Mike Mahan, of Shelflife Creative, has once again come through with a beautiful and evocative cover design for An Irish Miracle. The novel is in it’s final stages of production, so stay tuned for a release announcement coming soon!
Three Red Pencils by Horia Varlan (CC BY 2.0)
As an engineer, I learned the value of getting “a fresh set of eyes” on anything I was designing. At each stage of the design process (paper napkin, 3D computer model, dimensioned drawings, etc.), it was always a good idea to have someone else look over my work and offer suggestions or catch mistakes, because The Rule of Tens applied. That rule meant that every error that made it another step in the design process before it was caught would be ten times more costly to fix. The last thing I wanted was a call from the fab shop supervisor. By then, the cost to correct an error in my design might include surrendering body parts.
As an author, the same ideas apply to writing a novel. While working on An Irish Miracle, I was very fortunate to have Robin Martin, of Two Songbirds Press, as “my editor”. I really do love saying “my editor” because of the tremendous value Robin’s “fresh set of eyes” and talent as a freelance editor brought to my writing. I was well past the “paper napkin” step, having already written three drafts, before I contacted Robin through the Editorial Freelancers Association website. Based on her detailed Evaluation and Critique, I wrote the fourth draft, which nearly doubled in length while making my plot stronger and my characters rounder. I was also able to correct writing errors that Robin had documented, eliminating instances of filtering, narrative exposition, and shifting points of view that would have jarred my readers out of their vivid and continuous readers’ dreams. After doing a full contextual edit of the fourth draft, Robin even found yet another “fresh set of eyes” for the final proofreading of my corrected and polished manuscript. From experience, she told me she was too familiar with it to proofread it herself.
Because of the collaboration with “my editor”, An Irish Miracle is nearly ready to be sent out, and I’m confident that I won’t be receiving any unwanted telephone calls from the fab shop supervisor!
Gateway to Password Nirvana
Password Purgatory
Webster’s second definition of purgatory is “a place or state of temporary suffering or misery”. It’s where I used to go whenever the password I absolutely knew was correct was heartlessly rejected by the account I absolutely had to access. Not to be denied by some digital gatekeeper, I would resort to some really bad password strategies. You might even recognize one or two of them:
Sorry if I opened the particular bag you keep your cat in, but she probably needed a little air anyway. Now just about every online move I make, from blogging to shopping, from posting to self-publishing, requires a password. And many sites have gotten all we-take-security-seriously and require strong passwords like these:
But I can’t remember one we-take-security-seriously password like that, let alone a few dozen or more. I’d need a computer to remember all those cryptic, meaningless strings.
Wait. Maybe we’re on to something there.
Password Nirvana
Turns out you can have your we-take-security-seriously passwords and remember them, too. The solution is using a password management program. Who knew? I won’t attempt a comprehensive review of all your password management options here. You can find plenty of those with your favorite search engine. But here’s some general information to get you started:
The password management program I settled on a few years ago is RoboForm from Siber Systems. (This may sound like a commercial, but trust me, I’m no paid spokes-model for anyone.) RoboForm nearly revolutionized the way I use the Internet. Once I enter my we-take-security-seriously master password, RoboForm automates the entire login process for any of my online accounts, all with a single click of the mouse:
With a single click, I’m securely logged in and ready to opine, purchase or post.
Bottom Line
Read some password management program reviews and try out some of the free trial versions or even your browser’s built-in password manager capabilities. Once you settle on the password management program of your own choice, it will revolutionize the way you use the Internet and keep you out of password purgatory, all while enhancing your online security.
And take those little yellow notes off your monitor. They really are tacky.
Serenity by Alberto P. Veiga (CC BY 2.0)
A good friend of mine, Eddie Rhoades, once said to me, “Rob, there are too many things in the world that go ‘beep’.” In many of our lives today, amidst the incessant clamor of the modern world, we often forget to leave room for the quiet. I first learned about the idea of “active inactivity” in a small but powerful book, Zen and the Martial Arts by Joe Hyams.
