Part 3 - Entering The Self-Publishing Jungle

Chances are good that you’re not going to write your novel with a quill pen, dipping it into a bottle of ink, and scratching the letters on parchment. Most people write on computers these days. So how do you do it?

You can use software such as Microsoft Word or something similar. That’s great software with lots of capabilities that most of us never use. (One thing I have found useful is to use the Style menu and convert titles and subtitles into Heading 1, 2, or 3 and then use the Navigation pane. It will automatically make a list of all those elements and when you are ready for a table of contents, it can automatically do all that for you.)

There is writer’s word processing software, however. Now there may be others, but I have been using Scrivener from Literature and Latte https://www.literatureandlatte.com/ . This thing will do everything a writer might need. It does so many things that it takes a bit to get familiar with it. It does have some good tutorials, however.

When I’m working on my novel, I can go to the Notes section and set up a Diary where I can jot down all my developmental thoughts. There are template sheets for Characters and Settings. You can outline sections and pin them to the virtual cork board and more them around. I can load in images of scenes I am working on and put that in the background and remove everything else so I can just focus on the things I am interested in and don’t get distracted. You can save whole web pages in the reference section and download music to play while you’re working. You can set project targets to keep you pushing forward if you need a bit of a shove.

It has great editing features as well that allow you to split the screen while you’re work, cut things out but keep them available in case you want to put them back, and it goes on and on. I confess that I have trouble remembering all the features of the software that I use if I don’t use it every day. But this thing is worth learning and relearning if necessary.

There is a separate Scapple program that allows me to diagram the plot elements and connect them together.

It’s not expensive - $49 for Scrivener and $18 for Scapple. It was originally just for the Mac OS, but there is a Windows version. I bought that too a few years ago but at that time it was as satisfactory. They may have improved it.

And once your draft is complete, you can compile it and move over to Word if you need to. Then you can start cleaning it up for pre-readers to review.

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Part 1 - Entering The Self-publishing Jungle

It’s not that hard to write a novel. Frankly it’s a personal struggle between your head and your hands. Control is yours. It’s personal.

Getting the novel published is another thing entirely. I don’t have a printing press in my basement. I don’t have cozy connections with bookstores or Amazon. I have to turn to other people to do that. The question is: who? There are seemingly millions of people and organizations out there eager and willing to take my money and make my dreams come true. It’s like coming out of a tunnel in some fantasy story and being faced with a thousand Gandalfs who all want to take my hand and guide me. If Frodo had stepped out of Brandy Hall and been faced with a thousand Gandalfs, he would have turned around and never come out.

So that’s where I am. I have written what is actually my fifth novel. (In draft form, I call them by their number - “Call it Five” was the working name.) And it has been in the works for five or six years. I self-published “Call it Four” which became Recalculating Truth so you’d think I’d know how to do it again. I have my notes, but things change a lot in five or six years. So it’s like starting over.

The first thing I settled on was writing on my computer. Seems pretty obvious these days. Not may people write with a pot of ink and a quill pen. Many years ago I wrote on an IBM Selectric II typewriter. (Personal computers did not exist in 1972.) I thought I was going to live my life writing so I needed the best tool I could find at the time. I bought the typewriter directly from IBM because there really wasn’t any other way at the time. The salesman at the company was surprised I was going to use it in my NY apartment and insisted on coming to the apartment to set it up! I wondered how hard it was going to be to plug it in and turn it on.

I had a friend also living in New York who wrote on a continuous roll of paper that he fed into his typewriter. He didn’t want to be distracted by changing the pages!

Time passed and technology changed and I went through a bunch of computers from an Apple II to Macs to DOS machines and back to Apple. But that’s a different story. This is a Mac Mini so that’s where I am.

I am going to break this up into chunks.

Other Thoughts from Paul H Raymer RSS

Faces

Faces tell a lot about what a person is thinking or feeling.  Unfortunately we don't always read the right message from the face, but faces can lie.  We start reading faces as infants looking up into our mother's face, leaning over the crib.  The infant learns to read whether she is happy and smiling or angry or afraid.  The baby automatically reacts.

Somehow our brains tell us when a smile is a real indication of pleasure and when it is being polite or when it is being deceptive.  Sometimes a pleasant smile can hide anger or violence.  That is one of the reasons that clowns can be so scarey.  We can't tell if they are going to kill us or make us laugh!

Reading at A Book In The Hand

There are a lot of writers on Cape Cod on the coast of Massachusetts.  A lot of them are quite good and some of them are quite famous and have made a pretty good living.  I mentioned to a builder friend that I had published a novel and he told me about a client who builds a new addition to his home every time he publishes another book!  "Publish another book," he told me, "and let me know!"  The question is how to let people know.

To that end, I am presenting my novel, Recalculating Truth at the monthly meeting of an organization known as "A Book In The Hand" or ABITH on Monday night, January 12, 2015 at 7PM.  The gathering will be at the Jacob Sears Memorial Library at 23 Center Street in East Dennis, MA 02660 (508-385-8151).  There's parking across the street.  There is a drawing for copies of the books of the presenting authors.

