Category: writing

Waiting

I’m now signed up with two different ways of working in the health service and I still haven’t been deployed anywhere. Hurry up and wait seems to be turning the days into a miasma of ennui. Getting out of bed has reverted to being very difficult. It’s rare for me to manage it before 2pm and I don’t see that improving until I have a reason to get up. At 8 months old, Jellyfish is having a sleep regression. Every time he wakes up in the night for milk, he decides to spend an hour playing. Crawling. Making noises. My husband has just put him down for a nap and said it was like trying to tire out the Energizer Bunny. I’d  agree with that.

I planted some pea seeds. They have sprouted. They are in tiny pots.

I’m trying to put an application in for university, to retrain in a proper healthcare job. I want to be a dietitian, or a midwife. I’m going to talk more about that in an upcoming post because I want to get my head on properly before I apply.

Everyone is getting restless. It’s a brilliant sunny day today, and I can hear a cacophony of hedge cutters, lawn mowers and other such things. Staying indoors would be harder if we had anywhere to go.

Apparently, putting a couple of bits of gardening equipment outside the back door was a mistake. Like a dog marking his territory, the landlord and his adult son decided to use my back door (which is all glass) as target practice with a football. I know everyone is going stir crazy but it literally felt like the house was being invaded, like they were trying to say, “you can’t put things in the space around your house. That’s our house and we can do whatever we like with it. You have no garden. Not even that concrete outside your back door.” The ball kept hitting the gardening equipment and my back window as well.

Timmy, our last surviving rabbit, lives just inside the back door, where we have set up his hutch opposite the fridge and the tumble dryer. We leave the hutch door open nearly all the time, and just outside it, he has a little pet pillow and a pile of hay to snuggle in. I got quite hacked off about the fact the football was stressing out my beautiful orange rabbit, although I didn’t know how to go out and say anything without being confrontational so I just stayed indoors and seethed. I’m actually doing an anger management counselling course online at the moment so I’ll be able to help people through their anger soon. One big part of it is it’s okay to be angry sometimes.

So the house is basically an island surrounded by shark-infested water. We can’t go out, except to walk to the car and drive somewhere, which you’re not supposed to do right now.

The sun is an ongoing concern. I read in a reputable newspaper that a giant hole in the ozone layer opened up over winter, and apparently it circles over the northern hemisphere. It will be over us for the next month while it takes time to dissipate. On the map, Ireland looks so small compared to this circling threat of cancer and death.

I haven’t fully looked into the dangers of sun exposure without the ozone layer, but it worries me. There are three types of UV radiation that goes from the sun to Earth; UVA, UVB and UVC. The ozone layer usually protects us from the worst, which can cause skin cancer, blindness, sunburn and cataracts (although the cataracts presumably aren’t going to concern you if you’re already blind).

What I’m not sure on is how this will affect plants and animals. They’re outside all the time, and our ecosystem is already hanging in a delicate balance because of man-made problems like pollution and global warming. If species get irradiated and wiped out, the whole ecosystem could fall apart.

I’m worried. It would be easier not to worry if I had some work to do. I can’t write my books right now, because they just seem so frivolous and self-indulgent, like a complete waste of time, but I don’t have anything else to do because I’m waiting for the phone to ring to know which pharmacy needs my help. And then there’s the feeling, underneath it all, the one from the part of me that hates myself. No one needs you. You have nothing to contribute. Why did you even try and help? Like anyone would need you in a crisis. 

I’m glad I have my little jellyfish. Those sort of thoughts got really bad in the 6 months after his birth but generally, the fact he exists and is so dependent on me means the thoughts pass eventually. Someone needs me. Someone wants me around, even if he doesn’t show it. Someone is sad when I’m not near him.

The thoughts return after a while. They’re like waves. Sometimes the tide is high and I’m drowning, battered by wave after freezing wave of dark thoughts, clinging to a slippery rock, trying not to fall into the sea, wondering why I’m fighting it so hard. Other times, the tide goes out and there’s sunshine and a mile of golden sandy beach between me and the water. The less obvious danger then is when I forget how bad the sea becomes at high tide.

Is there such a thing as an Emotional Support Baby? [there would be a laughing emoji here if I knew how to get one on WordPress]

 

So many things going on!!

