Short blogs from two mystery writers caught my eye this week. Marcia Preston, past president of the Oklahoma Writers Federation, wrote about her son who’s off on his third tour of Afghanistan. Mary O’Gara, current president of Sisters in Crime-Internet Chapter, remembered family members who came home safely from two World Wars, offering a meditation that could easily be used as a cure for writer’s block. Together, these thoughtful blogs seem just right for the Fourth of July observance.
MARCIA PRESTON
I met Marcia Preston in Fresno, California, where she was on the 2001 faculty of the now-defunct William Saroyan Conference. I still have my cassette tape of her workshop on writing a short story. She laid it out so logically and made it sound so easy that I still think “one of these days” I’m going to write a short story.
At the time Marcia was editor-publisher of ByLine magazine and had just written her first mystery, PERHAPS SHE’LL DIE, which was nominated for the 2002 Mary Higgins Clark Award, and for Macavity and Barry awards in the Best First Mystery division.
She has since sold the magazine and (writing as M.K. Preston) published an Oklahoma mystery series featuring Chantalene Morrell, daughter of a Gypsy mother and a redneck father. SONG OF THE BONES won the 2004 Mary Higgins Clark Award for suspense fiction, and also the 2004 Oklahoma Book Award in fiction.
Her most recent novels are general fiction. The latest is THE WIND COMES SWEEPING, set on a wind farm and cattle ranch in Oklahoma.
Marcia earned degrees from University of Central Oklahoma, taught in public high schools for more than a decade, and worked for a time as PR and publications director for the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. There’s more about her and her books on her web site at www.MarciaPreston.com.
Here’s Marcia’s blog.
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THIRD TOUR by Marcia Preston
Do you know how hard it is to watch your child deploy to war in the Mid-East – for the third time in six years?
Some of you do know. Many sons and daughters have served even more tours. By the third deployment, you start to wonder how many times the little buzz-haired boy you raised can walk into harm’s way and return safe and whole. I won’t say unscathed, because nobody returns without cost.
Everyone says it’s much safer in Iraq now, but every day we read of deaths from IEDs and suicide bombings. Our son wears body armor under a standard uniform that’s not cool to start with, in summer temperatures that reach 110 to 120 degrees. And I better not find out he ever goes out without that body armor, even though this is a kid who loved to goose hunt in freezing weather and used to suffer in Oklahoma heat.
I can’t know what it’s really like for our military people, how they face their fears or mark the days missing their families, how they cope. I admire them more than I can speak. But I do know what it’s like for the ones left behind.
Think of the thousands of spouses and children, the mothers and fathers, who deal with this every day. They go about their daily lives doing their best to function normally, but a big chunk of their minds and hearts is overseas, sweating out the days with someone they love more than life itself.
They also serve who only stand and wait.
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MARY O’GARA
Albuquerque writer Mary O'Gara is the new president of the Sisters in Crime Internet chapter, an online chapter of Sisters in Crime, the international organization for readers and writers of mysteries and crime fiction. She’s also one of the busiest and most generous people I know.
Mary is a creativity and spiritual life coach with an eclectic approach to coaching. She has a lifelong passionate interest in creativity and especially enjoys coaching writers, artists, small business owners, and women over 50 who are creating new ways of living in the second half of life.
She’s also an internationally known psychic and astrologer who has been a professional astrologer since 1976, and it was an astrologer that I met her in 2003. I had an appointment with Mary while I was in Albuquerque visiting a friend and attending a workshop sponsored by South West Writers.
Mary’s bio is longer than my arm, but briefly:
She’s a journalism graduate from the University of Nebraska with both the Ph.D. and the D.D. from the Academy of Universal Truth, Seattle. She writers the Starfire astrology column for Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine and the Riding by the Stars column for Motorcycle Rider News. She has been offering online workshops on psychic topics for writers for more than a decade.
