The End Is in Sight

At last. A week or so ago, after two and a half years of labor, I uploaded the interior file for my novel, Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough, to CreateSpace, the amazon.com company that will produce it. Back came an e-mail. There was a “properties” problem, which I decoded as a problem with page count. I resolved that; then Lindsey Archer adjusted her cover design for spine width and sent me the file.

I uploaded my interior file again, this time successfully. Another hoop behind me. I uploaded Lindsey’s cover file. A message came back, a successful upload. But then another message: some elements of the cover needed a higher resolution. Lindsey dealt with that, and it appeared we could go back through that hoop again. Then, a message from Lindsey. Another hoop. The higher dots-per-inch count resulted in a file too large to send by e-mail. My son Mike found a way around that. The cover file came through, and I uploaded it successfully to CreateSpace.

Three days later, the proof copy of the book arrived in the mail, days before I had dared to expect it. The book is in sight, which is more progress than I made in the dream of my walk with Walter Mitty (see post of June 29). How many more hoops to jump through yet before this appears in the amazon.com catalog? Surely not many.

I’m almost ready now for all those marketing hoops. Hooray? Or aw shucks? I’m not sure which.

Jumping Through the Hoops.

Back to the twists and turns of self-publishing a book. When I decided I would self- publish my novel, Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough, I determined I would not invest cash in a stash of books to be parked in some storage locker (I have no garage) until sold.

I decided to go with CreateSpace, an amazon.com offshoot that publishes on a print-on-demand basis at virtually no up-front cost to the author IF the author produces a manuscript already formatted for the page and already proof read. That, of course, is a big IF.

It took some doing, and I thought I would be blind before I finished the proofing. Each time I thought I had perfect copy, I would read it through and find more typos. At last I am through that hoop. There may still be errors in the finished book, but I hope very few, and with the print-on-demand system I won’t have to wait for a second edition to correct them. If I upload an amended file to CreateSpace’s computer, the next book printed will be a corrected copy. Neat!

In the midst of all this there was the question of a cover. Before I was quite aware that CreateSpace offers cover templates that can be adapted by the author, I sought an original design. My son Mike enlisted the services of Lindsey Archer, a young designer in Memphis. While I was still proofing my text, she produced six cover designs among which I could choose. All were good, nothing “cookie cutter” about them, but one stood out. When I knew my final page count, which affects spine width, she e-mailed me a cover file to upload to Create/Space.

End of process? Not quite. There always seems to be one more jog in the road, another hoop to jump through but the book is now in sight. We'll get there yet.

(To be continued.)

No Thoroughfare.

One night recently I dreamed I was walking with Walter Mitty, our cat, through an urban neighborhood, trying to reach our home, just a few blocks away. Like so many dreams, this one did not fit reality. To begin with, Spanish Fort, where I live, is a long way from being urban.

Moreover, I would never try to walk down a street with Mitty and, more to the point, he would never try to walk down a street with me. Mitty is totally an indoor cat, who never wanders up the hall from our apartment door further than to the next apartment, a distance of about 25 feet, and who has to be carried out of the building in a cage for his annual trip to the vet.

My dreams, typically, are about the struggle to accomplish something always just a bit out of reach. It was so in this urban neighborhood. No street was a thoroughfare. At every intersection I was faced with a choice of a half-block jog to the left or to the right, and I never knew which would being me closer to my destination.

To complicate my struggle, I was having to carry my weary cat. At 16 pounds, Mitty is no small burden, and he fights being held by anyone in an upright stance. (Laps are another thing.) So I struggled on and on in this dream, carrying my heavy, squirmy cat and getting nowhere. As is usual in such dreams, I woke before I reached my seemingly unreachable destination.

I wondered later if this was a dream about the publishing of my book, Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough. It took me two years, working full time, to write this novel, and I’ve spent another year or more querying agents and publishers. More recently, I decided to self-publish, and that’s not a straight thoroughfare, either.

(To be continued.)