So I totally planned to put up a tutorial video last week, did my make up, got my camera out and everything, then I never got a chance to film it. This past week and a half, I’ve been swept up in the current of events again and haven’t had any time to think about filming/editing a video, or doing much else, either. Here’s why:
1. My dissertation: The big thesis project thing that I have to write at the end of my Master’s degree. Guess what? That is now. And it needs my full attention. But it’s not getting it, because I am lazy and/or ADHD, so decided it was more important to do the rest of this list…
2. I wrote a #1 bestselling lesbian erotica story last week, edited it, got a friend to proofread, designed the cover myself and threw it at the Internet in the hope that it would land somewhere half decent. It did. I have shifted 500 copies in the last 8 hours alone. Why did I do it? To see what happened if I did. Wish Ulla was here to see this day.
3. I’m going on an away weekend with the sailing cru this weekend. It’s gonna be hella awesome (always is) and probably exhausting (always is) and hopefully nothing will capsize this time, but obviously there’s this tiny voice in the back of my mind, telling me to get on with my research.
4. My husband has accepted (like, on Wednesday) a fantastic job half-way around the world, and we have 4 months to empty the house, rent it out or sell it, and emigrate abroad. Emigration is the week before my MSc dissertation is due, so… no pressure to get THAT done early.
5. I have been researching glitter eyeshadows. I really want to buy some glitter eyeshadows and didn’t know where to look (there’s a difference between shimmer and glitter… shimmer is bad as you age, but glitter is good. And we’re talking grown-up glitter here). The options I’ve found are Make-Up For Ever Glitter, Make-Up For Ever Diamond Dust, Stila Magnificent Metals Glitter and Glow Liquid Eye Shadow, Sephora’s own brand glitter eyeshadows and Urban Decay’s Moon Dust Powder. Has anyone tried these? If I can’t find any info on which ones will give me the look I want, I’ll buy a selection (expensive though!!) and report back to y’all on what’s good. It’s sorta ridiculous that this is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN MY LIFE right now, given the points listed above.

So I will definitely get a half-decent article out at some point this week (it’s a shame because I’d just started posting more often than once a week or fortnight then life happened again). It will probably involve glitter eye makeup or a review of the exciting Korean sheet masks I bought today.

Review: Dracula and Frankenstein: Penguin Clothbound Classics

I spotted these Penguin Clothbound classics on Amazon, and I decided to take a look at them.

penguin clothbound classics review frankenstein and dracula

I’m a voracious reader. I always thought I would be the last person to embrace the new trend of eBooks. I still write some of my books on paper before I type them up, and I do all my planning on paper, too, and type that up. There’s something reassuringly solid about a nice book, with pages that can be turned. However, there’s distinct advantages to ebooks when you read in the quantity that I do. If you only have 1 chapter left, you don’t have the dilemma about whether to cram 2 books into your handbag for the day, or whether to risk having nothing to read at lunchtime. Physical books take up far too much room if you can’t afford a large house. Before I moved in with my husband, I moved around a lot, because I didn’t really have anywhere permanent to live, which meant that about once every three months, I would have to fill up a stacking crate or two with books, and carry them (I didn’t own a car) to a charity shop. I feel sad when I think of all the books I no longer have, books I liked, and would like to read again, because I simply didn’t have the space to keep them all. I still remember dragging those heavy boxes of books, my arms nearly falling off under the weight, to make sure they found a new home.

I had a very strict rule, though; if I couldn’t carry it, I couldn’t keep it. That was borne from being homeless and destitute a few too many times, because when you get somewhere to live after being homeless, especially if some charitable agency donates clothes or books to you, it’s easy to accumulate a lot of things again in a short space of time, but not necessarily the most useful or appropriate things. You feel bad about getting rid of them, though, and so I wouldn’t. Then, every time I ended up homeless again, usually because my mother hadn’t paid our rent, or she’d threatened to stab the landlord/lady who owned the place we were living in, or she’d been offensive or violent toward another resident in wherever we lived, we’d end up homeless again. And when there were so many objects, it was hard to know what to take when we had limited space and only very short amounts of time.

As an adult, then, I held fast to that rule, and because I had to move so frequently for work, I found it difficult to let the books go, but sometimes you have to make hard decisions when you haven’t quite found a place where you and things go together (shameless Breakfast at Tiffany’s reference… another book I no longer have).