Mary is the author of short fiction published in Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine and in two anthologies, Just in Time from eWings Press and The Trouble with Romance from Trebleheart.
The Trouble with Romance was a New Mexico Book Awards finalist. Read more from Mary at her web site: www.maryogara.com.
Mary’s blog was written for Memorial Day but it’s appropriate for any patriotic holiday, and for any writer’s day.
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MEMORIAL DAY AND THE WRITER
By Mary O’Gara
Today is a fine day for a writing dialogue with someone you loved–or might have loved if he or she had returned from a war, any war–or perhaps for writing a heartfelt prayer for the ones who did come back.
In Red Oak, Iowa, my home town, they still fly the funeral flags of our hometown veterans on Memorial Day. Among them are two men I loved who came back: My father and my grandmother’s brother, who was my surrogate grandfather: Charles Arthur Reese and Philo Douglas Clark.
The stories they told me as a child were wildly exaggerated and made war sound like a great adventure. Today I might dialogue with Uncle Philo about his real memories of World War One. Dialogues aren’t limited to living people.
You could also dialogue with the condition of living in a world at war, and you might be surprised at what you discover for your own life and your writing.
Or this may be a chance to say good-bye in dialogue–or hello to someone you never got to meet.
Dialoguing is simple: Sit quietly and breathe slowly and deeply. Write a name on the journal page and make a short list of up to a dozen milestones in that person’s life, remembering that you are only one of those milestones. Then close your eyes and imagine that person or something representing the situation in front of you.
Close your eyes.
Write: Hello or some other greeting.
Listen and record what you hear or understand.
Write your next sentence. Continue until the conversation drops.
Ask if there’s anything else.
Sit in silence a little longer, waiting.
And when it’s really done, jot down a summary sentence for yourself or maybe a reminder about what you want to take into the rest of your life from this moment.
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By Pat Browning
Amy Shojai, past president of the Oklahoma Writers Federation, Inc. (OWFI) decided her out-of-print books deserved another life so she began putting them on Kindle. She has blogged her progress in detail, as a guide for other writers who might like to “Kindle-ize” their books.
Amy is one of the busiest writers I know. Just reading her bio makes me want to lie down and take a nap.
Briefly, Amy Shojai is a nationally known authority on pet care and behavior, is a certified animal behavior consultant, a spokesperson for the pet products industry, and the author of 23 nonfiction pet books and hundreds of articles and columns. She is the behavior expert at cats.About.com, hosts a weekly half-hour radio “Pet Peeves” show at PetLifeRadio.com, and appears as an expert on Animal Planet's "Dogs 101" and "Cats 101."
Her award winning columns appear in the Herald Democrat newspaper, at Purina’s CatChow.com and TidyCats.com, and HomeAgain.com. She also hosts “Ask The Pet Care Expert” at iVillage.com. She appears in a twice-monthly TV “Pet Talk” segment at KXII-CBS.
On April 10 Amy posted this on her blog:
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I have had 23 pet care and behavior books published since 1992, all by "mainstream" bigtime NYC publishers. In the beginning, my agent commanded 6-figure advances for my books, and some of these books have sold extremely well.
It sucks to start at the top, cuz there's only one direction to go from there, especially when Internet freebies and economic challenges meet. The Internet and Animal Planet killed the kinds of books I write--prescriptive, heavily researched, highly reliable info-tainment about cat and dog care, behavior and training. Why buy a book, when you can access the information for free--and who cares if it's the latest research from reliable sources or just the "guru of the moment" spouting off. Free = good.
Anyway, I have a number of solid-information books looking for a new life (and audience) as Ebooks. If folks want information from the Internet, I won't fight them--and in fact, I'll HELP them find some solid, good material at a price this economy can afford. Heck, I think some of these titles now sell on Ebay for $90 or so, and meanwhile I can provide updated information in a format they want at a fraction of the cost to readers or to me.
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And so began Amy's journey as a Kindle-izer. Formatting non-fiction books like hers may be different from formatting fiction text but even fiction writers can benefit from her experience.
