Wow. It was back on 12 September 2015 -- 56 days ago -- that I posted my last big writing update (DW) (LJ) on the YA series. So much for weekly reports.

It's a week into November, which means a number of people I know are getting into NaNoWriMo -- National Novel Writing in a Month -- which sets a 50,000 word "novel" goal. That's low, but it does inspire some writers, even pros, to put in the Sit In Chair time and churn out some kinds of words. As I say every year, I don't participate in NaNoWriMo because November is a tough academic month, even though last year I actually managed 53,035 words (DW) in the month of November. It wasn't NaNoWriMo, because I don't do NaNoWriMo -- I was just trying to create my YA Lost Kingdom series.

After being off from Christmas to Labor Day, it's been a little rough this semester. Three weeks of a lingering cold also sapped time and energy. Writing has slowed, but that's pretty reasonable. I'm working on editing Book 1 and finishing Book 2 here and there. A typical writing day is 500-1000 words, but that's not every day. Still... forward progress is progress!

Today's little detour involved a simple set of observations in the beginning of A Princess of a Lost Kingdom. Walking along a dirt road near sunset on Thursday 15 September 2016, just above the Arctic Circle, I had to actually calculate two things.

First, I needed to figure out when the sun would drop behind the mountains in the west. The mountains of Eisbergen aren't very tall -- 600 to 900 feet -- though as is typical for Norway, they are quite steep. If you're standing in Summer Home at the roots of the mountains, they look plenty big. But what's the angle for a 900 foot mountain seven miles away? It's arctan (y/x), of course, but damn... the calculator next to me is a business calculator. No trig functions. And the HP-48G in the drawer I haven't used in years? It came on, sort of, but needs new batteries. So I used the Windows 7 Calculator in Scientific mode:


There's a very nice website I've been using at timeanddate.com which has calculators for sunrise, sunset, twilight and moonrise, moonset for places all around the world and years into the future. Obviously, Summer Home or Nunuuvit aren't in their database -- it's a secret kingdom, after all -- so I chose Bodø, Norway, which is a bit north of the kingdom. Click on an individual day and you can slide the moon or sun along and find its position and elevation in the sky:

When does the sun disappear behind the mountains along the walk from Old Fields Halt?
15 September 2016 for Bodø – 6pm 8° , 6:50pm 3°, 7pm 1-2° . Sunset 7:32pm 279°W. (All times in CEST -- Central European Summer Time.)

Second, I originally wrote that the farm road headed "due west". But due to the coastline trends along Norway, I tilted my map of Eisbergen, so that "due left" isn't "due west". And then the farm road itself, isn't horizontal on the map:


So I pulled a compass rosette off of Wikipedia and superimposed the North reference from my map, along with a line that follows the farm road. Yeah, the sun is NOT going to be straight in your eyes at sunset. (edit-edit-edit...)


Version 1.16, the latest published Map of Eisbergen, is here.

All very cool. And I haven't even commented on the Syrian refugees spreading across Europe in this post, but I've incorporated that, too.

New Researches: The Armenian Genocide. Armenians -- The largest Armenian populations today exist in Russia, the United States, France, Georgia, Iran, Lebanon, and Syria. With the exceptions of Iran and the former Soviet states, the present-day Armenian diaspora was formed mainly as a result of the Armenian Genocide. The Armenian Apostolic Church is the world's oldest national church. Liturgically speaking, the Church has much in common both with the Latin Rite in its externals, especially as it was at the time of separation, as well as with the Eastern Orthodox Churches. Mo i Rana, Norway to Stockholm, Sweden, 1000 km via the E4. Hotel Kungsträdgården - The King´s Garden Hotel, Stockholm. Brasserie Makalös (Peerless) is a French brasserie located in the Hotel Royal Garden in the heart of Stockholm. "We are a cashless restaurant." The Ministry for Foreign Affairs (Utrikesdepartementet). A soul cake is a small round cake which is traditionally made for All Hallows' Eve, All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day to commemorate the dead in the Christian tradition. A precursor to Trick-or-Treat, children and adults would go "souling" and sing for cakes. In 1963, the American folk group Peter, Paul and Mary recorded this as "A' Soalin", including all the verses as well as parts of "Hey, Ho, Nobody Home" and "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" (which are traditionally associated with Christmas).

The Shiny Counters for the first two books stand at:
Book 1 (103,663 words)


Book 2 (83,015 words)


A Princess of a Lost Kingdom is still top heavy, but amazingly I am still under 105,000 words, so there is still hope. (grin) I am in the Edit Pass 6 complete read through, en route to producing the Book 1 Beta 2 reader books, as well as Beta 1 Service Pack 1, which incorporates the main chapter changes from Beta 1, so Beta 1 readers don't have to wade through a whole book if they don't want to. Need to watch out for version fatigue. (you're-welcome)

The Loneliness of a Lost Kingdom is in Edit Pass 2, with two chapters added recently. As soon as I have those finished or roughed in sufficiently, I'll start reading Book 2 all the way through for names, continuity, story flow -- then tackle the niggling issues of overused words, etc. Book 2 Beta 1 is coming!

