Author: J.S. Bangs

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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the rights to my previously-published novella The Taint recently reverted to me, and as a result I’m working to self-publish it. Which means that I spent much of the weekend playing with epub creation software, trying to get an idea of what it’ll take to put together a professional-looking book. And I learned something surprising.

This stuff is easy.

I was expecting something harder. I was expecting to spend hours poring over obscure specs, or wrestling with ugly, obscure, and bud-ridden open source software to get it to work. But it turns out that the software to do this is dirt-simple, and it’s called pandoc. Pandoc is amazing. It took me literally a few minutes to generate my first .epub file from the plain text version of my story. (I blogged once before about my extremely nerdy writing setup, and the basics have been unchanged since then. I now use Markdown rather than LaTeX for formatting, but I still write everything in plain text first.) It took me about fifteen more minutes to learn everything I needed to know about changing the fonts and layout in the generated file. I spent more time looking for e-reader software to try out the new book on than I did actually building the book.

And then, of course, I lost a few hours trying out formatting tweaks. That was a dark and twisty corner of hell to fall in to. The conclusion of that experiment was that CSS support across e-readers is very inconsistent, and ultimately doesn’t matter. I’ve got the font and the margins how I want them, so I will force myself not to care about the rest, no matter how often the alluring siren of CSS customization calls out to me.

With this hurdle out of the way, I expect that I’ll have the completed ebook ready sooner rather than later. The cover is being worked on, though you can’t see it yet. Pretty much everything else is good to go. It should be in e-bookstores in time for the holiday rush. (Do e-books have holiday rushes? Is that a thing?) Anyway, watch this space.

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The podcast of my story The Judge’s Right Hand has gone up over at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Head on over there to check out the podcast along with their other excellent audio content. I’ve also embedded the audio below, if you’re just too impatient to click through to that link.
The Judge\'s Right Hand by J.S. Bangs

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So you’re going to fly across the country with toddlers. You may be worried about the challenges that this presents, but DON’T WORRY. I’ve done this before, and I’ve gathered some useful tips that you might find helpful.

  1. Ensure that the outbound flight is scheduled to coincide with the children’s ordinary bedtime. This way the youngsters, already disoriented and distressed by the confusion of the airport, will fall into fits of screaming as their bedtime approaches. The flight will then pass in a typhoon of crying and howling, which will be sure to amuse both the parents and the people sitting near them.
  2. Try to stay with relatives, especially relatives who have never had children of their own. They’ll find the experience of being suddenly plunged into a household with two toddlers to be a delightful and enlightening experience.
  3. It’s best if the relatives with whom you are staying have a small apartment in a quiet, upscale building with no other children around. The cramped space in the apartment will invigorate your children, and the neighbors will appreciate the extra color that your toddlers bring to their otherwise luxurious, well-ordered lives.
  4. Tell your hosts not to bother child-proofing! Children are fascinated by $60 bottles of liquor stored in a tasteful antique wine rack on the floor, and their active play will help your hosts find out whether their vintage furniture was really worth the money.
  5. Don’t forget the salutory effects of a change in time zones on your children’s sleeping habits. If you’re lucky, you’ll find that the kids wake up before 5 am, giving you the luxury of a long, noisy morning in which you can fully wake up before you face your day.
  6. If you have friends with kids, don’t visit them. Having kids of their own, they’ll be far too used to the joys of toddlerhood and so won’t have the unique appreciation of the experience.
  7. Whatever else you do, don’t decide to go stay with your Senegalese friends for the last few days of the trip, even if they invite you. Their gracious hospitality will make things far too pleasant, and their children will be distracting, fun-loving playmates for your children. The consequences of this will be obviously horrific.

Anyway, how was my recent trip to Seattle with my family? Fine, thanks. Why do you ask?

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So I’m thinking about working on the new cover for The Taint soon. I’m still in the stage of coming up with ideas, which is tough because I suck at covers. I have a poor visual imagination and no flair for art. There’s a reason why I went into writing and not visual arts, and I’m probably going to wind up paying someone to do the cover for me.

But anyway, there are a few things that went wrong with the original cover that I want to fix this time around. Here’s the old cover for reference:

Cover for The Taint

Originally, I was pretty happy with this cover. And one thing that I still love is the font chosen for the title and byline: jagged, eye-catching, but still readable. It was an excellent choice. However, there are a few things that I now find problematic:

  1. The graveyard image misrepresents the setting and themes of the story. A misty graveyard suggests a ghost story, while the major setting of The Taint is a prison, and its nasties are vampires and zombies.
  2. While the image looks pretty good big, when it’s shrunk down it reduces to a muddy gray rectangle. I first noticed this when I was making my Facebook ad, and in retrospect I think this is pretty important. People browsing for books through an e-reader or a tablet are likely to see the image in a much smaller size than shown above, and this makes a big difference for how much the cover stands out and attracts.

I hope to fix both of these problems this time around.

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You may have noticed that The Taint is no longer shown on my sidebar, and is no longer for sale at Lyrical Press. A few days ago Lyrical Press offered to revert the rights to me, and I accepted their offer.

The reasons for their offer and my acceptance were pretty simple: The Taint wasn’t selling very well, and we both thought it was a good idea to try something else. Shortly after The Taint was originally bought Lyrical Press decided to stop buying SFF and horror and concentrate solely on their romance and erotica lines, which means that The Taint was stuck in kind of an odd place with regards to their overall focus. The Taint may actually have been the last non-romance title that Lyrical bought, and it suffered as a result. So when they offered to revert the rights to me, it seemed like a good decision. It was a very amicable separation, and I really have nothing but praise for the professionalism and consideration with which Lyrical handled the whole situation.

The good news is that this gives me a great opportunity to experiment with self-publishing. I have nothing to lose, really: The Taint has already been published traditionally, so there’s nothing to lose by seeing if it can do better self-published. It’ll be a few weeks before that happens, as I have to make a new cover image (rights to the original are owned by Lyrical), and I hope to come up with a better title. But watch this space. I’m going to have fun seeing how this goes.

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I’m happy to announce that I sold a short story titled The Judge’s Right Hand to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. This is my first sale to an SFWA-recognized pro market :). Look for the story sometime in November.

And for audio aficionados, the story has also been chosen for the BCS podcast, where it will appear some weeks after the story first appears in print. I’ll link to both the story and the podcast when they appear.

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I’ve been posting two posts a week since sometime in mid-July. This was a big stretch for me: before that I averaged something like two posts a month, and I went for long stretches without posting anything at all. Sometime in July I set myself a resolution to post more frequently, and I was able to sustain this goal by a neat trick: I wrote things ahead of time. When I had time to spare I wrote three or four posts at once, and then I used the WP scheduling feature to dribble them out over the next few weeks.

But, of course, it couldn’t last forever. As of today my queue is empty, and I haven’t had time lately to write any more. The most important reason for this is that I’m working head-down on finishing the first draft of my current WIP. There are about 10,000 words to go on that project, which means I should be able to finish in the next week or two, provided I don’t waste time doing anything else.

But not wasting time means not writing blog posts. So I may drop off my posting for a few weeks as I close up on that project, which is ultimately far more important to me than blogging. After that I hope to resume my regular posting schedule, but I will probably fall back to a rate of one post per week rather than two. In exchange, I’ll try to make my posts two times as interesting.