Full Fathom Five. . .

100' down in the deep blue sea

We're back in the grey and gloomy northeast after a week away in Florida, grateful for the time with family, yet wistful for the changes and losses we have weathered this year. One change is that for the first time, a family vacation didn't include our eldest spawn, as he's away at college with a different break schedule.

I am proud of him and the hard work he has done to get to where he is, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit how much I miss him and how much our family feels incomplete without him. This is one of the great ironies of parenting. Your children grow out of needing you, faster than you grow out of needing them.

So our youngest spawn gets to deal with all of our attention, without the diversion of his brother. :) And what a holiday he had.

My husband and I have been certified SCUBA divers for 25 years. Our sons got certified 2 years ago, but until last week, we've not had the opportunity to dive since their open water certification. This lovely photo was taken by the dive master during our descent to the Thunderbolt wreck in the Florida Keys. The ship sits on the sand 120' down and it was the deepest dive our son has done.

He did beautifully, and despite my worry beforehand, had no issues at all with managing his equipment, knowing how to be safe, and having an amazing time. Diving the wreck was definitely one of the highlights in his life. 

Mello like jello. . . kiddo hanging over the reef (photo by N Halin)

The underwater world is the closest most of us will come to being in space. It is an alien landscape, not always welcoming to interlopers, certainly one we have a healthy respect for. We take only photos and leave only bubbles. My husband has an underwater housing for his camera and has taken some remarkable pictures.

A school of yellowtail I could never catch

Grumpy Fish!

We were also able to spend some relaxing time with my father. Bittersweet for missing my mother who passed away in September of this past year.

My dad, with my sister and her fiance, myself, and my youngest son.

So the title of this post is a Shakespearean reference from The Tempest, my favorite of his plays.

  Full fathom five thy father lies;
              Of his bones are coral made;
    Those are pearls that were his eyes:
              Nothing of him that doth fade,
    But doth suffer a sea-change
    Into something rich and strange. 

It seems a fitting capstone for our time away. Everything changes. Our lives continually transform before our eyes. Perhaps, if we welcome it, into something rich and strange.

The Perils of a Public Life

First of all, greetings from a warm and sunny place. This is the morning view from our porch.

This afternoon, we will be scuba diving in the Florida Keys. My husband and I have been certified divers for 25 years. Our teens are now certified and we'll be taking our youngest (eldest is in college on a different break cycle) on a wreck dive. Stay tuned for underwater photos!

But what I really wanted to talk about today is the less comfortable side of leading a (semi) public life. For the most part, my experiences in social media and the internet have been completely positive. I've been part of several online communities for over a decade and have gone on to meet many of those individuals in 'real' life. All these people have been lovely and gracious and exactly as I had expected, given our interactions over the 'net.

Recently, I have enjoyed participating in Google+, finding a wonderful community of intellegent and creative individuals. Google+ has a text chat feature and I've had some lovely conversations with folks. While I generally don't chat with folks I haven't already developed some relationship with through posts or a g+ community, I also don't believe in being rude, so when a gentleman from the other side of the world began to chat with me, I was polite, while giving clear boundaries.

I had to remove this individual from my circles and delete comments from him on my posts because his interactions with me went from 'interesting conversations with someone from a different culture' to 'stalkerish and inappropriate'.

What made me the most uncomfortable was the way he felt as if he had some owership of my physical appearance, judging by his constant comments about my profile photos on whatever I would post publicly. I have never had this kind of clear experience of the male gaze before.

Regardless of the fact that this man lives a world away from me and doesn't have access to my full name or address and that he never actually threatened me in any way, I still felt unsafe and uncomfortable in the way he assumed my time and my physical appearance existed for his benefit.

That, to me, is the essential danger of the male gaze. That it makes of a woman an object that has no inherent rights to her own self.

That this man kept proclaiming that he only wanted to be my friend, while offering nothing except his desperation and his demands on my time was, in fact, a kind of emotional blackmail in which my reluctance to be mean placed me at risk.