Onward!

Dr. Phil

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As a few reviews/comments start trickling in on the Beta 1 book AND I am getting ready for school on Tuesday, I am flitting about working on this and that which needs working on.

Besides continuing to start on Query letters (a very painful process), doing some tweaks of Book 1 and starting up the Book 2 Edit Pass 2 phase, I am also looking at maps. Need to make town maps for Sommerhus and Nunuuvit. But it occurred to me that here we have a Lost Kingdom that doesn't appear on any maps, perhaps I had better MAKE a map which shows where the damned thing is.

I searched through my IMAGES directory, because I remember finding a nice map of Scandinavia -- Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. This one is particularly nice because a lot of maps DON'T bother to show the Arctic Circle. When you have a secret kingdom located just north of the Arctic Circle, this is particularly useful. Also, all the action in Book 1 runs from the north of Norway to Copenhagen -- basically the whole left side of the map.

And lo and behold, when I checked out the source, it is possible to use it as a stock image -- and modify it (I think they're looking at some of the tourist pages using 502.gif, not necessarily a novel) -- as long as you give it credit. Should be possible to license the map as well for publication, when I have a publisher who wants to worry about that.

So, without further ado, I give you:

The Locator map for the Kingdom of Eisbergen (est. 460 A.D.)

Base Map: Copyright World Sites Atlas (sitesatlas.com).

Full size files: Color or Grayscale for cheaper printing.

Version 1.15, the latest Map of Eisbergen, is here. It will soon be updated as well.

Dr. Phil

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And they are, too.

Today the mail truck drove up and dropped off a flat box. Turned out it was from Lulu.com -- my first four Beta 1 reader copies of A Princess of a Lost Kingdom.


All shrink wrapped and padded for your protection. (Click on photo for larger.)
©2015 Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon (All Rights Reserved)

I'd have ripped the wrapping off, except I wanted a picture. Very pleased with the results. The gutters came out right, as did all the pages. Cover looks good. All that work I did setting up the prototype mockups has paid off.


Revealed! Four books. (Click on photo for larger.)
©2015 Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon (All Rights Reserved)

The first copy goes to Mrs. Dr. Phil. Can I write on it? Sure.

Oh, and one of the things I need to know is where you throw the book across the room in disgust. Please fold over the page first, because bookmarks tend to fall out of thrown books -- and I need the page number. (grin)

Even better, in case my head gets too swelled at seeing books I put together in the flesh, I got my first comment email from a Beta 1 reader. About halfway through. Some confusion about details, which points out where I need to better explain the history. To avoid a big info dump, I may have been too coy.

And Chapter 13, midway, which I'd been waffling about and finally just rewrote the other day. May still be problematic. Good to know.

Not to worry, I can fix this.

Progress!

Dr. Phil

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Ugh. Egad. eBooks.

I must really like some of you a lot. Because I did this all for my Beta readers -- just as I am not self-publishing the hardcopies, I am not selling the eBooks either. But I'm cheap and some people have access to eReaders. Plus there's always the merry hunt of the chase of a challenge. I mean I was going to play with all this someday anyway -- I just had the time here in August 2015.

If you don't want geek adventure details, just scroll down to the pretty picture further down and start there. (practical-grin)

Early Monday morning, I posted that I had achieved generating the proper files and order four copies of the Beta 1 reading copy of Book 1 from Lulu(DW) (LJ). I've done some work with eReaders before, mostly for readings at cons. RTF files downloaded onto my Sony eReaders. More recently PDF files onto my Kindle Fire HD. Some earlier playing with files on an HP Jornada 548 PDA.

Since I'd just set up the files for Lulu and Lulu also does eBooks, I thought I'd check there. Surely they have a Convert Print Files To eBook option. Nope. There was, however, an eBook Creator Guide -- a free EPUB format download. Great. "Buy" it for $0.00 and download it to ZEPPELIN... and I can't open it. Nothing on the machine can eat an EPUB.

(Okay, I can sort of see it Lulu's way -- if you're going to make eBooks, you probably have a way to read them. But still...)

I know I've read EPUB eBooks on WINTER and SUMMER, but those are both Windows XP Pro machines and they have the full version of Adobe Acrobat Professional installed -- I think EPUBs were read by Acrobat. Alas, the Acrobat Reader DC on ZEPPELIN under Windows 7 Home Premium can't and it looks like maybe the EPUB functionality of Acrobat has been spawned into Adobe InDesign, maybe?

So, next thing is to look at reviews on CNET and PC Mag for free Windows 7 eBook readers. I finally settled on Calibre (64-bit). (An Aside: Really guys, both CNET and PC Mag have their download pages littered with big green DOWNLOAD buttons -- most of them are for installing other Windows utilities crapware. This is how you get infected machines. And frankly, given that people come to CNET and PC Mag for good info, this doesn't reflect well on them.) Download the 68.2MB installer and end up with some 196MB of application. Gee, I hope it isn't just an eReader -- that seems excessive.