The Preacher's Mechanical Aid

When my writer’s group met last week we were treated to three new blank verse poems by our in-house poet, Betty Ivy. I introduced you to Betty as my favorite contemporary poet in a blog posted on April 1.

Betty’s new poems were marked by her usual lyrical blank verse rhythm and her sense of the ironic, Betty’s trademarks. My favorite was called “The Fan.”

This fan is no ordinary house fan. It is the fan that sits beside the pulpit at St. James Church in Fairhope week in and week out and says, as it swivels and bobs, yes yes yes to the affirming words of the pastor and no no no to the things we don’t want in our lives.

Ingenious! Why did I never think to put such a fan alongside my pulpit, when I had a pulpit? Probably because I didn’t have a resident poet to tell me how it might sing out the gospel in reinforcement of my preaching.

Best of all, when St. James’s preacher leaves the pulpit and the members file out the door, the little fan remains behind, still saying yes yes yes to the preacher’s benediction.

But it takes a poet to hear it.

Meadows in Which to Dance

In a prayer entitled “I Need to Start Over,” the late Kenneth G. Phifer confessed past sins, as we all must confess ours, and moved on with a prayer for his future:
“So let me rise up and be done with the past. / Each day is new and fresh, / and each hour is fraught with grandeur. . . . / I’ve roads to walk / and hills to climb / and meadows in which to dance.” (From A Book of Uncommon Prayer. Used with permission.)

Many of us live in urbanized places where there are no meadows in which to dance or, if there are meadows in view, we do not use them for this happy purpose which God must surely have ordained for them. But our spirits, through faith, can take us to such a place and set our feet in joyous motion.

Dancing in the meadows of God’s forgiveness. It’s a refreshing thought.

~ Bert Johnston
Visit me at www.bertjohnston.com.

The Perfectionist

According to A. J. Jacobs, the author of The Know-It-All, who read his way through all 33,000 pages of The Encyclopedia Brittanica, Honore Balzac was a perfectionist. He nearly bankrupted himself making changes to his manuscripts after the printer’s deadlines.

That got my attention. I am currently bogged down in the proof reading and reformatting of my novel, Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough, and it’s time to get on with it. My cover designer promises a finished product is within sight. The proofing and formatting will then be all that will stand between me and the print-on-demand publisher who will issue a paperback version for the general market.

Problem is, as though proofing and formatting isn’t enough of a chore, I keep finding small ways to improve the text. A change of word here, a minor deletion there. I’ve spent three long days getting half-way through it. If it ever makes it into print, it will be a better book than the earlier Kindle version.

But now there’s this Balzac thing. Of course there’s no way I can compare Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough to The Human Comedy, but Balzac’s work habits are nevertheless a warning to me. I’ve been labeled a perfectionist before, and the thought of ruin-by-procrastination should be enough to reform me. Strike that. Make it “enough to set me straight.”

Oh, hell!

JQA - Procrastination

One of the things I’ve learned about John Quincy Adams in my recent reading is that, through most of his adult life, he had a strong interest in religion. He rose early and read several chapters of the Bible during his pre-breakfast regimen of long walks, long swims, and the reading of the classics.

Adams read voraciously. Along with the classics, history and the Bible, he enjoyed reading sermons and theology. He was also a church-goer. During his years as secretary of state and president, he attended three services of worship on Sundays: morning, afternoon and evening--Unitarian, Episcopal and Presbyterian. And these were not our modern, hour-long services.

Then Adams went home and critiqued the sermons in his journal. Once a professor of oratory at Harvard as well as a theology buff, his standards were not always met. Paul C. Nagel, his biographer, remarks that “the homiletical powers of Washington’s clergy were not of the highest order.” Hard to imagine in this day of prestigious capital-city pulpits, but Washington was then a mud-street village. (At least they had clergy. They had no dentist.)

By most norms, Adams displayed unusual religious commitment, yet not until 1826 did he make his own confession of faith. At the age of 59 he united with the Quincy church, where his forebears had worshiped for almost 200 years. He acknowledged he was about 30 years late.

That’s what I call unholy procrastination.