After I revised my first novel early last year, had it critiqued, and revised again, I entered upon the query process. It’s a bit taxing to say the least. But at one point, I realised it had taken so long that I began to have serious concerns about editing the book. It’s bad enough that I don’t remember from chapter to chapter what I write – hence the necessity of outlines! – but to go for months, now a year, between my last revision and the editing process meant memory issues would hinder me. Would I remember what I wanted to say in a particular chapter? Would I remember what I was thinking when I wrote a particular scene? Why I wrote it that way?

The lag time between finishing Lifeliner and editing it was less than a year. I also had the advantage with that book of having lived with it since 1991 and having every fact written down. I had no memory issues concerning content! But novels come out of one’s imagination. So the idea is still there (I hope!), but I’m not sure about the details. I realised I had to make a decision: continue the frustrating process of finding an agent, see if an offer to publish in 2012 was still on the table, or self-publish now before I forgot more of it and then become uninterested. For me, inertia is strong and lethal and is becoming an issue too. And then there’s the small matter of the fact that I want to have final say on the covers and titles of my novels.

For the sake of the book and for all those who’ve expressed an interest in reading She, I must self-publish now.

But how to pay, that is the conundrum.

I can borrow. Or I can borrow from what I’m living on. The former will make already tight budgeting impossible. The latter will shrink that part of my income (already less than CPP disability, which ain’t much), and again make tight budgeting impossible. I’m feeling a bit between the proverbial rock and hard place.

So I hemmed and hawed over Christmas and New Year’s and decided today to try a PayPal Donation button on my website (see the right sidebar). All donations will go towards editing and proofreading She and Aban’s Accension. These are the dollar figures I’m facing today:

Editing She properly for grammar, spelling, structure, style, consistency, etc. through Amazon’s CreateSpace would be $1,700US, through a local editor, over $2,000. In its current form, Aban’s Accension would be less; however, I am hoping after revisions to bring the word count up to standard novel length. If I can, then editing would also be about $1,700 or more. Proofreading is the careful, expert checking of the final manuscript for spelling, grammatical, and other mistakes. For She, it would be about $1,100CDN, depending on the final word count after editing. For Aban’s Accension less or about the same, depending on how many words both the revisions and editing add.

At minimum, I need $5,600CDN to edit and proofread two novels.

If I’m able to raise that and more, I would also like to hire someone to write the back cover copy – the synopsis one reads when deciding whether to buy a book or not. That is a tough paragraph to write, let me tell you! You’d think that after writing a book, writing a couple of paragraphs would be a cinch. Nope. To be blunt: I suck at it. CreateSpace offers that service for $249US.

I already have an idea for the cover of She and believe I can do that myself. Not sure yet about Aban’s Accension. That should cut costs by about $700 to $1,000 for the two books. Preparing and uploading the manuscript, cover, and back cover copy to ebook sites like Smashwords, Kindle, Barnes & Noble is free albeit labour intensive.

Back in the old, old days, before our great-grandparents were born, patrons flocked to support artists and their work. When governments came along, patrons became a rare breed. But today, governments don’t support writers like me – when I tried to apply for a grant from the Canadian, Ontario, and Toronto governments for Lifeliner back in the 1990s, I was informed it was too commercial, so no grant. Sheesh. Writers like me need a new kind of patron: you. I hope you will consider making a donation of any size you choose and click the PayPal Donation button. Thank you!

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P.S. A note about the Donation button. PayPal states that it will charge 30 cents + 4.5% for every payment I receive. So a donation has to be more than 31.5 cents for me to make any money!

1. Lifeliner, the eBook
2. Lifeliner, the screenplay
3. She, the novel

Lifeliner, the eBook is out. Currently, I’m in week 2 (or is it 3?) of the hard part: marketing it. To market, one must be persistent and consistent. But brain injuries interfere with both. Even if you can start a project, some little hiccup like a bad day or questions on how to fill in a form or a distracting phone call, will make you stop in your tracks and not pick it up again. Other times you may be chugging along nicely, when all of a sudden you forget or you get out of your routine or your second brain the PDA dies and all your tasks go down the drain as you struggle to remember what you’re supposed to do and all you perceive is great blankness. These problems are worse, of course, if you don’t really want to do it, like with marketing. The great thing about having organizing help is that the hiccup or forgetfulness lasts a week at the most; the greater thing is having help to break down the project, identify its priority, and schedule it in a way that ensures it’ll happen. We’ve done that, and I’ve started regularly writing and submitting press releases. I received an enormous boost from a fellow Twitterer who gave me valuable feedback on the first one. With a solid foundation, it was easier to write the second one.

It’s been over a month since I finished writing the Lifeliner screenplay during Script Frenzy. Since my therapist and I had decided my priority was on something that could generate income – republishing Lifeliner as a multi-format eBook – I had put off revising my script. I can only do so much at once, you know! But after an abortive attempt last week, I got down to it this week. Step one: read the script through all in one go. Step one was tough. My reading ability continues to be weak. It’s partly because the brain injury reset the frequency of my brain’s alpha waves down (more on alpha waves here). Sooo…I tried but I couldn’t do it all in one go. I did, however, do it all in one day in four 30-minute increments, with the help of copious amounts of chocolate, sugar-laden foods, and coffee (the brain uses glucose for energy, and caffeine is a stimulant).