Good news. Calibre is perfectly happy to read Lulu's eBook Creator Guide in EPUB format. Alas, as I expected, Lulu is doing due diligence in making sure you're creating valid eBooks for fun and profit. Like their Word style templates for print, it's overkill and not what I want to do. Again, I'm not self-publishing here. Still, there was a lot of useful information -- including the admission that:

Do I Have to Use Styles?
We know many of you are groaning right now at the thought of using the Styles menu to format every paragraph in your book. We hear you, and have provided tips for quickly applying styles in subsequent chapters. The good news is, you only need to use a few styles and most are available out-of-the-box in popular word processing programs. The most important thing to remember is that every chapter or section needs to use a Heading style, so we can ensure it shows up in the EPUB TOC.

The Table of Contents thing is understandable -- all the rest of the Style shit has to do with making sure your eBook dots all the T's and crosses all the I's to be commercially published. Not an issue here.

For laughs and giggles, I fed my PDF into Calibre -- and it barfed all over the screen when I looked at the default MOBI version. Not unexpected, since the PDF represents page images, so depending on window width, individual lines don't wrap.

Second attempt. Feed it the .DOC file. Despite Calibre saying it takes .DOC, my Word 97/2003 DOC file wasn't a readable format. Okay... on to creating an RTF file, which it will also take. And I might as well address a few other issues.

For Lulu, eBook default fonts are Times New Roman, Arial and Garamond. My PDF version has embedded fonts, since it is in Book Antiqua, Courier New, Modern No. 20 and Copperplate Gothic Bold. Time for Ctrl-H Search-and-Destroy:

change Modern No. 20 to Times New Roman Bold
change Courier New to Arial
change Book Antiqua 12 to Garamond 14
change Copperplate Gothic Gold to Garamond Bold
delete indents (5 spaces)
change Garamond 14 to Paragraph | 1st Line Indent 0.3"
remove Gutter
delete old manual Table of Contents
remember to rename Title on Summary Sheet ***

Note the Book Antiqua 12 to Garamond 14 font change. I've always found Garamond to be a small font, and so on the screen, where I normally write in 12 points -- Garamond 14 looks better. And in fact, using the same 6x9 paper size, the 336 page printing version of the book ended up as 337 pages in the eBook version -- so I'd say I've got the size question right. (grin)

I also changed my Chapter Title lines: Starting from the end of the book, I used Shift-F11 to go backwards through the AutoNum fields from 25 to 1. "25." was highlighted, so I type a hard "25.", click on the whole line and apply Heading 3, then do the next. Make a new Table of Contents using the Header 3 info. Boom... That was WAY too easy. It made a TOC in half a second. Okay, that's ONE use I have for Styles in Word. One. Only.

New attempt and Calibre did in fact make a MOBI eBook, which Calibre could read. Next try to make an EPUB. This could be read by both Calibre and Kindle for PC. Now we're getting somewhere. But I really couldn't get them to run on the Kindle Fire HD -- which was the whole point of the exercise. (double-trouble-grin)

So I went to Der Google and asked it what is the file format for a Kindle reader. Turns out, it's currently AWZ3, though MOBI also works. And Calibre makes an AWZ3 file, which not only can be read by Kindle for PC, but also gains a Kindle icon. But...

Here's where Big Brother and closed ecologies comes into play. You cannot download an AWZ3 file to a Kindle. Amazon.com acts as a gatekeeper for downloading books. So it's their way (or sideloading). Some more Googling reveals that you CAN Send-email-to-Kindle a MOBI file. Each Kindle has an email address-- which you can find under Account | Settings | Managing Your Kindle at Amazon.com -- and you email the file as an attachment. Then Whispernet takes over and downloads it to your Kindle.

Damn. It worked. There is my Cover sitting in the Carousel on my Kindle Fire HD. Each Kindle has its own email address, but once something is in Amazon's cloud, you can Whispernet it to another Kindle -- so my 2nd Kindle Fire HD got the file, too.

Now, the Kindle doesn't consider it a Book -- it's a Document -- so the only place it shows up on the Kindle is on the Carousel. But, it does all the usual things about finding your last place and synchronizing between readers.

All in all, a pretty respectable day's work. It's not perfect. The Table of Contents worked perfectly in the .DOC and .RTF files, but is screwed up on the eBooks. This is not a priority for me. Maybe the Bug Fix Committee here at Princess Central will get to it Real Soon Now. (yeah-right-grin)


Now I have PDF/Lulu Trade Paperback, EPUB, MOBI, and AZW3 versions.

Negating, as always, that my several days of time don't count in this experiment (grin), the printed books from Lulu cost me money. The PDF (L) is exactly the same as the printed copy (LL), including page numbers and I think the map is more readable, so it is useful to me and I recommend it if possible. The AZW3 can be downloaded and run in the Kindle for PC program. The MOBI can be Send-to-Kindle and show up in the Carousel on my Kindle Fire HD -- though it is not a "book" but a "document" -- but it does my have book cover mockup. Yay.

Presumably owners of other devices, such as Nook and Kobo, could tell me what format they want and figure out how to get it onto their machine. Sigh. Standardization -- not for computer users, alas.