The fact that I was reluctant to block him and felt guilty about it says a lot about the vulnerability of women--even someone like me who considers herself a strong individual and a feminist.

Should I Continue on my Serial (Writing) Spree?

Photo of Charles Dickens by The Boston Public Library,
used with permission, cc license

So starting last summer and continuing until a few weeks ago, I serialized chapters of my Science Fiction novel in progress, DERELICT.

I really enjoyed the experiment in public accountability for my writing and judging by my readership numbers on the blog and on Wattpad, as well as emails and comments, folks really enjoyed the read.

So now that DERELICT is completely drafted (and thank you to my lovely beta readers--I'll be working on the revision over the next few weeks), I've turned to revising renovating what had been a 'trunked' novel.

In the old days, you'd but it in a trunk beneath your bed and forget about it. Now, it's in a file on my computer. But regardless of its physical form, it needs an incredible amount of work to make it readable.

It was an early novel and I had still not gotten a firm handle on POV and characterization. But I still like the idea of the story and thought it had merit. I hired a developmental editor to give me a reality check and though the red comments outnumbered the words on the page, she agreed it was a story worth resurrecting.

So I'm 20,000 words into the rewrite--a little shy of the 25% mark. And I'm thinking of serializing this one as well. Working title: Heal Thyself.

Lilliane Tor, a renowned healer from Rimland, learns the cost of keeping her oath when she saves the life of Jahnissim Hal Zev, a member of the nomadic and insular Tisreen. A fugitive from her own land, she escapes to Tisreen with Zev and enters a bewildering world of a rigid religion and culture, where women's roles are tightly controlled and political disputes are settled on the edge of a blade. And where hudessh, or The Divine obligation, is as binding as any healer's oath.

That Zev owes his life to a woman, and one who doesn't follow his beliefs challenges the foundations of his identity. When he finds evidence of an illegal slave trade poisoning the heart of both their countries, Zev must learn to trust Lilliane, working with her against a common evil. Their quest to unravel the truth and expose the trade threatens their lives, the stability of two governments, and the core of their own beliefs about one another.

My question to you, dear readers, is would you be interested in following along with my renovation? In a way, this version is first draft 2.0 because it's being nearly totally rewritten. Of the first 20K, I think I salvaged maybe 500-1000 words of the original.

Weigh in with comments, if you please.

First Stories

First stories. That's this month's topic at the Forward Motion Merry-Go-Round-Blog-Tour. I could talk about the first novel I attempted, which I started writing in my teens and abandoned.  Two decades and 6 moves later, I found my stained and ripped legal pad and my spidery handwritten story opening. Yes, it was bad. Yes, it was melodramatic. Yes, it was wish fulfillment.

And yet, it also had the germ of a story I still wanted to tell. So after years of writing patient progress notes, journal articles, and some angsty poetry in long hidden away journals, I decided to write the story that eventually became THE WINGS OF WINTER, finishing it in 2005. That novel, less horrible than the handwritten chapters I had come across in cleaning out the basement a year earlier, is 'trunked' on my computer's hard drive, waiting for my willingness to burn it down to the ashes and start again someday. Since then, I have written 7 more novels, hundreds of blog posts, hundreds of poems, and dozens of short stories and in some way, every time I sit down to write, it feels like a 'first.' (See my post on the beginner's mindset.)

But when I think of first stories, what I think about is not what I have written, but the stories we tell ourselves even before we think of putting pen to paper.

The stories we convince ourselves are true about us--the deepest part of us. The stories we choose to believe, that shape the face we show the outside world. The stories that limit the full expression of who we can be.

The first story I turned into a kind of terrible truth was that my voice wasn't important. That other people had better things to say and more interesting lives. That if I spoke out, I risked the outside world's ridicule. And because I believed it, it became reality. I kept my silence, locked my words in notebooks no one read, kept my self hidden, too, believing that I wasn't good enough.

