagues and/or readers to their project via Twitter or FaceBook, whether it is to collaborate on a project or ask for feedback.

4. Their customer service is friendly and knowledgeable.

Pros

• Write your book directly on their site. Not only that, but you can collaborate with other authors on the same project. They also offer outlining, feedback, and automatic versioning tools.

• The FastPencil system formats your book for you, complete with a Table of Contents and copyright page. You can also move chapters around with the drag-and-drop interface.

• Publish your book traditionally and electronically, with or without DRM.

• Turn your blog into a book by direct import or use the RSS feed.

• Interact with other writers, editors, designers, etc.

• Ebooks cost $9.99.

• Book Publishing Interface: Drop-dead simple to use. You can write your book directly on their site and customize it so the pages go where you want them to go.

• Book designers and editors can post their services.

Cons

• Price: Multi-format distribution costs $199. Print distribution costs $149. Then there is the yearly $19.95 renewal fee for ISBN listings, which Lulu doesn’t enforce.

• Marketplace: Pitifully small at the moment, but that may change.

• Book Publishing Interface: The word processing feature is too basic. For instance, I’ll have to find the HTML code in order to make a first-line indent on my paragraphs. Images are a pain to format. The good news is that you can format your pages in Word or InDesign and upload the file as a PDF.

Conclusion

Although their service costs more, I like what FastPencil has to offer. The site isn’t bloated like Lulu, and I hope they keep it that way. I’ll be watching this company close over the next year. They still have things to iron out, but they show a lot of promise.

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