The files:

08/10/15  02:01 2,486,772 PLK-Reading-115-1-1c13L-pdf.pdf
08/10/15  02:05 2,132,527 PLK-Reading-115-1-1c13LL-pdf.pdf
08/11/15  01:57 4,947,471 PLK-Reading-115-1-1c13E.rtf
08/11/15  02:02   986,967 PLK-Reading-115-1-1c13E - Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon.mobi
08/11/15  02:03   475,660 PLK-Reading-115-1-1c13E - Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon.epub
08/11/15  03:11   851,762 PLK-Reading-115-1-1c13E - Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon.azw3

Voila! Like the process for creating the Lulu book, once one had enumerated a Procedure, it will all go smoother The Next Time. We hope. Maybe. (sly-grin)

Dr. Phil

*** NOTE that the Book Title comes from the Summary Info Title and NOT from the filename or the title line of the book.

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Book 1 Pass 4 Page 366 -- completed ‎08/‎06/‎2015 14:53:49

It's never really done, is it? I mean, I've read and re-read and re-re-read this a lot of times. I've gotten rid of the ambiguities, made sure everything has a name that needs to. I've got the first of several maps made and made sure things happen in the right directions and distances, now that I have a map. I've set a number of Chechov Brand Traps™ which are designed to go off in Books 2-9.

And by Grabthar's Hammer I have a story.

Is it perfect? Pfft! What a stupid question. Of course not. But it's good enough to read, I think. Oh, there's a chapter which might be a little hinky. I thought about pulling it, but then did some counting and realized that it filled a category under the Rule Of Threes. Not only that, but a couple of things I thought I had flogged too much -- some of that shows up in later books. And so it turns out those things also fall under the Rule of Threes for Book 1.

Oh, and while editing Version 1.15, I made the decision to ditch my odd numbering schema. A Princess of a Lost Kingdom is now Book 1. Not Book 1 Part I. Not Book 1 Part A. Just Book 1. The next volume is Book 2. The next is Book 3. I still have the first trilogy, Books 1-3, all in one file. For now it makes continuity sense, I think. But I'm sure when I am deep in the edits for Book 2, that I'll rethink and revisit this, but there you go.

I haven't decided if I feel like digging through the calendars for 2016-17 and establishing all the dates in this version. I feel it's okay. I have to stop somewhere and package this up ready to ship to Beta readers.

I also realized that I had some conflicts in the titles. So I rethought that and now 8 of the 9 books have titles which end in "of a Lost Kingdom" -- and the series goes "Book N Of The Lost Kingdom Chronicles". Lame, I'm sure. But consistency now and consistency later when someone buys the series and gets to change the titles. (optimistic-grin)

The first mention of this project was here on 15 October 2014 (DW), when I had 32,527 words written on what would become the first triology:

So back on 9 September, just over a month ago, I started in on a novel. It's a story I've worked on before, including the last year, but I changed things.

But after I'd written some 6000 words, I realized that this was the "nice" version of the story. I needed to be meaner to my characters if this was going to work. Because otherwise, it was just... schlock.

So I set the A novel aside and started the B novel on the 12th. After about 15,000 words, I decided that I was putting back in too many "nice" features. That things weren't hard enough. Also the characters needed to be edgier.

So I set the B novel aside and started the C novel on the 24th. After about... oh yeah, you can see this coming... after about 3000 words, I felt that while the characters were edgier -- and to some extent fun -- they were TOO cocky. These people needed to have suffered. And still living with it. No fairy tale endings. No Prince in shining armor or worsted wool.

So... since I hadn't gotten too far, I set the C novel aside and started the D novel on 27 September 2014. I think maybe I've got the mix right. Still haven't decided if this is YA or not. Technically it is neither SF or Fantasy -- call it alternative history -- and quite unlike anything I've ever written before, yet parallel to some of the stuff in my 29th century SF. Go figure.

I'm just about one-third of the way to my initial target length, so I might as well pull out the word meters and officially put this super-secret novel project on notice to the world.

That 'A Novel', "A Princess of Light and Letters", was started on 9 September 2014 -- 331 days ago.

The 'D Novel', "A Princess of a Lost Kingdom", was started on 27 September 2014 -- 313 days ago. It now stands at 96,821 words.

I have written, so far, 437,749 words in the current nine-book series -- mostly in the first two trilogies. The A-B-C Novels totaled some 24,000 words, but they are not all unique across versions including the current one. Still, I am comfortable in saying I have written over 440,000 words in 331 days. It sounds like a tremendous amount -- and it is -- but divide raw numbers by raw days, and it is only 1329 words a day. At an average 250 words/page in Standard Manuscript Format, that works out to about 5 pages a day.

I mention this not to brag, but to shout out encouragement to young writers who figure they can't write a novel or work on anything "that long". Remember, much of the work was written before Christmas, when I was still commuting 3 hours a day and teaching two classes.

