Diary of all blog posts – Read First Chapter.com

HOW DEATH CAN AFFECT A WRITER'S LIFE:

I have been writing novels since about two years before I retired in 2020. You can see them all if you click on the picture of them to the left. My life has been very stable and this, of course, makes writing very easy. Writing novels gave my life a certain structure and routine that can disappear when one retires from the workplace.

I moved to central Florida to get away from the craziness of Broward County, Florida, and had two family members close by. My brother lives in Orlando, which is only an hour away, and my cousin Michael moved up to live in my town and only lived two blocks away. My cousin and I had been close my entire adult life, and had gotten closer in the last five or six years. He was my anchor in this area of Florida. I have always been a "family person".

My other relative living close by is my brother Bill who lives in Orlando. It's only about an hour or so away and we met at least monthly for lunch and to catch up.

In the first week of April, my cousin Michael showed signs of not being able to finish his sentences. This happened overnight. I was with him the week before this and he was fine; better than fine. His speech was perfect and his memory was still 10 times better than mine.

After having to wrestle with him to go to the emergency room, he was diagnosed with brain cancer, and had 5 tumors that were inside his head. The prognosis was not good. My heart was broken for him, but I had to jump into caretaking mode, and that is a physically and mentally demanding role. In other words, there's no time for crying or falling to bits and pieces. I was raised as an Irish stoic of the highest order, and we don't collapse into tears until the mission, whatever that is, is completed.

So I and Michael's sister -- who immediately flew down from the northeast -- started preparing his house to have in-home hospice. His house had fallen to bits and pieces over time. A few weeks before this diagnosis, he had banned me from coming inside. He said it was because it was messy and he didn't want me to see. I am a bit of a neat freak, so I said I understood. However, the house showed signs that it wasn't just a mess; he had lost the ability to take care of himself and his cat. He just hid it well.

Living two blocks away from where Michael would be with hospice, my house filled up with cousins and spouse-helpers. We ran all over town preparing to have Michael discharged and brought home for in-house hospital.

While signing up my cousin for county services, he fell while walking with us and hit his head. This fall suddenly changed everything. He was taken by the paramedics and arrangements were made to have him go to a hospice facility. Instead of needing in-house hospital, he would spend the next two and a half weeks in the hospice facility before he passed away.

The hospice he was in was beautiful, clean, and everyone who worked there was wonderful. We found it through Marion County Services, E.W. & Lucille Cates House, and it was wonderful. The people who worked in the hospice system were all compassionate people who had been called to this type of work -- which is not easy. I am eternally grateful to them for how lovingly they took care of Michael in his last weeks.

SHOCK AND THE CREATIVE MIND:

During this time, my creative mind shut off. I don't think this is unique to me. I assume this would occur with anyone, especially when you are dealing with caretaking and/or grief. Writing was put not only on the back burner, but the pot was set off on a resting pad for an unknown time in the future.

I did continue my marketing, as my marketing is on semi-autopilot and it is as easy as copying and pasting onto the sites and takes less than 30 minutes. This routine at least kept me tethered to the book author in me.

STRENGTH THROUGH FAITH:

Raised Catholic and having embraced the faith myself many years ago, this has given me a softer view of death because I know it's not the end. My cousin, as well as the other family members who went before him and who I still miss, are with the Lord and I believe that I will see them all again. I liken it to being in the world, which is like Disney World, and they got tired and went back to the hotel room. I'm still in the park but I know they are not that far away and I will see them again.

We had our priest come and pray with Michael before he passed, and my cousin and I said a Rosary at his bedside the night before he died. So I take great comfort knowing that we were with him until the end. He drifted off to Heaven without any pain. I consider this, even in spite of the shocking and sudden diagnosis and loss, the blessing of a painless death.

ANOTHER LOSS:

About a week after Michael's passing and cremation, my brother announced he will be moving down to Hollywood, Florida to be closer to his children. That's about five or six hours from where I live. Suddenly, my second family anchor is disappearing. This made me feel more unanchored than I felt losing my best buddy and cousin, Michael.

FINDING A NEW NORMAL:

I know from past losses that there will always be a new normal. I also know I have to be willing to go through the painful and scary feelings of being lost and untethered before I can find that new normal.

I spent two weeks after Michael passed away running around and taking care of the 'business side of death' which involves lots of calls and running around.

During this time, I opened my last book, and wasn't even sure where I was with things. I write in Scrivener, so it didn't take long to find my place and figure out where I was in the story. I managed to pick up where I last was and wrote a few chapters on the same story. This restored my faith in being able to continue on with my writing.