Active inactivity isn’t as easy as it may seem at first blush. It isn’t just not doing something . . . it’s doing nothing on purpose. Nothing physical, like taking a walk or a nap. Nothing mental, like thinking about a problem at work or planning a vacation. Nothing. Well, nothing except breathing, which we normally don’t even think about. Try doing nothing but thinking about your breathing for fifteen minutes sometime tomorrow. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out . . . If you don’t make it the first time, don’t be hard on yourself. It really is harder than it sounds. Let it go and try again the next day, and the next.
Claude Debussy said, “Music is the silence between the notes.”
When I’m being well-disciplined, I try to do nothing on purpose for fifteen minutes before starting a writing session. If I succeed, my mind seems to be clearer, calmer, and it’s easier to focus on the day’s work. Active inactivity can tame wild mind-monkeys. And it’s a gift you can give to yourself, with a little practice.
In An Irish Miracle, young Dillon Connolly discovers perfect stillness for the first time in the Irish countryside. Raised on a bustling farm in northwestern Ohio, it’s a new and wonderful experience, one that evokes surprisingly powerful emotions.
Native American Storyteller
The term “disintermediation” seems to be popping up more these days, as if the concept is something new. It’s really just a fancy way of saying “cutting out the middle man” or “going right to the source”. If you remember Webvan from a few years ago, they tried (and quickly failed) to disintermediate the retail supermarket industry by delivering groceries direct to consumers. You succeed where Webvan failed every time you go to your local farmer’s market and buy what they’ve grown directly out of the back of their trucks. If you want to take this food supply chain disintermediation example to its ultimate level, grab a hoe and go plant your own garden.
I set out to talk about disintermediation in today’s publishing industry. I must be hungry.
The “traditional” publishing model puts many intermediaries—gatekeepers, if you will—between the author and the reader. In its simplest form, an author contracts with a literary agent to represent a manuscript to one or more publishers. If the manuscript is accepted, the author and literary agent contract with the publisher to finalize, produce, distribute, and market the manuscript in the form of a finished book. Only then is the reader presented with an opportunity to experience the author’s story, with very little chance of ever interacting directly with the author.
The “new” self-publishing model puts the author almost directly in contact with the reader. I think at least some of today’s self-published authors see themselves as pioneering disintermediators of the publishing industry, bypassing the gatekeepers of the Big Six and other publishers by taking their stories directly to the reader. But as far as being pioneers, I think those self-published authors and self-proclaimed iconoclasts have it a bit wrong.
In terms of human history, the “traditional” publishing model is relatively new. While Irish monks may have saved Western civilization by meticulously hand-copying and thus preserving many Greek and Latin texts, Gutenberg’s mechanical movable type started the Printing Revolution in the year 1440. Without movable type, the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution all would have had a much tougher time getting off the ground. Without Gutenberg’s invention (and all those Irish monks with writer’s cramp) knowledge would have spread much more slowly. Our modern world would look much different without those six or seven centuries of literary agents, publishers, and printers intermediating to spread literature and knowledge to people of all walks of life.
But what was happening before the year 1440? From the dawn of human history until then, the vast majority of people received their literature and knowledge directly from another person, in the forms of myths, legends, tales, songs, epic poems, and folklore in our rich and now almost forgotten oral tradition. No writing systems. No intermediaries. The village medicine man, tribal elders, minstrels, bards, and other storytellers had the ears of anyone within the sound of their voice. From generation to generation in every culture, knowledge was passed along orally, with each generation adding new stories of their own. The Printing Revolution may have given birth to many vital movements, but it effectively put a halt to our rich traditions of person-to-person oral history, oral lore, oral law, and oral knowledge . . . until very recently.
Just a few short years ago, what is perhaps the ultimate disintermediator came into being. Without the Internet, today’s Renaissance of Self-Publishing may never have gotten off the ground. After a six or seven century hiatus, the storytellers of our time finally have the ears of their listeners again. Well, almost.
