Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

Friday Mrs. Dr. Phil has a meeting in Dearborn MI across the state, so we drove over on a one-day trip. More later on that, but I did take a four hour business lunch and meeting with fellow 2004 Clarion and 2008 WOTF class member Al Bogdan. I tried to describe to him where I was with the YA project -- and without actually reading to see if it sucks or not, Al seemed to think I was doing all the right things to get this ready for Beta reading and then submission.

I am crazy stoked.

Also have been doing more prep work so that I can print a few trade paperbacks for some readers. Originally I had a very simple cover, done in Courier New so it clearly was a Not For Sale product. But... you know we really do judge books by their covers. And while most self-published covers I've seen have been poor -- and I am not a graphic designer by trade -- I do know enough to be dangerous. For real sales, that's where the art department of a publisher comes in. But for me? Well, I had run across the stock photos of an actual Danish model, Marie Amanda Staub, who does goth/fantasy/medieval photos and frankly, other than height, she strongly resembles my main character as I see her. (And apparently I am not the only one!)

So over last weekend I did some mockups in Corel PaintShop Pro X5 -- THIS IS NOT FOR SALE PUBLICATION -- and came up with the following:


Mocked up bookcover for A Princess of the Lost Kingdom
(Book 1 Part I of The Lost Kingdom Chronicles) by Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon.

The link to the Maria Amanda's Deviant Art page is here. (The embedded link from Deviant Art wasn't displaying correctly in the Preview.)

And here's the whole opening trilogy:

Mocked up bookcovers for The Lost Kingdom Chronicles trilogy by Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon.

Word 2010 makes an acceptable PDF file, which if formatted for trade paperback use, displays quite nicely in Adobe Acrobat for the Kindle Fire. But... I suppose I might actually set up a proper e-book file to give to first readers who want that option. Was looking earlier at Sigil 0.8.7, which is free and open source, and also Jutoh 2 ebook editor, which I've heard of from elsewhere, but would cost $40-80. I'll probably try a mockup in Sigil and see how that goes.

My goal here is NOT to get into self-publishing, but only provide some booklike manuscripts to make it easier for my Beta readers to read. What I have in the PDF is clear, clean and usable -- and took almost zero time. I do not want to invest Time In Chair with persnickety page formatting. (evil-grin)

But what about writing, you ask? No problem, I've worked my way through several knotty problems. Solved a number of names issues, which makes me very happy, including place names as discussed last week. And the small handful of new story bits which I needed have now mostly been inserted and integrated.

Good golly, it's looking like a novel.

And of course I revised the opening point again. I'm sure that more than one first-reader will tell me to start 7-35 pages later. (grin)

Speaking of page 7, here's a tiny snippet from the Work In Progress, originally posted on Facebook:

There's a 7/7 meme going around. Post the next 7 lines starting from the 7th line of the 7th page of the work-in-progress... nobody tagged me, but I thought I'd play. I'm on the Kindle, so this is not from my writing file, but page 7 of the PDF version I downloaded last week (it's actually nine lines to finish the thought):

On the way up the aisle, the cute boy she‘d noticed getting aboard in Oslo glanced her way, their eyes meeting only for a moment before he turned away in embarrassment. Sorry, she wanted to apologize, out of your league. As heir to the throne of Eisbergen, her marriage would be an affair of state and Father would no doubt find some suitable minor royal somewhere in Europe for her.

But it didn‘t hurt to look.

She‘d seen him writing furiously in a small black notebook and as she passed she could see it was a series of numbers and letters. Someone else might have thought it was code. But with the open railway timetable next to him, Daniska could tell it was railway locomotive classifications, numbers, dates and times and locations of all the station stops. The boy was a trainspotter.

Perhaps they had more in common than she‘d thought.

-- Dr. Phil

Don't say that I completely keep you in the dark.

New Researches: Maslow's hierarchy of needs. (May have had to look this up before -- doesn't matter, I needed it again.) Coconut cream pie --> led to Cream pie in general (the food -- DO NOT DO A GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH ON "Creampie") -- Pie shell, milk, cream, flour, eggs -- related to the French crème patissière which is a key component of various French cakes and tarts. Custard variations. Cooked (set) custard is a weak gel, viscous and thixotropic; while it does become easier to stir the more it is manipulated, it does not, unlike many other thixotropic liquids, recover its lost viscosity over time.

In terms of actual progress, the shiny counters now stand at:

Book 1 Page Edits (Pass 2)


I've been doing the Pass 2 edits everywhere BUT at the last progress counter, so it hasn't moved.

The Lost Kingdom YA Project Version 1.12 (06-21-15 Su, 1517 pages)


Book 1 Part I (83,457 words)


Book 1 Part I (83,457 words, starts page 44) / Part II (76,908 words, starts page 320) /
Part III (74,348 words, starts page 590)


So Book 1 Part I has sailed through the 80,000 word limit. But I'm okay with that. The end, I think, is in some reasonable sight.

Onward!

Dr. Phil

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