The Canadian Who Won’t be Returning From the Stars

Ooof. I finally got the first collection of SF stories I’ve written with Jay Lake up to Draft2Digital tonight, Almost All the Way Home From the Stars. Here’s the blurb:

“Almost All the Way Home From the Stars” contains seven science fiction short stories by award winning writers Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold. The settings range from distant worlds, to the near future, to an alternate US where slavery was never abolished. Here a sampling:

“Rivers of Eden”: In a world transformed by a virus affecting faith, one lone scientist wants to set loose a cure for fanaticism.

“The Big Ice”: On Hutchinson’s World, Vega and Mox are trying to unravel the mystery of the Big Ice — until the family responsibilities Vega has been trying to escape come back to haunt her.

“The Canadian Who Came Almost All the Way Home From the Stars”: An NSA agent is assigned to look after a Canadian scientist whose husband has left Earth to visit the stars — and the strange dimple in the lake that she is watching, while waiting for his return.

Five of the stories have been previously published elsewhere, in various online and print markets, including Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction. Two stories are new with this collection.

No links as yet, since it takes a while for books to go up on the various markets, but I will pass them along when I have them. I’m going straight D2D this time, since I’m passing all the profits on to Jay (what little there will be, given how notoriously hard short story collections are to sell). But it will make it a lot easier for me to keep track of profits for this book if everything is in one place. AND D2D will also do all the Createspace work for me. I wasn’t completely happy with the PDF that will be the basis for the print copy of the book, but doing all the Createspace formatting on my own for Yseult was a huge amount of work, and I don’t feel like tackling that again this week. I want this done and out of here.

And Jay needs to concentrate on his bucket list.

Speaking of Yseult, Createspace has finally approved the files I sent for the print version, but I would rather wait until the light of day to ok them for publication. *g*

In other news, my daughter and I created an amazing cover for Chameleon in a Mirror, but it’s late here in Central Europe, and I can’t figure out how to upload the image from the Facebook page, where I first asked for feedback. When I have a new version, I’ll upload it here!

Haven’t gotten very far in the New Words department in the last few days. I’m hoping that with a couple of these bigger projects off my list (see above), I can spend more time on plain old creation again.

Slowly but surely getting there on the paperback version of Yseult

This is what I spent most of the day on today:

I’m not very Photoshop savvy, and my daughter was out and about today, so I decided to tackle it myself. Of course, I had the front cover of Yseult already, designed by the lovely and talented Derek Murphy of Creativindie Covers. I’ve sat beside my daughter many a time while we designed covers together, have tweaked them myself in accordance with feedback. Besides, Britta is moving to the States soon, which will make it a lot harder to work on covers with her. It’s time I learned how to do a bit more on my own. I figured it couldn’t be all that hard, right?

Wrong.

I had to google all kinds of little steps that would have been super easy for someone else. But the thing I spent the most time on was the text on the back. The first time I tried to copy the description in, I had a long line of text with everything superimposed on top of each other. So I kept googling, trying to figure out a way to make Photoshop treat text like text. I finally found an apparent solution — but for the life of me, I couldn’t get it to work with my ancient version of Photoshop. Some little arrow that I was supposed to pull down that I couldn’t get to appear …

By this time, I’ve deleted more layers than I’ve kept, and hours have passed. I finally gave up, created a text box in Paint, saved it as a JPG, and copied it onto my cover as a layer.

If anyone with more design experience than me has any suggestions, please let me know how I could improve the cover!

Thursday was my birthday, so that day was taken up with preparation and celebration:

The next day was taken up with recovery. As a result, I haven’t gotten very far on recreating the revisions I lost on Island of Glass. At least I’m moving forward with a couple of big things. I really do want to get Yseult off to Createspace, and off my to-do list. A number of readers have asked me about when a physical book will be available, but I’ve been so wary of all the work involved, I just kept putting it off. Soon now!

And before I forget, I would like to point out that Elle Casey is hosting a massive Springtime Indie Giveaway. Most of you reading this will probably already have my book Dragon Time, but perhaps there are some other books on the list you might be interested in. And if you think it looks good, pass the word along if you’re so inclined!

ETA: My daughter showed me how to make the text box this morning — rather than clicking on the surface of your image, you hold down the left mouse key and pull. Now off to make my cover correctly and then upload!

On losing work (and other frustrations)

I spent several hours on Monday doing revisions of Island of Glass: addressing critique comments, filling holes, researching some things I’d left out. It felt really good to have a nice block of time for serious writing again, after all the writing business I’ve been doing lately, what with the formatting for the hard copy version of Yseult and the short story collection I’m putting together of my stories with Jay.

Then yesterday I opened the file — and none of the revisions I did on Monday were there.

I’m not sure what happened, if it was some kind of a software glitch or something, or if I was just so befuddled that I copied the old version onto the new rather than the other way around (I was working on my little netbook, which tends to keep me from wasting too much time on the Internet).

I was so frustrated, I didn’t bother going back to it yesterday, and only today have I started trying to recreate the edits I lost. Sigh.

It’s been that kind of week. I got the PDF of Yseult made and uploaded to Createspace, and it told me I needed larger inner margins, since the book is over 600 pages. More formatting, new PDF, another upload. The next time, it objected to the map. And so it goes …

At least I got Yseult up to Draft2Digital today. When I recently had an ad on Bookbub, it took Smashwords about a week to update my sales to the Apple store; D2D gives me that info the next day. So once the D2D version of Yseult is up, I’m canceling the Apple distribution on Smashwords. I will slowly be doing that with the rest of my books too.