When I was a senior in college, a friend urged me to submit some of my poetry to the Dean's Prize in creative literature. I don't know what possessed me--probably because I just wanted her to stop bugging me about it--but I typed up a few poems and submitted them. I only entered the contest because I KNEW I had no chance to win. So there was no risk of rejection: I had already rejected myself.

When a slim envelope came in the mail, I nearly didn't bother opening it. It would just be confirmation of what I already understood. But masochist that I was, I figured I should read the rejection letter.

Inside was a letter of congratulations and a check for some crazy sum of money--maybe $150 or so (this was in 1984, so I really don't remember the amount.) I had won the Dean's prize for a poem I had written called "To An Artist on Cadman Plaza West." During the summer prior, I had to drive over the Brooklyn Bridge for work and would see this young man in a little triangle of land in the tangle of on and off ramps to the bridge. He stood there day after day with an easel and would sketch amid the chaos. It moved me and so I wrote the poem for him.

I still remember staring at that letter, convinced they had made some clerical error. That my rejection letter had gotten slipped in someone else's envelope. But it was my poem they chose and in that moment, the story I had clung to for so long became a fiction I no longer had to believe.

In that moment, I could create a new story.

My own story.

It may have taken me a few decades after that to open my heart to my identity as a writer, but I trace my current self--my writer self-- to that moment. Not of reading the prize letter, because that was something outside of me, but that moment when I chose to believe in my voice and in who I would become.

What is your 'first story'? And is it one you want to keep retelling?

Today’s post was inspired by the topic “First Stories”– February’s topic and theme in the Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour — an ongoing tour where you, the reader, travel around the world from author’s blog to author’s blog. If you want to get to know nearly twenty other writers and find out their thoughts on first stories, check out the Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour. You can find links to all of the posts on the tour by checking out the group site.

eBook Formatting: Possibilities and Limitations

While we are well into the eBook revolution--far enough in so that it's pretty safe to say eBooks and eReaders are not a fad and have become a permanent disruption to print books--there are still significant limitations on how eBooks can be presented to the reader.

TL;DR

• You CANNOT duplicate sophisticated print typography in an eBook
• Readability is still the key, but your formatting choices are limited
• eReaders give most of the formatting/display control to the READER not the WRITER
• best practice involves formatting for the simplest common denominator (compatible with all devices)
• everything written here will change

e-Book Formats: MOBI and EPUB
At the very least, you will need to create two types of eBook formats to get your book in all the major marketplaces. Yes, eBooks are currently where Betamax and VHS tapes were in the late 1970's with two major formats that don't play well in one another's sandboxes. I'm referring to MOBI (Amazon's basic file) and EPUB (everyone else's). There are dozens of other eBook formats, but none of them have the market presence of these two.   

(If you want to see a rundown of all of them, this wikipedia article is a great overview.)

"But what about .azw and .kf8?" You ask. Those are Amazon's tweaked formats for their tablet devices. Currently, all amazon devices will render MOBI files and while you can do some fancier things with kf8 for the fire, those fancy things will not be shown on earlier devices. 

The good news is that both EPUB and MOBI are actually a limited subset of HTML with some fancy wrapping to make them displayable in eReaders, along with the cover and any metadata the author wants included. 

HTML? What's the Problem?

If you were displaying your book as a webpage, you could have it render just about any way you wanted. There's so much you can do with a good combination of HTML and CSS, even without resorting to other fancier programming. BUT, eReaders will not render all of that lovely code.

Understanding the limitations of what code eReaders will and won't display is key to creating clean eBooks. (An example of the HTML you can use for making Amazon compliant ebooks.)

Currently, there is no good way to render dropped caps, for example. It is possible to create an image file for the capital letter and have the rest of the word be text. However, when people increase the font size on their eReaders, your lovely image of a dropped cap will not change in size along with it. In addition, To the best of my knowledge, it is not possible to create a transparent image that will display properly on eReaders. A white background for a text image or a scene break glyph will be invisible if the user selects a white background for the eReader. But that is not a given and you need to consider how your images will look if the reader selects white letters on a black background, for example. (Your lovely image of a black dropped cap on a white background will potentially look quite odd.)

