Remembered

A passage from These Remembered Hills, a Hocking Hills Mystery from Stephen Brooke and Arachis Press

 

The Mechanics

My first one-and-a-half novels were written longhand and then typed (yes, on a typewriter). This was not a new process for me; it was pretty much what I used through decades of journalism, writing magazine articles. I was never able to compose directly on a typewriter, as I couldn’t completely organize my words until I saw them on the page. This was even more true with writing poetry.

For a short time, I dabbled with an early standalone word processor, but my first drafts continued to be handwritten (frequently on scrap paper). The computer changed everything. I could move things around as I went. Composition and editing became one seamless process. I switched over almost immediately for everything except poetry. I still sometimes start poems on paper but there, too, the computer is where I now do most of my writing.

The only thing that held me back early on was the need for printed copies. The word processor I used for a while solved that problem, as it typed out pages, even while saving projects to floppy disks. Later on, I was able to copy the files into word processing programs on the computer without too many problems, and invested in a succession of printers. But as I went from submitting printed pages to publishers and agents to publishing on my own, the need for printed copy largely disappeared.

Though my first publishing endeavor was a self-printed and assembled poetry chapbook, using a laser printer. That was pretty much to have copies I could sell at poetry readings. Within a year or so, I switched to a print-on-demand supplier (Lulu) and have stuck with that, both for printing and distribution as Arachis Press.

I knew pretty much nothing about book design, or word processing and/or desktop publishing applications when I started on the computer. There was a lot of learning from my mistakes as I went along! In those early days, I wrote mostly in the WordPerfect program that had come installed on one of my first PCs. In fact, several Corel applications were bundled on that machine, including CorelDraw, which remains my go-to for design. All my covers are created there and even one ‘coffee table’ book. But I didn’t stick forever with WordPerfect; it’s a great office suite, especially for offices that still use a lot of paper (like lawyers), but only so-so for writing (though I would still take it over Word).

What replaced it was OpenOffice, which is not only excellent for writing and editing, but is also a fairly decent desktop publishing program—more than adequate for a typical novel or even a book of poems. I still like OpenOffice but fairly recently switched to the spin-off LibreOffice, mostly because it allows me to access opentype features in my typefaces. That’s handy but, admittedly, not essential, and OpenOffice does seem a tad more stable, so either would really be usable for me. To be sure, another attraction of both versions of the application is is that they are free. Unfortunately, although they share a file format, they do not create identical projects when I move a file from one to the other. Page count, spacing, etc. may vary some, so I stick to LibreOffice now, at least for the final print-ready versions of my books.

Both also produce perfectly good PDF versions for sending to a printer or for offering as ebooks. Neither is quite adequate for producing an EPUB I would consider distributing or selling, though both offer conversion. For that, I plug a formatted LibreOffice file into Calibre, another good free program. It’s not perfect but I’ve learned enough to fix most problems that pop up.

Incidentally, I’ll mention here that I do the bulk of my note-keeping in Notepad++. That is another quite useful free program, and one with enough features it could actually be used for writing drafts. Indeed, the only thing it really lacks is automatic ‘smart quotes,’ and those can be added with code as one goes along. That’s as simple as double-clicking on a panel I keep open. Italics aren’t available but that’s not a big deal. I probably overuse them anyway and one could use one symbol or another to aid in a search-and-replace when transferring the file for formatting.

My purpose here was to provide a quick view of the mechanics of my writing and publishing, the methods and programs I’ve found useful along the way. I’ll not go on about either typography or my writing process; I’ve done that elsewhere and undoubtedly will again. I (and maybe you) can certainly continue with the applications and methods I have listed. Would a dedicated desktop publishing application be a useful addition? Perhaps, but I’ve found no real reason to add one. InDesign—aside from being expensive—is very much overkill for me. So is the free Scribus. Were I laying out something heavy on graphics, a magazine perhaps, it might be different, but for now I get by quite well with the programs I have settled on and become familiar with. They serve my needs.

Coast of Spears Video

This is a rather old book trailer I put together for the first Malvern fantasy novel, COAST OF SPEARS. I've neglected that sort of thing (as well as composing music of this sort) for quite some time. Maybe I'll put up some others eventually, though I doubt I'll create any more of these slideshow-style videos.