PLUGGING ALONG:

As an author I am plugging along, but things are still slow and I'm still quite distracted by the grief and losses. Losing my two family members, one to death and one to Hollywood, Florida, led me to buying a minivan to build out as a camper van. I am intending to become a part time campervan traveler. This way, I can visit my other family members who reside in different places all up and down the east coast.

I'm still in the planning and layout stages, but I want to build a minivan where I can continue writing and visiting family. I still feel heavy with grief, but I feel hopeful for the future. I can see the glimmer of a new normal. I'll keep you all posted!

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How to Create a 3D Book Series Book Cover

This blog post is done to accompany the video that is posted below. This will give you the instructions that may be helpful to keep open as you create your own 3D Book Series Bundle Cover like the one on the left.

These instructions will allow you to make any size bundle cover, going in any direction.

At the end of the video, I will also give you instructions to make the thumb cut or the finger pull that is popular on book series as well.

WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

A high resolution front cover copy of your book, or whatever other copy you want to represent the book series
Gimp photo editing program which is free, or photoshop. If you use Canva, I will assume you can translate all the steps in that program.
A high resolution picture of whatever you want to be the background behind your books spines.
Any emblem or other branding graphics that you may want to put on the covers. In the cover that I make in the video, I use a police badge graphic to brand the series as a police procedural.
You will need a large rectangle image with a transparent background in order to work. Make sure you are also working in 300dpi or 300ppi, whatever the resolution is referred to in your program.

LET'S MAKE THE 3D BORDER DIAGRAM:

In gimp, the first thing we will do is open a document that is 2500 pixels wide and 1,000 pixels high. This will make sure you have lots of room to work.

The next step is to bring in a 3D bundle model cover that you found on Amazon, like the picture on the above left.

Next, draw lines around the cover so that you create this shape. Our final cover will be transformed into this final shape by using the perspective tool. The example of this is above right.

LET'S CREATE THE COVER AND THE BOOK SPINES:

Open a new document that is 2082 x 1000 pixels and 300 dpi. This will turn out to be too large, but better too large than to run out of room. This will give me a good platform to make the book series mockup.

Bring in your ebook cover and place on the right side of the space. Leave a space between all the books spines and the cover. Add the titles and the author name.

My best tip is to start with the book title that is the longest. This way, you will choose the right size font to use. You will also need a picture to put on the background of the book spines. You can either add a color wash layer or fiddle with the opacity to make sure you can read the book titles.

Once this is done, you will then want to add a 5 pixel line between the books and then on that same layer, add a filter, gaussian blur and blur it out until it looks like a slight bend between books.

The final step is to choose a light color and dark color from your front cover. The create a gradient in the space between the front and back. Anyone with digital graphics skills will be able to put this together with just these few instructions and pictures. However, if you are new to graphic design, just watch the video below where I demonstrate how to make it using gimp, which is a free program.

The video below will be available when it is posted:

https://youtu.be/uU0xM48Cou4

13 Tips on Formatting a Book with Text, Pictures and Graphics

I just finished formatting and publishing a new workbook entitled Brainstorming: Thinking Up Storylines and wanted to make a blog post and video while all the information was fresh in my mind.

I made a few errors when creating my book, and hopefully, reading through these 13 tips, it will help you avoid those same errors.

1. You need to know the size book you want to create. That's called the trim size. The most common size for novel paperbacks in the USA is 6" x 9". Larger books have different printing costs. I published a workbook and it was 8.5" x 11".

2. You will feel most confident by downloading a template right from the KDP website. If you don't know the exact number of pages, you can use a template with the approximate number of pages. I didn't use a template. I just used very tight margins and the default print size in Microsoft Word. But if you want to download a template, you can find them on this page: (https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201834230).

3. The inside layout of your book will depend upon how you set up your page margins. In some books, like children's picture books, you may want a more spatial look. For my workbook, I wanted my margins as tight as I could get them. They were 0.5" top, bottom and both sides. That's about as tight as you can make margins.

4. You need to know how much space to choose for the book gutter. Above is a snapshot from the KDP website showing the inside gutter margins based on how many pages will ultimately be in your book. As you can see, they have different measurements for bleed and non-bleed. If you are setting up your book from the beginning, you can work with an "approximate number of pages." If you click on the picture it will open a larger size. Otherwise, here is a link to the KDP page with the information.

Notice too that you need to choose based on bleed or no-bleed. These instructions and video are for the book that has no bleed. This means all the text, pictures and graphics will be inside the page margins.

5. This is for two changes under the File section of the document. We will embed fonts and choose not to shrink the photos.