Then, one day, about six and a half years ago, I found a place where I and things might go together, only my husband had already filled it all with his things and there wasn’t really any room for me and I didn’t feel it was my place to say anything. So about eighteen months later, when we had to move to a different city for teacher training, we upsized and rented an enormous house, many times the size of the one we have now. That house had about 4800 feet of floor space excluding the garages which the landlord retained. It had two kitchens, a laundry, servants’ quarters (we kept the bunny down there), and the sort of staircase with a huge sweep to it. We accumulated a lot of stuff but I was still reluctant to indiscriminately bring things into the house. I will never forget the time I came home from a long day and found that my husband had ordered eight enormous bookcases to turn one of the huge rooms of the house into a library for his 2000 books. To match, he added a handmade wooden dining table which seated twelve. I was initially apoplectic at all this unexpected furniture, but I got used to it.

This was when we had money, and prospects, and all sorts of other wonderful things (like a future). Those things have all been in extremely short supply for the last few years.

We moved to this (much smaller, but still fine for 2 people, at 600 feet square) house in late 2013 and because we were both working 14 hours a day, five days a week, we had to move overnight (we did it ourselves as we had no money for a removal van) and we literally just moved everything with no thought as to what to keep. I put in a lot of hard work clearing out our house over the last couple of years to declutter it of all the things we had accumulated when we lived in that proper house. One of my hardest tasks was to read the first three chapters of every single book in my husband’s 2000-book library to decide which ones were worth keeping. I pared it down by about 60% (and ended up reading most of the books we kept). The thing is, those 2000 books (now about 800) were all sci-fi and fantasy novels, of varying quality and noteworthiness, so we didn’t have copies of quite a few very common books, but we did have duplicates of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, amongst other things. Since my husband came with such an enormous library, I haven’t felt able to buy books for myself. Ebooks came to the rescue, on that score, and before I got Kindle for PC/iPhone, I missed so many new book releases because I felt bad for adding to the unmanageable collection of books we already had.

So with all that in mind, it feels a little bit ridiculous that I recently realized the value in having a nice set of decorative novels around the house. So when I learned about the Penguin Clothbound Classics, I was very taken by the design. I took a look through the list to see which books had been clothbound, and imagine my surprise when I found they’d picked Dracula and Frankenstein.

penguin clothbound classics review frankenstein and dracula

Frankenstein is a book that made a big impression on me when I first read it at fourteen (ditch the popular version retold a thousand times in film). It’s about a construct whose story reflects the otherness and isolation of trying to live in a world which often seems as though it’s made for a different type of person.

penguin clothbound classics review frankenstein and dracula

What I really love about this version is it has anatomical drawings on the cover, of hearts, but they’re not pretty puffy hearts, they’re biology diagrams of hearts. I thought that was especially appropriate for the subject matter.

penguin clothbound classics review frankenstein and dracula

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a story I started reading on my Kindle for iPhone about a year ago. I love that you can get free ebooks of all the great classics, but the Kindle version of Dracula that I got was really badly formatted and I gave up after about 30 pages. I think some books are better suited to being in paper form, so I’ve bought this version. The cover is all black, and while the design is not as inspired as that on the Frankenstein, I still rather liked it:

penguin clothbound classics review frankenstein and dracula

penguin clothbound classics review frankenstein and dracula

Here’s the title page inside each book:

penguin clothbound classics review frankenstein and dracula bram stoker

penguin clothbound classics review frankenstein and dracula mary shelley

Here’s a page at random from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to show the text size and layout quality:

penguin clothbound classics review frankenstein and dracula mary shelley

I’m really looking forward to reading Dracula next!

I’ve got a bunch more of these on my mental wishlist, but at £11.99-£14.99 I could only let myself have 2 this time. Perhaps I’ll have the whole set before we emigrate, which is very likely to be August now, but probably not. There’s about 40 of them all told, which is £800-£1000, and there’s no way I can spend that much money on books!! I can’t talk about where we’re emigrating at the moment because it’s all working out, for the second time in my life something is actually working the way it ought to, and I don’t want to jinx it all, but I promise I’ll tell you all before we depart.

Here’s Dracula on Amazon.com. Apparently Frankenstein is out of print in the US but it’s here on Amazon.co.uk.

Good Luck America!

Just a little picture I made for all my American readers today:

Good luck America go vote!

What are you waiting for? Thanksgiving?

Is it me or was the last election way more exciting? I stayed up through the night listening to live radio broadcasts of the vote counting and I cried a bit when Obama won because I knew he was the right guy for the job, but there’s so much institutional racism in America that I honestly didn’t expect him to get anywhere.

