No, not the movie. I’m referring to the song that the movie borrowed its title from.
I called up my friend LeRoy on the phone
I said, Buddy, I’m afraid to be alone
I got some weird ideas in my head
About things to do in Denver when you’re dead…
It was exactly like that, except completely different. As readers following these posts in chronological order know, the simply difficult process of adapting the screenplay for Raether’s Enzyme into a novel manuscript reached narrative complete in October 2017. I wasn’t dead, but it was a period of relative quiet. My brain was cooling with subtle ticking noises and spurts of steam. Sizzling drops of cerebrospinal fluid hit the floor.
Friends help you move read your Facebook posts.
Real friends help you move bodies read your first drafts.
Unresolved bugs and story ideas lurking in OneNote invited me to dive into editing and rewrites, but the writings of the Ancients said that I should step back for at least two weeks then approach those tasks with refreshed eyes. My own experience in the software industry also argued that I should wait for feedback from my beta readers before making any big changes to my story’s code. That feedback would reveal a heat map of where the writing and story were strong and weak. The heat map would shape edits and rewrites, steering me towards what needed fixing and away from breaking things the readers already liked.
My courageous beta readers needed time. They had jobs, families, and lives of their own that somehow had priority over reading hundreds of pages my freshly-picked words. After months of working with imaginary people who existed to advance my narrative, the loss of control inherent in handing work off to real people was…grounding. While the beta readers worked, I was alone with some weird ideas in my head.
Doomsday Prepping
In the 20th Century, failure to secure a publishing deal all but doomed a novel. Vanity press was an option, but an expensive one with a low chance of successfully connecting the story to its audience or making money for the author. The new millennium saw the advent of eBooks and Print-On-Demand (POD) services. These disruptive technologies lowered the cost of “vanity publishing” to the point where any author could put their book up for sale in digital form or actually hold a bound copy in their hands for a modest price. These options have advanced to a point where they have challenged the traditional publishers and sparked lively debate as to whether authors of any level of success should submit their manuscripts or self-publish.
So, the arrival of that last rejection letter is no longer doomsday. Preparing for self-publishing is prudent. That’s what I told myself when I prioritized an exploration of self-publishing over working on a query letter, writing synopses, proofreading, and sundry other tasks. A friend had a good experiencing publishing a how-to book via CreateSpace, a POD appendage of Amazon. He assured me that I could hold a proof copy of my story in my hands without committing to publishing on the platform. It was irresistible.
CreateSpace-ing RE Draft 1.0
I was still a bit leery of committing my work to CreateSpace, so I set up the project to “publish” a novel titled RE Draft 1.0.
CreateSpace will walk you through the pre-press process, which has a small number of steps and some of the pitfalls along the way. I reached the point where I had selected the 6”x9” trade paperback format and was ready to upload my manuscript. I hope that magic on their end would reformat the text as necessary. It didn’t. The file was rejected. The site listed a number of general errors regarding content being out of bounds. It said the book would be over 700 pages long. I was stunned.
CreateSpace is not without mercy. It wants to help. It produced its best effort to wrangle the manuscript in the form of a downloadable Word file. From that, I could see where certain graphics embedded in the text broke through the margins. The high page count came in part from the manuscript’s double spacing. There were problems page numbering and chapters starting on the backs of pages that CreateSpace didn’t flag. It was a mess. After another iteration, I broke down an enable Adobe Flash to run on the site, which enabled CreateSpace’s previewer to give me a good look at the book’s contents. A bit more fiddling and an argument over who was responsible for what part of the front matter later, and I had what I thought was a good interior.
Dev Art
With the interior settled, CreateSpace said I was ready to work on the cover. The site has a library of design templates and stock photographs you can combine for a professional-looking but generic effect. I had something more specific in mind, so I picked the Simplicity theme, which allowed me to supply an image file that defines the whole cover.
Those who have read my bio and have worked in the software industry are rolling their eyes. In the early stages of app development, the graphic design team is busy working on the art that will be folded into the product to make it beautiful and useful. To keep the project moving along, the software engineers supply placeholder art. The quality of these placeholders varies from crude scribblings to carefully crafted work that the engineer secretly hopes everyone will fall in love with and ship to the customer. These placeholders are known as ‘developer art’, or ‘dev art’. They are almost always far below the quality required to ship and are rarely seen outside the company. I knew what I was setting out to do was dev art. I knew that in the end, I would hire a professional artist to do a proper cover. But I just had to try.