The shiny counters stand at:

The First Trilogy Page Edits (Pass 4)


A Princess Of A Lost Kingdom Page Edits (Pass 4)


The Lost Kingdom YA Project Version 1.15 (08-06-15 Th, 1601 pages)


Book 1 Part I (96,821 words)


Yes, I am over even the super-stretch goal of 95,000 words, rather than the usual YA range of 60,000-80,000 words -- but amazingly I am only 1821 words over and did not break the 100,000 word sonic barrier.

Go me.

Dr. Phil

PS--Twice I offered the great opportunity for someone to read the almost-ready version. Got no takers. So I __STILL__ don't know if what works in my mind works for ANYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD. Writer's insecurities and panic -- we all do it. Thanks for helping me. (/sarcasm) (evil-grin)

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I could read a map practically before I could read.

At age 3, it was around 1961, I became the official family navigator when, on a regular family trip from Medina NY to Aliquippa and Cheswick PA, my father got lost. It wasn't really his fault. In those days, I-79 from Eire to Pittsburgh was still under construction, so we kept on having to get off the interstate and onto US-19 and then back on. We had similar issues with our annual ventures to the Thousand Islands on I-81 and US-11. Yes, the federal highway system we're letting fall apart today was still being built. Yes, I am that old. (grin)

Anyway, so we had an inkling that we were on the wrong road. The road got narrower and narrower, dustier -- and there was no traffic. It had been raining heavily and we were running late. The rain finally stopped and just a few minutes before midnight, so did the road. On a bluff overlooking the sweeping vista of I-79 heading south... My father swore and my mother was trying to read the map, which of course was out of date with the construction, when this little voice peeped up out of the back seat.

I told my father where we'd missed the sign in a very confusing set of barriers and then gave a series of directions and turns. My father looked at my mother and figured at that hour there was nothing to lose. Three minutes later, at midnight, we are on the ramp accelerating south on that section of I-79.

No one ever disbelieved me again when it came to directions.

Oh, I did have a navigation error -- but the mistake wasn't mine. In my teenage years we were driving through rural New Jersey -- and yes, the Garden State does have some really lovely rural farmland -- and I'd worked out a shortcut that was going to save us a lot of time over the AAA Triptik's route. Alas, as I was looking for the exit to the US highway from the Interstate, we drove over a road where from the back seat I could clearly see the US highway marker below. Dammit. I re-routed us.

Later I found out that there WAS going to be an exit there in three years, and AAA printed their maps to last for a number of years, so they put the damned exit in. Without a "Coming in 1974" note or something. I've never trusted a AAA map since. I'm a Rand McNally man, myself.

Naturally I'm a map snob. As a little kid it irked me when a map maker didn't display highway numbers in the correct shield. And Interstate highways need to be white numbers on a blue background with a red crown. A solid black shield with white numbers... or GOLD numbers? Shudder. The horror, the horror.

As a little kid I would get ahold of a pad of paper and make my own maps. I preferred east-west highways, because so many of them took you places. I-90, the New York State Thruway. The Pennsylvania Turnpike. Etc. Also, you could take your pad and put it in landscape view -- we called it "sideways" in those days -- and then all the sheets could connect. I remember one project where the last page came up, so I put a shoreline of a mythical Great Lake and then crammed three interchanges on top of each other to maximize the amount of mayhem as I could on one page. Not unlike Detroit, now that I think about it. But I'd not been to Michigan yet and so Detroit wasn't on my radar. This was like trying to cram in an extra few words at the end of a line. My penance for having several pages of highways running along with no exits. That map used a box of colored pencils, so I could color the highway symbols correctly -- and also the road themselves as they went from regular streets, to highways, to divided highways to freeways -- and the toll roads. Hey, I grew up with Thruways and Turnpikes -- you paid to drive.

I am no artist or graphic artist. But if you hum a few bars I do know some tricks on how to fake it. Sorry, the maps to my Lost Kingdom YA series are not going to be Bristol Board with pencil layouts, lovingly inked in with .1, .3 and .5 Pigma Micron archival ink pens, then scanned. I do have the pens and pencils. I do have the paper. But... No.

Years ago, my first completed novel was a military SF story The Devil's Coffin. It required two sets of illustrations. First, a simple star diagram of the constellation itself, along with stellar class and names. Second, I needed detailed layouts for the three main decks of a Unified Star Fleet FFL lightweight Callisto frigate. I used MS Paint, the Windows 95/98SE/Me/NT4 version -- mainly in NT4, because the Windows 9x versions had a bug when you did a black & white picture whereby dragging objects tended to leave little poop trails of pixels on the screen -- which Undo would NOT get rid of.

Primitive? Sure. But with the built-in scale and the one dot/pixel .BMP bitmaps, it was possible to do some decent enough drawings -- then copy them and erase whole chunks to get the next deck's floorplans. If I ever get around to doing the rewrite on The Devil's Coffin and submitting it, you can bet that those drawings will be included. Should I sell it, the publisher can decide if they want a better artist to redo them. (evil-grin)

So... with regards to The Long Kingdom, I have a few little sketches from various incarnations of the story, but the main arrangement has survived through all four versions of story, novels A through D (DW). These maps were on my usual notepaper, which is typically a discarded printout or unused quiz, folded twice to make a little booklet. Hardly big enough to want to scan or trace or use.

