I’m classified in the project management world as a “Director.” That means I like checklists, I like seeing things get marked as complete on that checklist, and I am okay with incomplete work that I can fix later if it means we keep making progress. These are good qualities sometimes. Not so good at other times. Publishing a book is one of those times.

Plan Ahead

For example, these are not good qualities when you are at the last step of submitting a manuscript to the publishing company that is going to produce the eBook and the print-on-demand paper books of your first ever finished book. That is not a good time to start reading about “what is a long description” of a book…which is what I just did for the past three hours. I got it done, though, but it’s probably not as good as it could have been.

I spent about a week getting feedback from goodreads.com on my “blurb” (the little summary on the back of books that tells you all about what you’re going to read). That was very helpful. I got no feedback on my long description. I tried to include keywords, but then it felt awkward, so I took them out. That is bad marketing, by the way. The keywords are how people find books. We’ll see what happens with that. I think I can change long descriptions later on if I want (I think…but that’s the Director part of me talking, fix it later if we can keep going now).

Anyway, today was stressful for me. I am using bookbaby as my indie publishing helper. They do a bunch of stuff (for a fee, of course, but seriously, I don’t have the ability to design a book cover, so I need help), but not everything that I hoped. I really wanted someone that would give me feedback on what I am asking for, like my cover design and my short description, and so on. They don’t do that. I guess there’s probably liability in there, and potentially contention with the authors who think they know everything.

Here’s what I’m excited about, even though I have a headache now, my book is going to be published. That is crazy.

My current (and first) book is in editing right now (thanks, FirstEditing) and I am really excited for it to come back to me so I can move on to the next step. For now though, I am working on my second book, which is actually really my first book.

Let me explain. When I was in fourth grade, I started writing a novel called the Quest for the Crystal Sword. We had creative writing assignments and I thought I would take it just a little further than the assignment asked. I wrote about 30 pages (all printed out on a dot matrix printer…awesome). My best friend, Chris, also was writing a novel (I don’t know which of us came up with the idea first), and his was entitled The Crystal. You can see we were not afraid of plagiarism at the age of eight.

Anyway, I started on that book, I wrote all those pages, and then I set it aside for the next, oh, about, 20 years or so. I started working on it again a few years ago. Needless to say, in that time I had changed a lot. A lot. And when I picked it up to work on it again, I think I kept only two things from the original: the opening line of Chapter 1 (which is now Chapter 2); and the name of the main character. As for the rest, it sounded amazing to a fourth grader, but not so much for a guy in his mid-30s.

It was both interesting and cringe-inducing to go back and read that original manuscript. At the same time, though, it was pretty cool. I have often wondered what my life would be if I had kept at that as an eight-year-old. Would I have beat Christopher Paolini as the most successful youth fantasy author (answer: unlikely…even more realistic answer: no)? But I might not be an engineer today, and I might be wondering what it would be like to NOT be an author, rather than the other way around.

Who knows, of course. That’s one of the truths of life: you never know what ‘might have been.’

Welcome to my website. You may notice there is not much here at the moment. My hope is that will soon change. I am in the process of preparing a book for publishing, and I think I will have plenty to say about that when the time comes. For now I will say only a little about it, especially since I doubt there is anyone that will probably ever read this particular post. The upside to that, though, is that I’m not even worried about spoilers.

The book is titled Thread and Other Stories and is a collection of short stories, the lead story being “Thread.” I am really excited for this book–some of the stories have been in the making since I was 15 years old. The only emotion I am feeling greater than excitement is anxiety. I am a pretty confident person, but you wouldn’t guess that if I was talking to you about this project.

I’m still working on what I want the back cover summary to say, but this is what I have so far:

“I think therefore I am” (René Descartes)

Maybe it isn’t that simple, though.

Prudence and Yannick know poverty firsthand, heartache from the inside out, and injustice from the bottom up. When a young boy with needs beyond their own arrives in their life, they must choose what kind of people they are.

Fair warning: there’s a really good chance that the summary will change, especially considering I changed it while I was transcribing it into this post. Well, that’s all I’ve got for you right now. Here are the short stories included along with “Thread” in the collection:

Thread

Shrink

Chance

Conflict

Oversight

Deception

Conversation

Until next time, then.

Eric