Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Category: Publishing (Page 3 of 4)

Sprinkles not Spoonfuls

August 5, 2024 /

This past weekend I received some feedback on The Corpse in the Courtyard from one of my first readers.

I found the prolog hard, she said. There were time when you used a comma and I expected the word and after it. Did you do that deliberately?

As an example, I wrote A part of Jacob wanted to relax, walk across the courtyard The expectation was relax, and walk.

Writing that way was a deliberate choice. I came across the technique while studying the Eve Dallas novels by J.D. Robb (Nora Roberts). I liked what she did and how she did it, and decided to experiment with the technique about the time I started writing The Corpse in the Courtyard.

Dean Wesley Smith describes using many craft techniques – tags, power words, etc., as sprinkling a spice in your writing. It adds depth and flavor when done right. If you do it wrong, it can pull the reader right out of the story – just like that mouthful of cayenne pepper when you used a tablespoon instead of a pinch.

So I went back to the Eve Dallas books, and then my manuscript.

Essentially that’s what I did in the prolog. Instead of sprinkling the technique through the pages as J.D Robb did, I spooned it on thickly in just about every other paragraph. Because I was now reading the story from a different perspective, I saw what I’d done and felt how clunky the story flowed. Not good as I could lose a reader in the first four or five pages, and they would never know why they didn’t feel at home with the story.

It didn’t take long to make some changes that improved the flow of the opening. Now I have to read through my current work-in-progress and make sure I used sprinkles and not spoonfuls.

A Licensing Wrinkle

July 22, 2024 /

Over this past weekend, I was browsing the DepositPhotos web site looking for images I can license for book covers. I have a couple of projects currently in their early stages, but I have a fairly clear vision of how I want the covers to look to fit into that genre.

One of those visions is to have a New York image as a background with the characters in the foreground.

Easy enough you’d think, except there are several hundred thousand images of New York on DepositPhotos. They range from instantly recognizable landmarks like Central Park or the Empire State Building to street and alleyway scenes you’d only recognize if you lived close by.

I’m getting better and refining the searches and quite quickly found an image I liked that fit what I was looking for. When I clicked on the image for more details, it came up, and there was a white callout box above the image that said Editorial Use Only. Interesting, I thought. What does that mean? Fortunately, there was a pop-up box along with the callout to explain Editorial Use Only.

Essentially these images can only be used for non-commercial purposes and their use in any published work that involves the payment or receipt of a fee is prohibited.

Bummer, but as I said with several hundred thousand images it just took another few minutes to find something I could use without the Editorial Use Only restriction. The cover mockup looked good as well.

Before finishing a quick recap on Pro-Writing Aid Everywhere. I am getting to better grips with it. There are still some areas that feel a little clunky, but overall it has removed a step from my editing workflow.

Another Upgrade

July 16, 2024 /

This past weekend, I finally finished the read through and edit of my latest novel and began putting the changes into the Scrivener project.

My normal workflow once a story is finished, is to run it through Pro-Writing Aid to catch grammar, punctuation, and spelling issues. Then I print out and do the read through mentioned above.

I use Pro-Writing Aid as a desktop app, and when I opened it there was the message – upgrade available. So I upgraded. The desktop app is still there but in addition, I now have ProWriting Aid Everywhere.

I left Everywhere alone for a week or two because my guess was this upgrade required a learning curve. And boy was I right.

Being able to pull up ProWriting Aid without leaving my Scrivener document was a huge plus. Potentially, it lets me combine two steps into one – make the edits, check with ProWriting Aid. Done!

Except not exactly.

The integration works well in Word and Obsidian. Not so well in Scrivener. The first thing I noticed was all the spellings I added to the ProWriting Aid dictionary were gone and there didn’t seem to be a way to recreate them. Perhaps not much of an issue when writing a contemporary story, but a real pain with all those Babylonian names and places.

I finally found the dictionary in my online profile and added the words, but I used to be able to do that directly from within the app.

I can absolutely see the advantages of having ProWriting Aid available without having to leave the application you’re writing with. It’s just going to get longer to get used to, and understand the nuances, than I thought.

A Pleasant Surprise

July 8, 2024 /

Late last week, I took a pause in my current work-in-progress to look for a piece of writing that fit in with the work, and which I was sure I had scribbled down at some point in the past.

I have two Scrivener projects I use for notes. One is called Thoughts, and the other is Writing Projects. Thoughts really is for random jottings, notes and ideas. Writing Projects was originally conceived as a placeholder for new story ideas. Some things still get in there but not quite in the way I envisioned initially. I find it easier now to set up a complete Scrivener project and drop all the thoughts in there as they occur to me.

As you’re probably gathering, I didn’t find what I was looking for in those Scrivener projects. Where else to look?

Quite often I’ll take a scene or situation from a larger story idea and write a sort story covering that incident. I didn’t think I’d done that in this case, but worth a look inside the Scrivener project that stores all my short stories.