But I've had the whole thing in my head since September. Which isn't very useful for the dear reader. As I tell my students, you have to show your work, and if you do all the work in your head, you must staple your head to the paper and turn it in. (It's in the syllabus. Really.)

I've also written about the pitfalls of maps. From the fantasy maps lament in The Land of Clichéa (DW) (LJ), to solving the problem of how to have secret kingdoms which are, well, secret (DW) (LJ) and, of course, xkcd's take on maps for stories (DW) (LJ).

Last week I realized I needed to have an actual map. Let's face it, I hate elaborate stories which fail to have maps. Remember, I grew up on J.R.R. Tolkien!

An Aside: The other year I read through the extant boxed set of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, aka A Game of Thrones, et al. If you buy the paperback boxed set, I will tell you that the maps you need for volume N are sometimes in volume N+1, either in the front or back. I guess it has to do with some other artist doing maps as the series was being developed. Anyway, it sure would've helped to have a bloody map of King's Landing one book earlier!

Another problem I had to fess up to and face was this: Right in the beginning of the story our main character has to walk from the train station. It's seven miles from one side of the kingdom to the other, before the mountains. Also, it is described as twenty miles south and east to get to the other village. That roughly means that you have to go a little over twelve miles south before turning east. Simple math suggests that the kingdom is rectangular, and taller than wide.

Except... in my mind I'm still thinking landscape and have wanted it wider than tall. Too bad. Too late. I'm not rewriting the book. The early sketches are just wrong.

A few days ago I realized I had another problem. In that opening walk, there is another route which goes north and then west a distance of twelve miles. We got seven and... oops. Not enough room north. The northern route needs an extra bend around it. Which is no real problem, but one had to be consistent.

The island on the other side of the mountains is smaller than it once was. Little things.

With that preface, I give you:

Map of The Lost Kingdom Version 1.14 Nr. 1 Version 2


The Kingdom of Eisbergen (Click on map for larger.)
©2015 Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon (All Rights Reserved)

Oh, there's still some issues. First of all, it has a tendency to look a little gridlike. Geesh, do you think I'm plotting the novel like Battleship? Take the road from B2 to B6...

On the other hand, it is a lot of fields and hills and farms -- a lot of them abandoned because after 1500 years the soil is wiped out and the water sucks in some places -- all hemmed in by mountains on three sides and a railway line on the other.

From a logistic point of view, I solved this linearity by decided to tilt the compass point. Take a look at the coast of Norway, I'll wait, and you'll see that this actually makes sense.

Of course this version doesn't have the key yet -- it's in another file -- and there's some details not given. And you have to click on the map to be able to read any of it. But hey, I'm not divulging my storyline yet anyhow.

I'm just crowing that I have my first usable map for my kingdom.

Yay! Go me!

Oh, and the postscript offer from my last blog post STILL is available, as no one has yet come forward. I can even offer you a map now... (satisfied grin)

Dr. Phil

PS -- So far no one has read the whole novel. And I don't want to impose version fatigue on anyone. But... If there was ONE person who would like to read the current PDF version on your e-reader this weekend, I would appreciate a very rough response to what I've got here. (evil-grin) Comment here on Dreamwidth, or LiveJournal or on Facebook. Or email if you have my Gmail address.

If anyone ever actually READS these blog posts of mine...

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With the Tour de France hitting the Alps tomorrow, we reach some of the toughest challenges and yet I am already mourning the loss of having the Tour on in a few days. Weird how we think.

I bring this up because I am beginning to feel that way about the first book of the YA trilogy. I still hope to have the first beta version by the end of the month.

How has the name change for my main character gone? Well, the last time I asked the question: How long will it take me to type the wrong name when I start writing again?

THERE HAVE BEEN __11_ DAYS
SINCE A WORKPLACE ACCIDENT

I guess the name change is going quite well, thank you very much. (grin)

While Book 1 Edit Pass 2 is really all about names of people and places, I can't help fixing other things, of course.

Out of control with the -ed endings (grin):

She sliced off half of her pickled, stabbed it and placed it on Anaulka’s plate.

And then there was the mistake where for a moment I thought I'd gotten rid of three days of file edits. The CMD DOS box command was supposed to be

xcopy . e: /d:7-14-2015

but I left it without the "." !!! Whatever Windows thought it was doing, I had continued the error across the main directory and two backups, dammit. However... it wasn't that bad, because I do save often, and actually only lost two short scene bits. Which I was able to recreate without incident.

Still, you can never be sure when a file disaster will come. Recheck the dates before you start dumping the latest files across your backups. (grin) This is real world stuff, folks.

I will suspend Book 1 Edit Pass 2 at the end of the first actual book and go on to the readability Edit Pass 3. And then we'll have something to show a few of you.