I’ve seen thousands of book covers in my life. There was I time when I would buy a book if it had cool cover art. I could see the cover for Raether’s Enzyme in my mind. Our protagonist is in the foreground. Her hands are pressed against her solar plexus, trying to contain the luminous vapors of Raether’s enzyme. Her trusty dog stands watch behind her, where the villains of the story loom. It’s all dark and all the characters are backlit, appearing as silhouettes. The title is corrupted by digital noise. This is a techno-thriller.
My search for public domain and stock photos to build this tableau went nowhere slowly. I couldn’t even find a dog of the right breed in the pose I needed. A professional artist can draw people and animals. I was stumped and went back to the stage before the drawing board. What I came up was to combine a picture of a mountain lake here in the Pacific Northwest (setting) with a stylized DNA double-helix (Raether’s enzyme arises from a rare mutation).
I enjoy hiking in the Washington Cascades, so my photo library has a number of picturesque lakes to choose from. The best fit based on lake size and picture angle is Snow Lake. Of the many pictures I’ve taken there over the years, I picked this one as my backdrop.
For the DNA, I went to Google image search. I told Google I wanted a DNA helix that was large and free for commercial use with modifications. It needed to be big so that it could fill the 6”x9” cover without the loss of quality that occurs when you enlarge a photo or bitmap. From the results, I picked the following.
Which no longer appears in the free-to-use results. 🙁
The glowing orange contrasts nicely with the blues and greens of Snow Lake.
I loaded these images into layers in Paint.NET. To help the helix and the title text pop, I inserted a dark translucent layer in front of the lake scene. The result was also less cheerful, which is fine for a thriller.
Given the format (6”x9”) and the page count, CreateSpace will produce a template image with guides to where the art must fit.
Not actual size
I resized the background image to match the template and added the template as a translucent layer in front of the background. It was time to add the title, author, and back cover blurb.
Experiments with various recommended fonts were not satisfying. I wanted the title’s style to reflect the dangerous world between the covers. My search for a menacing (and free) typeface lead me to FontSquirrel. Oh. My. As someone who reveled in inappropriate typography when the Macintosh first unleashed bitmapped fonts on the world, I was in heaven. (FYI: Chicago+bold+shadow+outline is never the right answer to your typographic problem.) I downloaded several candidates. Conspiracy was the best fit.
A few layers more and I had my cover. I’d share it with you now, but… At the time I was satisfied with the cover as a prototype. It was dev art and thus doomed, but it would do for the time. After a few rounds of argument with CreateSpace later, the system green-lit my book for production. I was free to order proof copies. Giddy with optimism and delighted with the under-ten-dollar price, I ordered five copies.
Draft 1.0
What arrived in the mail was disappointing.
I’ve been around desktop publishing since before color was really an option, so I knew that there is always a difference between the colors the computer displays on the screen and the colors the printer can produce. I had naively assumed that CreateSpace would make a quality effort to translate my cover art from RGB to the printer’s CMYK colors with maximum fidelity. I was wrong. I found a handy site that will convert an RGB image to CMYK. All you need to do is pick the right CMYK color profile from their menu. CreateSpace technical support was unable to tell me which profile to use. Grrrrrrr! It took a couple rounds of ordering new proof copies to find one that worked. FWIW, that’s GRACol2006 Coated1 V2.
The interior was a mess as well. This was entirely my fault. I failed to change the text justification from left-justified to full-justified. The book had ragged right margins. That looks so wrong.
The manuscript->book recipe I arrived at is:
- Upload manuscript.
- Get errors.
- Download resized version.
- Change Body Text style to single-spaced, full justified, Garamond 12pt.
- Change Handwriting style to single-spaced Garamond 12pt.
- Resize MAPP/MOPP tables.
- Substitute ⁂ for # scene breaks. Add 6pt before and after.
- Change Chapter Style to Garamond 16pt.
- Check spacing around embedded text messages.
- Page headers – remove author/title. Garamond 12pt. Outside corner odd/even.
- Chapters begin on odd pages. Delete page break and insert section break as needed.
- Map cover art from RGB->CMYK:GRACol2006_Coated1_V2 via https://www.rgb2cmyk.org/.
(Scrivener is a promising option for the next book project. It abstracts the writing from the format, turning my hand-tuning recipe into something resembling a simple ‘Save As…’ operation. There are trade-offs. If you render your Scrivener project as a Word document and hand that off to an editor, all the edits have to be merged back into the project by hand. Or so I suspect. More research is required.)
I am done with my doomsday prepping for now. I can produce bound copies of my story with a modicum of effort. The proof copies preview how various formatting games might play out in the real world. I can offer them to beta readers as a friendlier alternative to a stack of loose pages or an electronic document. And I get the warm, fuzzy joy of holding a copy in my hands and gently stroking the dev art on the cover. Insert purring noise here.