Sheila Rambles

 Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel yesterday as she went to a screening of Citizen Kane  that afternoon and spent long-delayed time in Second Life that evening. She has already started work today.

 Many years ago, my father set up a micropress to publish a textbook my mother had written about nursing education. When I got it in my hypomania-addled head that I wanted to publish some self-help books of my devising, I put together one called Catbooks and Other Methods  about various free-writing techniques for head-clearing and problem-solving. My father let me release it through the auspices of Lullwater Press. (You can still get it! Just go to  https://www.wonderbink.com/books/ and pick your ebook purveyor of choice.) It was a new experience for him as it was for me, since my focus was digital publication and the previous book he'd done had been in print. I designed the cover and handled the conversion process; he got the ISBN block and provided the company details to the various booksellers.  I still haven't sold enough copies to collect payment on it. But, I'm kind of okay with this. It was, primarily, an exercise to to get a feel for the process. I had othe...

 Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel yesterday as she had a very long drive from the lovely little condo where she vacationed to the lovely little condo where she lives.

 Early on in this blog (I'm not going to link to it and embarrass myself) I said that self-publishing was doing the hard work from the wrong end; that the hard work didn't go into making the manuscript perfect enough for a major publisher to pick up, but instead went into notifying the world that your book existed and would anybody like to buy it, please. Please relax. I have rethought that particular perspective, so please don't expend the effort into defending independent publishing. I'm with you. The fourteen-odd novels I've crafted with the help of National Novel Writing Month somehow wove themselves into a unified world which I've taken to calling the Juneiverse, after the main character in a novel called Soft Places , which I tried to revise and submit to agents but got nowhere with. (The last time I reread it, I understood why.) I hope to retell June's story one day in a much better version, but first... The first NaNoWriMo I have successfully complet...