New Researches: Stonehaven/Stonehive, Scotland. The Jacobite rising of 1715 (also referred to as the Fifteen or Lord Mar's Revolt). The Scottish Crown Jewels. The Stone of Scone: An Lia Fàil. Dunsinane Hill. John Erskine, Earl of Mar. The Act of Grace and Free Pardon, 1717. The Catskills -- The old-timers in the Catskills describe our soil type as "two stones for every dirt" -- Shandaken and Phoenicia. Scandinavian migration to New York. Interestingly, the first ship of Norwegians in 1825 were bound for Orleans County. I was born in Medina NY in Orleans County, founded in 1817 and along the Erie Canal. I remember the founding date because I had to learn what the word sesquicentennial meant in 1967. (small-town-grin) The so-called 'Iron Ration' comprised an emergency ration of preserved meat, cheese, biscuit, tea, sugar and salt carried by all British soldiers in the field for use in the event of their being cut off from regular food supplies. The Iron Ration in the US Army in WW I led to the development of the A, B, C and D rations. Is overfarming one word or two? Well, it is used as one word in the New York Times... so good enough for me.

The shiny counters have crept up to:

Book 1 Page Edits (Pass 2)


Remember that in my odd accounting "Book 1" has ended up the whole first trilogy. So if you only look at the first book, ends on page 346 of the main work file, you get:

A Princess Of The Lost Kingdom Page Edits (Pass 2)


See? MUCH more progress! (moving-the-goal-posts-grin)

The Lost Kingdom YA Project Version 1.13 (07-21-15 Tu, 1583 pages)


Book 1 Part I (91,347 words)


And... I've screamed through the 90,000 word mark in the first book, so I upped the target to 95,000 words. For the moment. This damned sucker is going to be a 100,000 YA novel no matter how hard I try to make it under 80,000 words. (evil-grin)

Dr. Phil

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Crossposted on LiveJournal

It's been 20 days since my last writing update report. There have been some good reasons for that. The big one, of course, is that we took 10 days to drive down to North Carolina and back to visit my mother. Managed to do the long drive without hurting my foot -- we took three days each way instead of the two days in past years.

Then I had to write a 5000 word story for WOTF Q3. I'd come up with Yet Another Story Idea while I was in Dearborn on a day trip a couple of weeks ago. The funny thing is that the Big Driving Idea that I'd come up with? Didn't make it into Version 1.01 of the story. (grin) It happens.

And this week I had two doctor's appointments, which pretty much ruined two afternoons of writing time, but obviously quite necessary.

So while I was away, I took a break from the trilogy. And when I got back, probably half of what I wrote was stuff I had to put into Book 2 Part A/B, which are actually the first two books of the second trilogy. Have I confused you guys yet? Yes, I'm still keeping an archaic book numbering system because it cuts down on the number of files I have. (evil-grin)

Yesterday I posted a couple of tantalizing little bits of Book 1 Part I from two writing memes (DW) (LJ). Very sharp eyed readers might note that the 7-7-7 meme posted yesterday is not quite the same as the one I posted in June (DW) (LJ). The reason is simple -- different versions of the PDF version of the book on the Kindle Fire HD. (grin)

Version 1.13 -- It's Time

Well, the book edits have reached the point where I really need to reconcile what's in the main book file with the two holiday chapters I put on the blog back for Christmas (DW) (LJ) and New Year's (DW) (LJ). What that means is something that I have been avoiding doing for a long time -- my main character is getting a name change. Of course Edit Pass 2 is all about replacing all the Xxx character and place names with actual names, so it makes sense that I have to do this.

It's not quite as simple as doing a single Search-and-Destroy replacement, especially when you consider nicknames as well. What I'm actually doing is switching first and second names -- so if I just did a simple replace, they'd all end up the same name. (triple-word-score-grin) So I have to do an intermediate safe word replacement as part of the procedure. Also, somewhere there's a joke which will no longer work, so I'll have to get rid of it during a later Edit pass.

But... by filling in the people names in the kingdom, I've been making family connections and also connecting multiple incidents with the same people. Huh. Who knew that filling in the blanks actually creates more story?

New Researches: Shieldmaidens (Old Norse: skjaldmær, Danish: skjoldmø, Norwegian: skjoldmøy, Swedish: sköldmö, German: Schildmaid). Certainly they show up in some stories and epic sagas -- the historical truth is a bit murkier. Not that I care -- this is a secret history anyway!

On the verge of a new file version, the shiny counters stand at:

Book 1 Page Edits (Pass 2)


With the conversion and merger going to the new volume, I expect the Edit Pass 2 counter to actually start moving again. But I've gotten a lot of work done elsewhere, so it's not like this counter is definitive.

The Lost Kingdom YA Project Version 1.12 (07-10-15 Fr, 1517 pages)


Previously the "trilogy" counter had been bumped up to 400,000 words, so I would be over 100%. But since this is the sum from three files with 3 + 2 + 2 books, I've again bumped this up to a 7 book total of 560,000 words. The new counter looks about right.

Book 1 Part I (84,569 words)


The first book is still bumping up a little long, just shy of the revised 85,000 word total. I suspect that Edit Pass 2 of the first actual book will run about 90,000 words. Which I know is on the high side for YA. But we'll see.