I will be reading a bit of Recalculating Truth and explaining how it came to be.  Writers are interesting people.  The transfer of non-existent people created in one mind to other minds is quite fascinating.  People talk about them as though they really exist, and I guess if I've done my job, the characters are as real as any other person you've never met but have only heard about. 

Leslie Meier will also be there.  http://www.lesliemeierbooks.com/  She's written a bucket load of mysteries.  It should be a fun evening.  I hope you'll join us

The Gentle Art of Electronic Waterboarding

It is only fiction but it is uncomfortably close to reality

Long time Cape Cod resident, Paul H. Raymer, recently published his novel, Recalculating Truth, a story based on electronically processing human tells to reveal the truth without torture.   For the past thirty-five years, Mr. Raymer has started numerous companies and developed a wide array of products.  He has woven those experiences into this story of starting a business, developing a unique product, and the challenges and mysteries of truth and lies.  The story winds its way from Guantanamo to Cape Cod and gradually peals away layers of lies from the simple to the deadly.

With the release of the report on "enhanced interrogation techniques", its impact on international relations, future interrogations of Americans in captivity, this novel is very timely.  Technology is moving so rapidly that in the year that it took to put this book together imagination and reality have moved frighteningly closer together.   Facial recognition is used to detect terrorists at airports.  The FBI and police departments use voice stress and statement analysis.  And body language is used by television shows to uncover true love.  All of these technologies are combined to provide a much more accurate interpretation of the truth in this novel, proving that truth and lies can be used as a very effective weapon.

Can actionable truth be extracted with torture?  Or is it just another layer of lies?  Recalculating!

Voice Stress Analysis

Is she telling the truth . . . or not?

One of the four elements that the device in Recalculating Truth is Voice Stress Analysis (VSA) or Layered Voice Stress Analysis (LVSA).  There is a lot of money to be made if a technology can clearly and simply prove that someone is lying.  Because of that and because of the passion that surrounds fringe sciences, there are those that take the technology very, very seriously.  There are studies and institutes and technical papers.  And it can move all the way into violence as positions are defended. 

There is The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law.  They did an interesting story on scientists getting sued when they challenged the technical validity of one technology.  There is the truly interesting National Institute for Truth Verification.  Maybe there is more to this stuff than smoke and mirrors!

VSA – Voice Stress Analysis is based on the theory that stress brought on by lying causes tremors in the vocal cords thus changing the person's voice. VSA uses an instrument that measures micro-muscle tremors which are impossible to hear with the human ear. When the machine detects that a person is no longer speaking within his normal range, it is an indication the person is lying.

Layered Voice Analysis   LVA uses a patented and unique technology to detect “brain activity traces” using the voice as a medium. By utilizing a wide range spectrum analysis to detect minute involuntary changes in the speech waveform itself, LVA can detect anomalies in brain activity and classify them in terms of stress, excitement, deception, and varying emotional states, accordingly.

Professionals in the field of lie detection know that there is no "true" lie detector, as lying is not a unified set of feelings that can be measured. Lying is a result of a deep logical process that is executed with a particular intention. One might lie to protect oneself from harm, while another might lie to gain profit, or even just to make a joke. Due to this variety in motivation and intention, there is no fixed set of characteristics (physiological or psychological) that differentiate lies from truth. However, LVA is capable of detecting the intention behind the lie, and by doing so can lead you to identifying and revealing the lie itself.

Cate's Book Club

On Friday evening, November 21 I experienced my first book club meeting regarding Recalculating Truth.  Lots of great questions, a lot of enthusiasm, and a few bottles of wine (and Buddy the dog).  Readers are absolutely vital in the process of creating stories and characters.  It was exciting to hear other describe thoughts and ideas and people that had come out of my head.  I don't think that most readers realize how powerful they are.  This was an exceptional group - both literarily and technically savvy.  Thank you all for inviting me and sharing your thoughts.

New!

It's confusing.  Everybody loves new things . . . new clothes, new cars, new cell phones.  People pay money to get a new cell phone every year or every week!  It's a passion!  But wait a minute.  Those new things are from well known brands . . . Apple, Toyota, Michael Kors!  Are they really new or are they just . . . I don't know . . . an improvement on something existing?  (I've always wondered how something could be 'New and Improved!'  Can you improve something that didn't exist?)

But what about things that are truly new like the first radio, the first airplane, the first telephone?  It took awhile for those innovations to be accepted.  The same thing is true for new artists or writers.  A new book by a known author is much easier to take a chance on than a new book by an author you've never heard of.  It's another attrition filter.  There are thousands of new writers out there trying to get someone to pay attention to their new book.  I don't know if this is a fact, but the average new book sells less than 100 copies.  Like most things, if a writer doesn't get encouragement, they will often lose faith in their ability, and they will stop writing - moving on to something else.  Who knows how many really good writers have simply stopped writing.

But maybe NEW could be made into an asset!  Like a rookie baseball card!  What if you had the Ernest Hemingway rookie writer card?  Or the John Updike rookie card?  What would those be worth on Ebay?  It could come in a package with a flat piece of the pink, yuckie chewing gum!  The card could be for the book and the team could be the writer.  Or we could form writer teams like the New York Novelists or the Cape Cod Psychological Thrillers or the Maniac Mystery Writers!

I don't know.  You get a little punchy being creative over a hot keyboard!