And because the exact subset of HTML that each reader is happy rendering is different, "KISS" is the rule that applies.

	This is an example of the print book format of the first page of THE BETWEEN. Notice the very simple formatting choices--Bold, large initial letter, first 5 words of the initial paragraph in small caps, leading paragraph flush with the left margin, subsequent paragraphs indented. The serif font was chosen for in print readability and the leading and kerning were also set. The text is fully justified, right and left. Notice the hyphenated world in line two "be-fore". That will be the same in each copy of the book.
	This is a screen shot of the EPUB version of the same book. Notice the chapter heading is indented, but not centered* and the font is one that the eReader defaults to. Bold formatting is understood and rendered, as is small caps for the opening words, but all paragraphs are indented* and there is no larger or bold font for the first letter of the first word. There are no hyphenated words on this page, but that would change depending on the font size chosen by the reader. The eReader wil automatically reflow the text. Text is only left-justified.
	This is a screen shot from the kindle paperwhite of the same page. Notice the different font chosen. It is a san-serif font. The text is fully justified, right and left. Regardless of the stylistic choices, be certain to select some typographic look that distinguishes the opening line of a chapter and/or scene.

*Note: Centered headings and no indents of initial paragraphs CAN be easily coded in current eBooks, but were not in this case.

Because I wanted the end experience to be similar across print and eBook platforms, I chose simple formatting that biased readability over all other style considerations.

Embedded Fonts
We are just beginning to see the ability to embed fonts in eBook files. However, this may not be best practice given that the fonts will not render on earlier and eInk devices. Again, I caution you to format thinking of backwards compatibility.

If you have a book whose design heavily relies on custom fonts and precise formatting and you feel the eBook must match it, then the only choice you have currently is to have a specific book app created in android and/or apple formats. The tablets will likely render it appropriately, but not a dedicated eReader (kindle, nook, etc) Therefore, your market will be smaller.

Tables and Images
Because of the way eReaders allow end users to control font and font size and because of the wide assortment of screen sizes of those readers, displaying tables and images can be problematic.

Consider your readers will be looking at your book on a smartphone screen and/or a large tablet. Images can be centered, but playing with sophisticated text flow around them won't be able to be rendered by most eReaders. Keeping the images reasonably small will keep the image and the text at least potentially on the same eReader page.

For tables, the problem is even worse. Large amounts of data in tables will be broken over multiple pages, especially in small screened devices. One way around this is to present your tables as image files. However, the text will not reflow if the user increases the font size and a large image may also break over a page.

You can also consider displaying table data as bulleted lists, if possible. It's potentially a better solution for device agnostic formatting in that it allows text size reflow. However, some tables may not be able to be converted in this way and still make sense. Another possible solution is to present the data as an image along with a link to the table on a webpage or as a downloadable pdf file for the user.

Best Practice, as of February 6, 2013
eBook formatting is still in its infancy. Most of what I have reviewed here will likely change in the next several  months to a year as technology marches on. But for today, at least, best practice includes:

• simple formatting for readability over other style considerations, and, 
• backwards compatibility to reach all eReader devices.

If you are a DIY type, you are welcome to download a free guide to using a combination of open office and calibre (both open source, free programs) to format and convert documents to eBooks. This will only do a good job on its own with relatively simple novels. More complex formatting requires hand coding in HTML, using CSS, and understanding what eReaders will and will not render.

I appreciate your thoughts on this post and if you have information and/or resources to add, please do leave a comment.

#Amwriting Guest Post: Always a Beginner

One of the interesting things about being an artist of any stripe (and I include any creative endeavor here, though I’ll talk most about writing), is the tension between competence and experimentation. There is something marvelously freeing about being a beginner in something.  I think of the workshops I’ve conducted with young elementary school writers and the wildly bold work they produce when they don’t have the pressure of making something ‘perfect’ or living up to some artificial expectation for themselves.

(Continue reading "Always a Beginner" on the #Amwriting Blog)