Kent State University Visual Communication Design professor Michael Mahan has created these awesome logos for Rob Mahan Books and the publishing company Marietta Book Works.
Mike is currently working on the cover and interior design for An Irish Miracle. In addition to teaching at KSU, he owns and operates the graphic design firm, Shelf Life Creative.
I am pleased to announce that
- Rob Mahan Books -
has launched the publishing company
- Marietta Book Works -
Marietta Book Works will release An Irish Miracle, a novel by Rob Mahan, in the Spring of 2012.
Be sure to follow the website for An Irish Miracle and see posts about the novel, excerpts, and the latest news about its upcoming release.
Book Country, the Penguin Group USA‘s online community dedicated to genre fiction, introduced a suite of self-publishing tools today. While there are dozens of entities offering authors self-publishing options, I believe this is the very first time any unit of The Big Six traditional publishing houses (Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, MacMillan Publishers Ltd, Penguin Group, Random House, Simon & Schuster) has ventured into this relatively new and fast-growing (and fast-changing) segment of the book industry.
This is great news on a number of levels:
I think the biggest revelation with this announcement is the indication that The Big Six are coming around to a self-publishing trend that is popular with both authors and readers. You and I already know it’s a trend that’s here to stay!
Here are links to the Penguin Group USA’s announcement and a related article in today’s Wall Street Journal:
Photo Credit: Soggydan on Flickr
I didn’t do a very good job taking feedback from my “alpha” beta reader* on the first draft of my first novel, An Irish Miracle. One could say my initial responses were a bit defensive, as most of them started with “Well, I did that because . . .” It soon became obvious taking that approach would eliminate the possibility of future feedback from any beta reader, and I desperately needed all the feedback I could get. I was setting out on the path from engineer to author quite alone.
It took me several tries, but with some very helpful coaching, I started to catch on. My responses to feedback began sounding more like “That’s really interesting. Would you please tell me more about what you mean . . .” For the second draft, my circle of beta readers expanded to two. From that feedback, I learned the term “in media res” and rearranged the timeline of the entire story, which was a big improvement.
For the third and fourth drafts, my circle of beta readers continued to expand and I worked at my new skill of taking feedback gracefully. I got volumes of excellent critical feedback that helped me to polish my novel. I also made some observations about taking feedback on my writing:
*A beta reader reads a written work with an eye to improving story, characters, and general style before the work is published. Of course, my “alpha” beta reader is my lovely wife Linda, who is an avid reader in her own right and who is a lot smarter than me!
Write First
Many athletes have pre-game rituals so why can’t authors have pre-writing session rituals, too? I certainly do.
My first ritual (technically, it’s third if you count the first as coffee and the second as settling my four-legged writing companions into their beds . . . more on them in a future post) is to set the mood in my lonely writer’s garret with music. Not just any music, though. During the hundreds of writing sessions it took to create An Irish Miracle, I have listened to the same track . . . over and over again. I don’t want get distracted by catchy lyrics while I’m writing. I want the music to help me slip quietly and efficiently into the “writer’s dream” state of mind (more on the writer’s dream in a future post, too). Now my brain will forever associate “Insight & Intuition” from the Brainwave Suite with the stories in An Irish Miracle. (You can listen to a short sample of “Insight & Intuition” here.)
My second official ritual is to “Write First”. It may not be true for everyone, but writing in the morning is definitely the most productive creative time for me. I’ve heard it said that no good writing has ever been done on a computer connected to the Internet. Having vast resources of background research material literally at my fingertips while I’m writing is invaluable, but if I don’t “Write First”, it’s too easy for one e-mail reply to lead to an interesting news article that leads to paying bills or an idea for a new blog post and my productive, creative morning has slipped by.
So identify the rituals that work for you and stick to them . . . even if you have to resort to writing them down on a sticky note. You can always tape it to your monitor after the sticky wears off!
(I’m planning a science fiction novel as a future project. I think I might listen to “A Storm is Coming” from “LOTR: The Return of the King” while I’m writing it.)
An Irish Miracle Back, Spine, and Front