Also if you happen to stick a sticker on Susan B Anthony’s grave* I’m pretty sure you get 1000 points to Gryffindor and a pair of odd socks.**

*Pretty sure that would be some sort of crime in my country, and that you’d find angry people yelling at Matt Le Blanc about it.

**Or double, if you get this reference.***

***Potter for President!

First frost of winter

Hello lovelies hope you are all wrapped up warm and toasty this morning. I got up and looked out of the window, only to discover that all the car windscreens are frosty! Unfortunately, the sun is low in the sky but really strong so if there was any frost on the blades of grass, it has melted and they all just look soggy/damp. Hello, world, this is not photogenic! So instead of sharing beautiful landscape photographs, I’m going to will the postman to bring my new tripod sooner, and I’m dreading that moment in twenty minutes when I have to put my tea down, cast off my blanket and venture out into the freezing cold world and cycle to my work placement (we still don’t have a car).

Frozen winter meme cold winter is coming Elsa
I don’t own these images. Top: Disney. Bottom: CNN

What’s the world looking like where you live? Is it winter there yet? Let me know in the comments (and link me to any photos you’d like to share! I love seeing people’s photos)!

His Naughty Little Friend

When I was a housewife, before I started my master’s degree (which should basically have the title, ‘Lucy wants a master’s’), I had a lot more time to pay attention to my rabbits. Now, I am still a housewife (in the sense that I take care of it, because I like how it grounds me) but I’m also doing my MSc in Obscure Science (not housewifery or even midwifery, either of which would be useful), and I have a social life now thanks to the university’s writing (Lucy starts a book club) and sports societies (Lucy goes sailing), and doing a placement at an academic publishing house (Lucy wants a career), where I code their website and copyedit bibliograhies into English from bizarre languages; then I’m also applying for grad schemes with Severn Trent (Lucy still wants a career) and writing my romance books (Lucy… writes something??). While I’m cooking his dinner or sorting out the dishwasher in the evening (Lucy’s a fifties housewife again), I tend to look out of the window and see the rabbits. It’s the only time of day I tend to notice them now, but don’t worry, they’re not being ignored. Ricky – I mean my Dearest – can spend lots of time with them because he’s getting hardly any work due to having a very foreign last name which is career-fatal in post-Brexit-vote-Britain (Lucy and Ricky still want to move to Canada).

Poppy and Fifer are the only two rabbits living in the huge indoor-outdoor enclosure (Lucy gets a rabbit… or 4), who live in the big shed in our garden which I think the council built in the fifties so housewives got some reprieve from their husbands filling their home with tools (like mine does, since our shed is home to our rabbits). After Fifer lost Katie (Douglas Adams never had to write about these sort of problems) I thought he’d never love again, then Poppy appeared. The bunnies love each other so much it makes my heart grow three sizes just to see them grooming each other. Until Timmy goes outside. Then sparks fly because Poppy is a romantic at heart.

Poppy is a very determined rabbit (by Fifer’s standards). Fifer wants her all to himself, and she wants some sort of three-way with Timmy (our indoor rabbit). If Timmy is outside, every time Fifer hops away from the fence for a few minutes, his naughty little girlfriend is straight over to where Timmy is sitting, and she’s trying to get out of the rabbit run to be with him. I think she might be a polyamorous rabbit, but Fifer has no interest in a guy-on-guy relationship.

I think in Poppy’s mind, there’s no problem with having two boyfriend rabbits and she can live a life of luxury. I guess she’s a little bit of a bored housewife sometimes too (maybe she can be Ethel in our Lucy analogy; she’s also a housewife) and wants something more than a giant rabbit hutch, 24/7 indoor/outdoor access, an attentive (if slightly overprotective) boyfriend and a nice view of the rest of the garden. She wants the excitement of a second relationship with Timmy. She adores Timmy just as much as she loves Fifer. Fifer, however, disagrees, and he’ll chase her away and bite her if he catches her showing an interest in Timmy.

little Timmy and his bed
Timmy lounging on his bed in the living room next to a pile of his toys.