I continue to search for an agent for my novel She, which I wrote last November during NaNoWriMo. I had a nibble or two but nothing came of it. I could forego the headache of searching and go straight to a small publisher or publish it as an eBook, but I’d like to have an agent for all those other non-print rights – film, foreign, game – plus an agent is a good person to help one chart a career. One advantage of publishing it as an eBook right now is it would help me build up a library quickly. Authors with more than one published book under their belt are more credible – unless you’ve managed to write a debut-hit wonder. Not so in my case. Sigh. The problem with myself publishing it as an eBook is I would have to invest about $1,000 at least in a good editing and proofreading job. I don’t have that kind of money anymore. But having worked as both an editor and proofreader, I know how valuable those services are in producing a polished, enjoyable book. And, as a writer, I would not want to skip having those smart pairs of eyes looking over my manuscript, catching problems, ensuring flow, suggesting good ideas to improve upon it.

I have another way to build my libary: put all the short stories I wrote pre-injury, stories that are polished and ready to publish, in one eBook. That is on my ToDo list. And then there is the rare moment I stumble upon a story, a story that is best told in a photograph but provides fodder for one of my blogs, each of which enables me to both practice my writing and engage my readership in the now as I work towards building my library for the future.

I’ve updated my Essays page with links to every session in the series. Please check it out.

It has expanded my mind, and I’m pretty sure helped some of my reading and thinking neurons reconnect as I thought on Job’s friends, Job himself, and that windbag Elihu. Starting with the first Session, it has also opened up new ways of seeing and playing with my photographs, much to my surprise. It was emotional, aggravating, challenging, and supremely rewarding. But now it’s over. I’m glad. Each poem, each book has its time in one’s life, sometimes once, sometimes more than once, but rarely continuously. I’m not sure what’s next. Until I find out, I’m going to have fun with my photos.

When I installed the new theme a few days ago, I liked the fact that I had more screen real estate available for the Featurific plugin. I could change up the template from Skinny to something snazzier.

But I ran into a problem. First off, I changed my home page from a static front page to the blog because the new theme’s options don’t work on a static page. And then Featurific wouldn’t work properly in the sidebar; worse, I couldn’t get the template to change. Looking into it further, I felt it was conflicting with Smooth Gallery, which I also really like. I had to disable it.

Unfortunately, that means those clicking over to my site to see how Featurific works on a static page will no longer be able to see it. Bit of a bummer.

However, here’s the info for those who are looking for a solution:

First, get the Exec-PHP plugin and install it. Next upload and install the Deactivate Visual Editor plugin. Don’t do anything with Featurific until you have uploaded and installed these plugins. They were both still working for me up to version 2.7 of WordPress.

You need both plugins because the first helps you get Featurific to work on a static page and the second ensures you will always be in Code mode anytime you edit the page thereafter. That’s vitally important as the author of Exec-PHP warns:

“To successfully write PHP code in the content of an article, the WYSIWYG editor needs to be turned off through the ‘Users > Your Profile’ menu. It is not enough to simply keep the WYSIWYG editor on, switch to the ‘Code’ tab of the editor in the ‘Write’ menu and save the article. This will render all contained PHP code permanently unuseful.”

Ensure Exec-PHP is installed and running. Go to the page you wish to edit. You will see a big warning message by Exec-PHP above the page. Don’t worry about it. Follow the instructions for deactivating the visual editor or WYSIWYG editor for that page.  You should now be in the HTML editing mode. Type the following code where you want Featurific to appear on your static front page:

<?php
if(function_exists(‘insert_featurific’)) //If the Featurific plugin is activated…
insert_featurific();                    //Insert the HTML code to embed Featurific
?>

Publish the page, and Featurific should now appear on your home page. Enjoy!

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Click here to see what others are saying about Lifeliner and Judy, the first person to live for 20 years on Total Parenteral Nutrition.

Welcome! Thank you for stopping by! It’s good to see you here! This site features my debut book Lifeliner: The Judy Taylor Story — plus my musings on the writing and publishing life, knowledge I’ve gleaned about brain injuries and their treatments, information on Lifeliner, a link to my short story Angelica at Amazon Shorts, and articles posted on the web.

Lifeliner is both a print book and a multi-format eBook, the latter now available on Smashwords and approved to be distributed to Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Amazon, and Apple, for the low, low price of $4.99US.

At that price, I would buy it even if I didn’t know what it was, said one reader.

Read a free sample. Then download it in your eBook format of choice. And if you have a moment, please leave a review too!

You can find purchasing information for Lifeliner in trade paperback and hard cover editions on this website: click here for links. Please shop through those links to support this website. For phone orders of Lifeliner, please call 1-800-AUTHORS.