On April 23, Amy posted a recap of her progress.
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It's Alive! The Kindle-izing Journey continues...
by Amy D Shojai
April 23, 2010, 1:40 pm
After a little over a month, much research and even more angst, Complete Kitten Care is LIVE and available for $2.99 at Kindle. Whew!
While publishing via the DTP (digital text plaform) provided by Amazon works great for text-only (fiction) works, there are a number of hoops nonfiction cat-egories must leap. Pun intended. I promised a recap for all my followers, and I promise it's not nearly as difficult as I made it. So for all you other DWAA and CWA and other nonfiction authors including all my good friends at OWFI, (maybe even some nonfiction Thriller Writers?) here's how I did it.
1. Create a single document by combining all chapters into one.
2. Format with the "style" templates to code your documents for the table of contents. For each chapter heading, I used "Heading 1" and then "Heading 2" and so on for either section heading and/or breakout boxes of text. I found that the software default for HTML codes in the TOC recognized Heading 1, 2 and 3.
Remove any tables, boxes of information or other such graphics, as they will not translate. Instead format them with bolded or italicized text, or use Heading 4, 5, 6 etc. These won't be recognized in the TOC, but the look/format will remain true once translated into HTML. I used this technique to highlight "pull out" information such as sidebars.
3. Insert any photos at low resolution (72 dpi) but as large as possible to be viewable once published in the Kindle. A gif or jpg file works well. Kindle only displays black and white pictures; HOWEVER, if you have color, why not use them? The FREE Kindle-for-PC does display color, and perhaps in the future the handheld will as well.
For what it's worth, I set my page size to A5 (about 6" x 8.25") to approximate the view from the smaller Kindle, before sizing my photos. I also placed them between paragraph breaks, which worked well at that size--but not as well if the page is read in larger format or changed to smaller type. I suspect there's not much to be done in this case although you can set it to "word wrap" which helps a bit.
4. Insert any links you wish. In my bio section, I've included my other writing venues as well as my website. Throughout COMPLETE KITTEN CARE, any website mentions for products or resources also have live click-able links.
When the books COMPLETE CARE FOR YOUR AGING CAT and COMPLETE CARE FOR YOUR AGING DOG are updated and published, they will include hot links to veterinary resources, and the experts interviewed for the books.
5. Click on the "references" tab in Word software, and find the "table of contents" command. There are default choices, or you can build your own. I used the template. It automatically lists, in order, every single word you've "coded" with Header 1, 2, and 3, with associated page numbers and clickable bookmarks to that given page.
6. To convert the finished document to HTML, you will SAVE-AS, click on OTHER FORMATS and save as a WEB PAGE, FILTERED. You will lose much of your margins and formatting, but don't let that scare you. Check throughout for any inadvertent missing paragraph tabs. Remember, this will be translated once more by the Amazon DTP software.
7. If you have any photos in the text, the HTML conversion will create both an HTML text document with 'placeholder' spots for images, and a second folder that contains the files of those images. You'll need to 'zip' or compress both of these into a single document. Highlight both files, and then right-click the mouse, SEND TO, and click on compressed (zip) file. THAT is the file you will upload to the Digital Text Platform.
Once you've uploaded, be sure to view the test version. This process can be tedious because each page takes a couple of seconds to load. It is well worth checking for formatting errors at this stage, though. If you publish at this stage, and later find errors, you will need to re-publish all over again.
Good luck! I hope this journey helps others. And once again (cuz it's my blog and I can!), I hope y'all will spread the word about this how-to blog. And if you need good pet care information or know someone who does, please consider my Kindle-ized books.
I've just updated my homepage to reflect the new kitten book--along with a new author photo, what fun!
Happy Writing!
Amy
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You can read all of Amy’s posts on her Kindle-izing journey at her blog:
http://tinyurl.com/36klk64
The blog also has a link to her web page.