Anyway, it’s been even more fun this weekend, as we had to put Poppy and Fifer in the kitchen due to the November 5th fireworks. Guy Fawkes night is a British thing where people celebrate that something horrible happened to someone for standing up for what he believed in, because people need to know that conformity is hella important and whatnot. I was raised Catholic by my strict Irish grandma (who looked after me in fits and bursts when my mother was lounging around the house sleeping her life away and waking up to shout at us, hit us or lock us out and tell us how lucky we were to not be Chinese, where, apparently, people were starving. Long story short, my grandma stepped in whenever we started missing school, but sent us home again every time my mum promised she’d changed).

My grandma was an amazing woman (I’ve kept her last name after I got married, in the matrilineal style – when I was engaged, one of my biggest worries was how to respect my husband by taking his name while still honoring my grandma by keeping hers, so I split my double-barrel, dropped the side I had no affinity for, and replaced it with my husband’s name). So, anyway, I digress a little, but the point is, when you’re raised Catholic by a grandma who never moved on from the fifties and sees *everything* you do, you tend not to burn Guy Fawkes for being a Catholic criminal. She was more vigilant than the nuns that I knew, but like the nuns, she was lovely until you were naughty, and she was lovely again straight after. My grandma died in ’99, when I was twelve, but as far as I know, my entire extended family has never made a Guy to burn.

Maybe it’s my old-fashioned upbringing, but as an adult, I find the idea of burning an effigy of Guy Fawkes to be in very poor taste. We wouldn’t stand for people doing that to Saddam Hussein, for example, we’d say it was racist jingoism, but Guy Fawkes? Get kids to scrounge money by walking him round in a wheelbarrow then set him on fire. Because it’s British.

Poppy is his naughty little bunny
Poppy wants her picture taken.

Anyway, the rabbits are terrified of fireworks and last week the neighbors on one side decided to have huge loud expensive fireworks aimed over our garden, and I was being pelted by shells of fireworks and getting sparks inches from my face and explosions a couple of feet above my head while I was trying to get the rabbits in, so we planned ahead and got them in early this weekend, to make sure my PTSD wasn’t triggered by a giant dick with too many fireworks. Because of our brand spanking new door between the kitchen and the living room, with the see-through glass panels, the rabbits can now see one another when the door’s closed. I open their indoor hutch because I don’t agree with confining them just because the rest of the world is setting off incendiary devices for entertainment. To be honest, the heat level in the kitchen is far too hot for outdoor rabbits so I try and keep the thermostat low while these two are inside. So while Poppy is hopping around in the kitchen, she can get a glimpse of Timmy, but Fifer can’t smell him, so he doesn’t know. But his naughty little girlfriend sits by the kitchen door and watches Timmy while he sleeps (Timmy sleeps a lot). If only Fifer knew what she was doing, she would be in so much trouble!

Poppy and fifer little rabbits
Fifer decides it’s time to put his foot down

The psychology of choosing a color scheme for your website

I was reading (as I’m sure many of you do, too) Neil Patel’s blog earlier today when I came across this interesting article about the psychology of choosing a color scheme for your blog or website. I quite like reading articles that go into psychology, because while I doubt they’re applicable to everyone, everywhere, I usually find something of value in them (unless they’re truly terrible).

Most of Neil’s article was very interesting, and I liked spending time thinking about how color schemes affect the way my readers feel when they’re on my site. I don’t want anyone to get distracted by a jarring or stark color scheme and I do sometimes wonder if my black-and-white format is too harsh for my usual content.

I found his take on the “color wheel” (part-way down that article, looks like a flower) and at first I was interested, then I felt I just had to disagree with the “meanings” assigned to color. Purple, for instance was associated with revulsion. It’s my favorite color, so of course, I don’t feel revulsion when I see purple. According to the color wheel Neil had posted, the exact shade of orange which is part of his own branded color scheme, was a color which evoked mixture of vigilance and rage. It just doesn’t add up, does it?
I decided to search for some more interpretations of how color affects people, and I found these:

This one has been done phenomenologically and it’s sounding very authoritative but it has no evidence on which it’s based its conclusions, which appears to be an endemic problem in this topic.

This article from Entrepreneur.com has a good summary of the debates surrounding the psychology of colour and highlights the need for more evidence.
There is no doubt that color plays a huge part in buying behavior in marketing, but no-one seems able to agree on which colors are best to do what.

Personally? I think the most important thing is to use a color scheme that goes together properly. The color blender color matching tool often gives surprising results, but overall I think it works very well. In some instances, the coloring might be obvious (this erotica author’s writing site, for example, is themed monochrome and pink, and it’s easy to tell that it’s a steamy romance author’s site with exciting books) but in other cases, the role of color is ambiguous and complicated.