Well, if the weather plays along, tomorrow there will be grilling in the garden, and maybe a little bubbly too.

Progress on various books and an interview with me

The weather was finally nice again for a change yesterday, so I took the day off and spent it in the garden. Everything’s a bit late this year, since winter went on forever, but right now, the tulips are blooming like crazy.

I don’t think I’ve been doing enough “replenishing” lately — need to spend more time in the garden, appreciate all the work I’ve put into it over the years.

On the writing work front, I’m moving forward with the science fiction collection with Jay Lake and sent him a copy of the ebook today. Here’s the latest version of the cover, btw:

What do you guys think, any better?

My hubby has gone through the PDF of Yseult for Createspace, but I haven’t had a chance to address his comments yet. I will be very glad to get this stuff out of the house and spend some more time on writing again!

Finally, Lorna Suzuki did a nice interview with me on her blog. Check it out if you’re so inclined!

Wishing everyone a great week with lots of words and no frustration.

Feature of Shadow of Stone today on the Kindle Boards blog

I don’t have much to add, other than I think it’s cool:

http://www.kboards.blogspot.de/2013/05/shadow-of-stone-by-ruth-nestvold.html

Will have more soon on the progress creating the first paper book. PDF has been created and is now being inspected by significant other.

Announcing a new anthology with one of my stories – and a reminder of free ebooks

I just got the news this week that an anthology I sold a story to some time ago has finally come out in ebook, with print to follow:

The theme of the book, Times of Trouble, is the much-maligned genre of time travel. A lot of people say it’s been done to death, and maybe they’re right, but reading A Wrinkle in Time when I was a kid was a mind-blowing revelation, and I’ve had a fondness for time travel ever since. Here’s the description of the book:

TIME TRAVEL IS THE ULTIMATE DO-OVER.

It’s funny how second chances usually wind up being just another opportunity to make the same mistakes, though.

The authors represented in the collection you now hold were tasked to create grim and gritty tales of time travel gone horribly wrong.

They have done so, in some wildly varied ways.

There are stories of rare and exceptional beauty; stories of dark, otherworldly horror; stories of white-knuckle thrills and even some that will make you laugh out loud.

In fact, if you pay close attention, in at least one of these adventures, you’ll realize that no time travel at all ever takes place.

All of them will take you places–and times–you’ve yet to be, and make you think about the experience.

I also want to remind everyone that two of my ebooks are free today, Beyond the Waters of the World and “Misty and the Magic Pumpkin Knife.” In addition, Shadow of Stone will be on sale this weekend for 2.99.

I hope everyone has a great weekend!

A new story collection and upcoming freebies

Most of my time lately has been spent working on the new collection of stories I wrote with Jay Lake. A few years back, we collaborated on a number of stories together, both science fiction and fantasy. When I started switching from traditional publishing to ebooks, I told Jay I could put together some collections of our fiction. But since I always have more projects than time, I kept putting it off. Then recently I learned that Jay’s battle with cancer has taken a turn for the worse, and I figured I better finally get on it. (As opposed to my writing buddy, Jay, I don’t go into personal stuff a lot on this blog, but for the record, I had a crying fit before I realized I had to shift priorities a bit.)

The first book of our collaborations that I’m doing is science fiction and includes five previously published stories (two of which were reprinted in Year’s Best anthologies), as well as two stories new to this collection. I’m not done with formatting it yet, and I still need to write a blurb (always particularly hard with collections, gah). But here’s the second version of the cover:

Please let me know what you think!

The other big project that I’ve been working on this week is FINALLY PUTTING TOGETHER A PRINT VERSION OF YSEULT! I splurged and bought a license from Book Design Templates. But if you click on the link, don’t believe that marketing line about your book “looking this good in just minutes.” Having some base styles already designed, and by a pro, is definitely a time-saver, but I’ve spent most of the day today importing Yseult into the template, defining styles, looking for import mistakes (e.g. I lost all of my italics and have to find them again in another window in Word), etc. — and I’m still not done. But since that whole procedure is definitely worth a blog post of its own, I won’t bother you with any more detail now.

I also spent a fair amount of time organizing some freebies for the coming week and notifying sites that will still carry announcements. I’m slowly moving my books out of KDP Select. Of the twelve ebooks I have out now, five are still in Select (one by mistake). Of those that are still in, several will be free next week. I did some overlapping in an attempt to get more of my books on my other books “alsobots” — something I’m not having much luck with. I suspect that’s because I don’t write exclusively in one narrowly defined genre. The readers who enjoy Yseult and Shadow of Stone may well have absolutely no interest in Looking Through Lace, and vice versa. So be it. One of the things I love about being an indie author is that I can write whatever I want, without someone else pressuring me to watch out for my BRAND. Ok, so it means I’m going to continue to sell modestly until I get enough out there in ALL the genres I like to write — or a miracle occurs. But the thing is, I really enjoy the freedom.

Anyway, here are the upcoming freebies:

Dragon Time and Other Stories – April 29-30

Misty and the Magic Pumpkin Knife – April 30 – May 4

Beyond the Waters of the World – May 3-4

The Future, Imperfect – May 4-5

Enjoy!