5A: File > Options > Save > Embed fonts, check the top box only. But be aware that even though this is following the directions from the KDP website, you may get a message that say something like: Your fonts are not properly embedded, but we can embed them for you. Don't scramble around trying to fix them. It always says this. As long as you checked the top box, it will be fine. Below is a link to check the video about embedding the fonts for yourself. Here is a link to check out the video on how to embed the fonts from the KDP website:

5B: On the Advanced Tab, go down to where it talks about saving photos. Then check the box that says, do not compress the pictures. Also make sure your pictures are in a large format. Mine was set at 220ppi which was fine. If you are using high-resolution photographs, you may want to put the ppi up to 300.

6. Put on the Show/Hide selection, so you will see all of the line breaks and page breaks. Also, add a page number so that it will take this into account. If you wait until the end to add the page numbers, then this may throw off some tables or graphics. So before you even begin, add the page numbers. You will need them for the table of contents anyway.

7. This is a work-flow tip: Before adding a picture be sure to add a space above and a space below the picture. You may need the space above to add more text or a title, and you may need to add text or add a page break after a large photo. If you don't use this spacing technique, you may have to go through a whole game of tug-of-war with Word in order to get a space above or below a picture. So try to use this technique to save yourself the frustration. I demonstrate this in the video below!

8. I have added pictures from the insert picture menu and I have even copied and pasted graphics from my Gimp program straight into the book. They both work for me. I mention this because I either read or heard on an instructional video that you always have to insert them. But I copied and pasted many of the pictures in my workbook and they all came out perfect in the final copy.

Be aware that any pictures that have color in them will be printed as black and white.

9. Each picture or graphic will require you to make at least two choices. Both choices will be made from the Picture Format tab. In order to see the tab, you must click on the picture.

The first choice will be to wrap the text or not wrap the text around the picture. These choices are both inside the Picture Format tab as seen above. In order to see the Picture Format selection, you will need to click on the picture to make it active. Then inside the picture format, choose the wrapping style and also the align style. You will most likely want to center the picture.

Don't be alarmed if the picture appears to not be perfectly centered. Behind the scenes, Microsoft is allowing space for the gutter of the book.

10. To add two pictures side by side, use a table with no borders and center the table. Then center the pictures in each cell. I demonstrate this in the video below.

11. In the workbook, anything with color will be produced in black and white. Just know this ahead of time.

12. In order to have a two tiered table of contents, you will need to use Heading 1 for the top tear titles, and Heading 2 for second tier titles. Likewise, if you will be working with more sub-headings, you will need to use Headings 3, 4, etc.

13. Use Odd-Page Breaks and Even-Page Breaks instead of line breaks!

In my workbook, there were pages that started a new brainstorming method, so I wanted those to be on the right hand side. So I made sure I chose a page break that was a section break (odd page).

Likewise, I had a two-page workbook form that I wanted the user of the workbook to be able to see side by side. So the first page needed to be on the left hand side, so it had to be a section break (even page). I have an example of how it looks in Microsoft Word above.

One further tip is that once you finish your book, you need to save a copy as a PDF. All paperbacks have to be submitted in PDF format to KDP. However, in order for you to check your even and odd pages, it is easier to look at this in the PDF because that will how the extra pages that Word skips. If this doesn't make sense, be sure to check out the video below!

Below is the video which will show up once it is published:

Category: Diary of all blog posts

Coloring Page – National-Donut-Day

Check out my new Brainstorming Workbook!

Free Download for a Limited Time

Check out my Book Series!

Iron-On T-shirt Design – America

How Grief & Loss Can Affect a Writer’s Mind

HOW DEATH CAN AFFECT A WRITER'S LIFE:

SHOCK AND THE CREATIVE MIND:

STRENGTH THROUGH FAITH:

ANOTHER LOSS:

FINDING A NEW NORMAL:

PLUGGING ALONG:

Iron-On T-shirt Design – Feeling Feline

Coloring Page – Cinco de Mayo

Check out my new Brainstorming Workbook!

Free Download for a Limited Time

Check out my Book Series!

Iron-On T-shirt Design – A Good Day to Read

Coloring Page – Earth Day

Check out my new Brainstorming Workbook!

Free Download for a Limited Time

Check out my Book Series!

How to Create a 3D Book Series Book Cover

WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

LET'S CREATE THE COVER AND THE BOOK SPINES:

13 Tips on Formatting a Book with Text, Pictures and Graphics

Coloring Page – April Fool’s Jester

Check out my new Brainstorming Workbook!

Free Download for a Limited Time

Check out my Book Series!