Different colors mean different things to different people, but we can associate color schemes or sets of colors with the things we know they represent – for example, fire is orange, water is blue, so is sky. If we see those colors, with other associated colors (orange with brown for the logs on the fire or black for coals, and grey for smoke, for example) it will definitely ensure people make links between a brand and a concept or thing.

I have no idea how to apply any of this to Delight and Inspire, but it’s been interesting to research how other people have thought about the psychology of color.
Isn’t color theory fascinating?

This post was scheduled; I’ll reply to comments tomorrow 🙂

What actually happens when a content farm steals your handmade content

Today I want to talk about something that very regularly affects writers, beauty bloggers and photography bloggers, and occasionally affects travel bloggers too: Content theft. How does it happen and what can you do about it?

I am a moderate traffic website; according to both Amazon and Alexa, I am not yet in the big leagues (I’m in the top 1,000,000 websites, but so are 999,999 other sites). I do have some very good SEO, however, and I score first result on the first page of Google for at least 10 different search terms, because I work very hard to make my content relevant to what people are searching for. Because of this, I’m not blind to the crappy games some other sites play so they can rank higher in Google.

The past two days, however, my single most popular article has taken a nosedive. My traffic has plummeted and I have lost more than a hundred visitors a day. When investigating this, I discovered that a content-farm type website has basically stolen my top ranking article, reworded it and dumbed it down, and posted it on their site. They aren’t ranking above me, but they’ve got enough relevance that they’ve taken some of my traffic away. The thing is, despite the fact they’ve directly paraphrased my article, and added in some photoshopped snazzy pictures (that they also haven’t attributed), they’ve not actually said where they got it from. And they haven’t asked me if they could steal my stuff.

content theft statistics
Picture showing my most popular page; this page was most popular, day in day out, for months.
content theft how to tell
The stats for the blue circles page have increased, proving this shouldn’t have been a “quiet day.” It’s only my most popular page that’s been affected, and all the other stats were just the usual day-to-day fluctuations. That’s how I knew it was probably a content theft issue.

I get by solely on my income from this website and from the books I write (on my author website). This website (Delight and Inspire) generates 20-100% of my income on any given month. Needless to say, I don’t make much money. So when someone steals my personally researched and written articles, changes a few words to get past Google’s duplication penalties, and, by proxy, prevents visitors from finding my site, it makes me feel worried. If people took every article from my site and did that, I’d have no income. It would be like someone putting the PDF of my books on torrent sites, and it’s obviously not a nice feeling.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do about it because they haven’t just copied and pasted my work. So this is an exercise in pragmatism more than a solution. I am usually not remotely precious about copyright, and when people email me, asking if they can, for example, translate my articles into Italian, I am usually happy that the information is getting shared. But that’s the difference. The cool Italian guy asked, and I knew they were using my content in that way, and I’m happy with the result, which is that Italians can now read that information in their own language. I now get 1-2 emails a week from Italians trying to cross the Bering Strait (true story). Generally, I think sharing information is the way forward.

When someone does it without acknowledging the source material, however, they’re just trying to make themselves look good with other people’s hard work. And that’s not ok. I would bet money that the person who stole my content was paid by the content farm for “creating” my content. But since half the internet is run by automatic bots and computers these days, with little user generated interaction on sites like Livestrong (a content farm), there’s no-one I can contact about this issue (normally, you can contact someone and ask for the page to be taken down or attributed).

So after the initial infuriation has worn off, I am left with the truth of the situation. Someone stole my stuff, they fooled Google (and whoever paid them to “write” it) and my income has been affected. I cannot do anything about it, so I can either go crazy (crazier) with rage and fury at this daylight robbery and turn into a pathetic dribbling ball of tears, or I can choose to let it go.

Imma let it go, and looking to the future, I’m going to try to ensure that I keep producing fresh, relevant content for my readers that ensures I always rank first on Google for other things. Like my lip plumpers review or my eyelash serum comparison reviews that I have written.

How have you dealt with copyright theft? Let me know in the comments!

The Neverending Story: A Cautionary Tale

Neverending story Michael Ende
It’s dead.

For those of you who don’t actually know, the Neverending Story was a movie from the 80s with a super-catchy theme tune. It was also a book by Michael Ende, a German dude. It was fashionable at the time for authors to sell movie rights to Hollywood then, upon seeing the film of their work, complaining that it destroyed their work and that they wanted nothing more to do with it (see also: Alan Moore).