I still didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find a completed three-thousand word short story that, according to the timestamp, I wrote about four years ago. The characters have appeared in other stories so they were familiar. The story itself not so much. I looked through my submissions log, and found I had never submitted the story to an editor, which made sense as I couldn’t find a proper manuscript document anywhere.

The piece of writing I was looking for remains elusive, but it was a nice surprise to discover something from the past – something I wrote and forgot about.

I’m wondering how many other stories I have that are like that.

Thrill Ride – Gadgets

June 10, 2024 /

If you didn’t support the kickstarter for Thrill Ride, the latest issue Gadgets, is arriving on June 21st. I don’t have anything in this issue, but I’ve seen some of the stories and it’s another great anthology.

I can’t tell you to hurry before all copies are gone, because it’s an eBook! However you can get it here where you can avoid the rush: Thrill Ride.

You’ll be glad you did.

Sisters in Arms is now available

March 25, 2024 /

A short post this week to let everyone know Sisters in Arms is now available at all eBook retailers.

Women who put it all on the line when the shit hits the fan. Military, family, or thrown together by chance doesn’t matter. They join, they cooperate, and, when they run out of options, they fight.
Tales from feudal Japan to modern day Angola. A slink through the Parisien woods and a strut along the Seattle streets. A Babylon that we never knew to a war-torn hell we should all fear.
A baker’s dozen of stories about women owning their place in the world.

Sisters-in-Arms | Universal Book Links Help You Find Books at Your Favorite Store!

A Quick Update

March 4, 2024 /

For those of you who supported the Thrill Ride kickstarter, a big thank you from me, and implied from everyone else with stories in this year’s issues. The kickstarter funded, so expect to see the first issue – Sisters in Arms – within the next few weeks. This issue includes my story A Cousin’s Outing.

It’s been a while since I submitted anything to the top science fiction magazines, but I have stories under consideration at Asimov’s and Analog. Unfortunately at the moment Fantasy and Science Fiction isn’t accepting submissions, but when they open again, there will be several stories in the queue for them.

Elsewhere, I’m making good progress on the third Jacob and Miriam story, and that’s on track for publication at some time in the second quarter of 2024. More news on that closer to the publication date.

A New Approach

February 19, 2024 /

This past week my writing study and reading intersected in a way I didn’t expect.

I’m coming to the end of a nine-week class on dialog, and wow, has it been illuminating. In parallel, one of the fiction books I was reading was Beyond – the first of Mercedes Lackey’s trilogy about the founding of Valdemar.

I enjoyed the book but something felt off, and not quite right. I couldn’t pin down exactly what it was. Not then, but later when I finished working through the lectures on the dialog class, I had a glimmer of an idea.

This week’s topic was narration, and how a writer can use it to give the reader information, and to paraphrase, there’s light narration, heavy narration, journal narration, and whole book narration. The assignment was to find examples of each type.

And there was my answer. Beyond isn’t just heavy narration, the whole book is mostly narration, and that was what disturbed me.

The thing with whole book narration is it tends to keep the reader at a distance, and I wasn’t expecting that from Mercedes Lackey. When you read the other Valdemar books you are deep inside the character’s head feeling their thoughts and emotions, and I kept waiting for that in Beyond.

I read the book almost in one sitting and know I’ll go back and read it again, so although I wasn’t expecting this approach, I suspect the next book in the series – Into the West – will have the same style.

This time I’ll be ready for it. And probably read the book in one session.

Meaningless Error Messages

February 5, 2024 /

This past weekend was a catch up on the many admin tasks put aside while we were out of town for most of January. One of those catch up activities is to scan and shred documents. I moved to electronic storage for copies of bills and invoices about ten years ago and managed to retire and remove a full four-drawer filing cabinet.

Despite this, and having multiple backups, both on a physical hard drive and in the cloud, I still keep hard copies of some documents – contracts, and the final versions of manuscripts spring to mind immediately.

As you’re probably suspecting, there was quite a pile of paper to scan, and as I got through the pile, the Epson printer/scanner barfed. That’s not unusual as pages get caught and jammed every so often. This was different though. There was no paper jam icon. Instead I had an Epson error 100069 and a message telling me to restart the printer. Easy enough, and for good measure, I checked nothing was caught in the scanner feed.

Restarting went straight to the same error message and a suggestion to contact Epson technical support. So straight to the browser and a search, and a discovery.

There is nothing on the Epson site that acknowledges printer error messages, let alone a list of what they might be, and how to resolve them. Buried deep in the results of another search I found the title Epson’s triple secret error codes. Now that seemed promising.

And it was.

The 100069 message essentially means the scanning function has serious issues. It could be the scanner motor pulley (checked it and looked okay), or a failed scanner motor or scanner sensor or . . . Given the amount of scanning I do, my guess is it’s the sensor or motor, which almost certainly means a new printer.

I don’t begrudge the cost of the new printer (actually, yes I do 🙂 ). What does frustrate me is how hard it was to diagnose the problem. I love the printer, and will replace like with like, but come on Epson, you’re better than this.

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