Here's the first trilogy numbers:

Book 1 Part I (84,569 words, starts page 44) / Part II (77,420 words, starts page 326) /
Part III (74,348 words, starts page 600)


With pieces of five new chapters added, I also note:

Book 2 Part A (76,905 words, starts page 41) / Part B (50,650. words, starts page 317)


Now on to create new files and get back to work.

Dr. Phil

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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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Crossposted on LiveJournal

After my last writing post on Monday 25 May (DW) (LJ) about finishing Book 1 Edit Pass 1, I've taken a little break. I had been thinking of making the TOR novella deadline on 4 June, but realized that the novella I had needed some significant rewriting since the last time I'd worked on it. Just because a sucker is more than dozen years old when you first wrote it, doesn't mean that the words have necessarily matured -- only the writer. (grin) So I passed on that. Worked on some writing exercises, things which were unlikely to see the light of day -- except I have two promising bits out of it, so who knows.

Mrs. Dr. Phil had a meeting in Bay City MI last week, which I'll post about later, and I broke out some of my Christmas reading that I'd didn't read at Christmas because I was so busy writing. So I read through my boxed set of the four-book Maze Runner series YA trilogy, a review of which will be coming Real Soon Now, too. But the Maze Runner books are short and read fast -- and they have short chapters.

Shortly after starting Book 1 Edit Pass 2, I realized I really needed to address the burgeoning length problem. I mean, lots of story is a good thing, but no one is going to publish a 215,426 word YA novel. What had started as one novel, had not only gone YA, but I'd turned it into a YA trilogy -- with five or six books in it. What I've been calling Book 1 was split up quite a while ago into Part A/B, but clearing up big blocks of story which hadn't been written bloated those over the 100,000 word mark each. Way over the 60,000 to 80,000 YA word length I was shooting for. And no mere 10% editing cut is going to fix this. Besides, as I've discussed before, when I do a 10% editing cut, most of the time I end up with a longer story...

I finally built a spreadsheet and went through chapter by chapter, recording their word lengths. That was interesting, especially as the chapter length varied from under 2000 words up to over 10,000 words over 30 pages of text in my current writing format, Not A Standard Manuscript Format™. Too long and too irregular. You want to keep the story moving, so the reader will keep going, and if the chapters are short enough, you can read Just One More Chapter...

So I started breaking up chapters into short chunks, eventually settling on all chapters being under 6000 words. And having been away from the book for almost ten days, it was really easy to do some writing to smooth out the new transitions, with the result, of course, that Book 1 was now longer.

But now I can do my data analysis. This is what I have now:

 Book 1 (2 books)
Part A     106,199     Ch.  1-32
Part B     109,206     Ch. 33-63

If I chopped these in half, the same words and chapters become:

 Book 1 (4 books)
Part 1.1    51,502     Ch.  1-15
Part 1.2    54,697     Ch. 16-32
Part 1.3    52,772     Ch. 33-46
Part 1.4    56,434     Ch. 47-63

This arrangement makes some sense, as it preserves the current break between Part A/B, and introduces two new ones. But it's not a trilogy and I'm not even at 60,000 words a novel. I add words because of the story, not just to add words. I hate padding. Roll the dice, try again...

 Book 1 (3 books)
Part I      74,516     Ch.  1-21
Part II     69,439     Ch. 22-42
Part III    71,450     Ch. 43-63

This one makes enough sense that I posted on Facebook this afternoon:

Book 1 of my YA trilogy is now a trilogy... each book 21 chapters and 69-75,000 words. For now. My writing never gets shorter. But the book chasms are cliffhangers... Dr. Phil

No doubt I'll still have trouble keeping these under 80,000 words apiece, but they're averaging 71,800 words all before brutal editing. AND, it craftily means that the book I am trying to get to my Beta readers this summer is suddenly 25% less.

Assuming something similar happens to the currently 127,629 word Book 2, I would end up with one trilogy of the princesses' teenage years and one trilogy of their college years. And at least a trilogy of "post-graduate" kingdom intrigues. With 394,000 words in total currently written and mapped out across the whole story, this could easily be a great career by itself. And then there's the military SF.

As long as it doesn't suck... (evil-grin)

New Researches: None.

Whoa. Maybe I am getting towards the "end" of this part of the story.

Okay, starting with the new Pass 2 shiny page counter:

Book 1 Page Edits (Pass 2)


Note that for searchability on my part, I now have Page Breaks at the end of each chapter, which drove the total page count from 755 pages to 784 without changing the number of words. It's looking more like a book all the time.

The Lost Kingdom Project YA Trilogy Version 1.11 (06-06-15 Sa, 1446 pages)


Book 1 Part A (106,199 words, starts page 43) / Part B (109,206 words, starts page 400)


As you can see -- already blown past even 100,000 words/novel. But here's the new/next configuration, allocating 80,000 words per novel or a 240,000 word total:

Book 1 Part I (74,516 words, starts page 43) / Part II (69,439 words, starts page 291) / Part III (71,450 words, starts page 537)


Room to grow. Room to revise. Room to trim.

I'm excited to create Version 1.12 now and get back to business. It has been a very instructive two days worth of data work AND writing.

Dr. Phil

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