Michael Ende sorta did that. So you don’t know who he is any more.

It’s actually a good read, in the same league as The Princess Bride. And The Neverending Story is also a great film. I liked the sequels when I was little, but they didn’t have the same timelessness as the first one.

But my favorite part is the theme tune by Limahl. The lyrics are just… just perfect.

 

What happens after a publisher accepts your work?

There’s millions, if not zillions, of articles for unpublished writers, but what about for those people publishing their first novel, who don’t know what to expect? There are a lot less people whose work has been accepted by a publisher, so I guess less people can write about that with any degree of authority, not to mention the fact that less people want to know about it. I thought I’d start with talking about what happens after a publisher accepts your work for publication, giving people an insight into the publication process.

If you start by sending in a proposal, they will read over the proposal and they should either accept your proposal or decline it. If they’ve accepted it, they may suggest changes to make it more marketable. Mandatory changes should be made clear. After you have your proposal back, you can get on with writing (unless you’re really naughty like me, and start writing the bits you know will be fine while you’re waiting to hear back from them).

If you didn’t send in a proposal, you’ll either send in a sample first, or just a complete manuscript. If you did send in a proposal, the next thing you send them is the full manuscript. Make sure you’ve done as much editing as you can to the manuscript before you send it to them; I found this very, very difficult with my first book because I had no idea what needed doing to it. After they’ve got everything, it gets sent to a line editor. The line editor’s job is to go through your work and write notes on any improvements you need to make to your work; some improvements are optional, but some are mandatory. If you’re unsure about whether a change is mandatory or not, ask your editor and they will tell you one way or the other.

Once they’ve written those notes, they will send you back the annotated manuscript, or they’ll send you back the notes separately, and your job as the writer is to make the changes and improvements to your work. Some places give you deadlines for this, others don’t mind. After you’ve made your improvements, they will send your work to a copy editor.

The copy editor is the last person from the publishing house who will see your work; they go through it and format it to in-house style guidelines, and they generally use the Merriam Webster dictionary and the Chicago Manual of Style as a reference for anything that’s questionable. They will also flag up typos and spelling and grammatical errors, inconsistencies (one minute she wears a red hat, the next minute she wears a blue bonnet), and factual errors. After they’ve done that, you should get your work back, at which point you either have to make the copy-editor’s changes or you have to have a damn good reason (“I don’t like that change” isn’t one) to reject their changes – the Big Five Publishers, and some of the smaller ones, will usually expect you to give references to support your reasons for not approving every change made by the copy editor, but check this before sending back reams of information, because some places don’t want that (my current publisher doesn’t). When the copy editor gets it wrong, you need to raise that with someone at your publisher (or get your agent to do this, if you have one).

Once you’ve approved or rejected (with references) the copy edits, you send the work back to the publishers and they start work on the cover. After you’ve seen the cover, it’s natural to get very excited about your forthcoming book. If you like the cover, let them know, and they will get the blurb written and the proofs made up, or if they’re an ebook publisher, this is when it will be prepared to be made available online.

At some point before the book is made available online, you should receive a contract (if you haven’t received one, let them know). The contract is the only thing that protects you from getting royally screwed over by your publisher, so read it carefully and get a lawyer (one who has seen other book contracts, not any old lawyer) to read it over if you’re unsure about anything. Sometimes publishers try it on with their contracts but you have to stand your ground, otherwise you’ll regret it when the book’s a bestseller and you’re not making any money. I got taken for a ride by one publisher, a few years ago, who published my unedited work, lied literally every step of the way, and never paid me the advance. Later, when I tried to get that sorted out, I discovered that I would have to go to somewhere on the East Coast of America to take them to arbitration to get my money back, and that I had to do this within a certain time period, which I’d missed, because they’d spent so long delaying in answering and I’d been too patient. If I’d understood this beforehand, I would have acted sooner to get it resolved, but it was my first book and I didn’t know what to expect from the publication process (hence this article).

If you’ve signed the contract AND RECEIVED THE ADVANCE (if you are in the habit of accepting advances – I am not) then you’re good to get excited about the release date. Many contracts have a clause stating the author must do their best to publicize the novel – there are a bunch of ways you can do this and I’ll talk about them in a future article.

Has your experience of the publication process been different? Let me know in the comments!