Month: September 2017

Goerge Had Six Moths To Feed.

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After nearly five years floating in the ether, the first novel I published on Amazon Kindle is now available as a paperback. Quarter Acre Block was inspired by my family’s experiences emigrating to Australia as Ten Pound Pommies; ironically the paperback costs £10.00  (£9.99 ).  I have not yet written a novel inspired by my return to the United Kingdom, as a twenty year old on a six month working holiday which has stretched till now; suffice to say I have family on both sides of the world and there have been many journeys back and forth over the years, few of them mine.

Project Paperback QAB took on some urgency as Australian visitors were coming to stay; Kindle Direct Publishing paperbacks are not yet available in Canada or Australia.

Technology at our In House Publishers is rarely new; second hand computers, smart phones and other devices pass through the house, passed down from family who are upgrading or bought from ‘Pete at work’. Quarter Acre Block documents were in my new computer, in the external hard drive and on various memory sticks, but we couldn’t find the HTML document that had formed the original Kindle book. I wanted to add pages at the beginning and end that could not have existed in the first version, ‘By the same author’  ‘About The Author’, so with my Kindle at my side as reference I treated the Microsoft word document as a final edit. It was good to read the novel again and the Palmer family were pleased I had not forgotten them, but I was mortified to find more than one mistake in spelling and grammar. Had gremlins crept in? There was no escaping the fact that the same errors occurred in the Kindle version.  I am not alone in this, I have enjoyed plenty of e-books where letters have swapped places and full stops have fallen off; perfection is hard to achieve, but it was galling to read that George had six ‘moths’ to feed.

At last the book was ready to download, with a new cover and perfect pages. Before you press Publish, Amazon comes up with a helpful spell check, a feature not available when we first published. Six errors… four were colloquial, wheatbelt should have been The Wheatbelt, but the glaring mistake was Goerge. One of my main characters, George, had endured the indignity of having his name spelt incorrectly in the first chapter; I can only hope that like the jumbled letter quizzes on Facebook – only people who are highly intelligent can read this – readers did not notice.

We ordered one copy to check it was fine. The visitors arrived on Thursday, the book on Friday. I ordered ten more; they were due on Sunday, an e-mail from Amazon on Sunday afternoon stated they had been delivered and left in the porch. The porch was empty, the visitors were going on Tuesday morning. On Sunday evening the neighbours came round with a parcel that had been left in their porch. On Monday evening we gave our visitors their gift and luckily they had enough room in their suitcases to take copies for my mother and niece; at 95,000 words the book is quite heavy, I had saved a lot on postage and packing.

In all the excitement we had not noticed one glaring omission. There was no title on the spine… on Amazon Kindle nothing is set in stone, you can go back in at any time and change the book, future copies will not be spineless. Perhaps those first eleven copies will be famous rarities in a hundred years time…

Read my previous blog on how KDP print on demand first came into my life.     https://wordpress.com/post/tidalscribe.wordpress.com/383

 

A Tale of Two Sons

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Writers are not alone in observing people, pondering on their background story, or even inventing a whole life and family for them. I wonder how wrong our assumptions might be.


Out and about on holiday I saw two very different lives, two very different sons. Thanks to modern technology and perhaps thanks to fund raising friends or rich relatives, the disabled are able to get out and about more easily than ever.


Wheelchairs for those who cannot walk, or cannot walk far have been superseded by bespoke motorised thrones controlled by touch pads for the severely disabled.


Sitting outside a coffee shop, enjoying lunch and the scenery, the table next to us was soon occupied by a young man, perhaps still a teenager, and his carer, or was it his mother? He was a cheerful chap despite his obvious limitations. Chatting to them, they were locals having a regular but simple treat, coffee in a cup with a straw for the young man and a chocolate muffin shared with his mother. Then the son told us proudly he was leaving home tomorrow, his mother cheered, they both had a sense of humour. He was going to the National Star College near Cheltenham, a further education college for the disabled.


However dependent they are, however loving their families, I’m sure most disabled young adults want to be independent and move away from home when they choose, the same as anybody else. I wonder what the future will hold for that young man?


The next day found us at an air museum, where outside and in the hangars there was plenty of room and level access. I spotted a boy skipping alongside his father’s motorised chariot. Strangely, everywhere I wandered I kept seeing them and couldn’t help wondering whether disease or disaster had left the father so disabled.


At lunchtime they turned up near our table and someone brought them over huge plates of fish and chips that neither could possibly manage. The staff behind the self service counter had been particularly bored and uninterested when we were getting our food, so I hoped they had shown some patience and empathy with the father and son. All along I had been expecting a mother or wife to appear, or at least a responsible adult, but they sat alone at the table. We should not make assumptions about how independent disabled people are.


There was plenty to see and they were still exploring late into the afternoon. The son looked a cheerful cheeky lad, but obviously a child who could be trusted not to run off and get lost; a child most parents would be delighted with, who did not get bored, whine or beg to go to the gift shop. I wondered what the future held for them.