Pilsen 18th Street

Pilsen, street with El tracks over

My office

Finally . . .AT THE HEART OF CHICAGO will be up on Amazon as a paperback in a day or two . . .

Done. I finally pushed the publish button for the paperback edition of AT THE HEART OF CHICAGO, my third entry in Seraphy Pelligrini's Chicago Stories.I thought I'd never get through all the revisions and proofs, and wouldn't have, if it hadn't been for the amazingly patient folks at Booknook.biz. I finally have a proof in hand and Amazon tells me the paperback will appear on their site in a day or two.

I decided to publish the first in the series: CHICAGO STORIES: WEST OF WESTERN, in paper as well.  That meant correcting the Kindle edition--but when I did, I ended up rewriting this and that, and that meant a whole new version, which is the one I'm currently proofing. No big changes, just wording, mostly. The problem is that now I look at it again, found much I'd like to tweak and . . .anyhow, I've decided just to fix the typos and leave the rest.

Onward.

All the revisions are done, the fourth proofing run is done, and Hitch and the folks at Booknook.biz are packaging AT THE HEART OF CHICAGO for publishing! Finally! As soon as I get the Mobi, I'll have it up on Kindle. CreateSpace may take a bit longer to get the paperback version out, but I hope it won't be long.
Then I'm going to revise CHICAGO STORIES: WEST OF WESTERN and issue that as a paperback,
I've cleaned up my office space, cleared the desk, organized  my books . . . not much to do but get started on the next Chicago adventure. I have two in mind and am having trouble deciding which to do first.
A. DEEP IN THE VILLAGE takes place in winter in and around Ukrainian Village, near Seraphy's loft. 99 year old Lucy Altgeld has died and left Max a mansion in Wicker Park. The police say Lucy fell down the stairs in an accident of a  type common to the very old. Seraphy discovers Lucy was murdered . . . with the help of Lucy's housekeeper, Gertrude, she sets out to find the killer.
B, ON THE STREET OF FORTY DOORS takes place in October, perhaps ending on Halloween. Based on a townhouse in Alta Vista Terrace, a landmarked block up on the city's North Side, where a townhouse in the middle of the block has been torched. Olivia Issacs dies in the fire, but her husband Nate and their adopted baby Seth, who were sleeping in the basement, escaped.Nate is devastated, asks Seraphy to rebuild/restore the house to its original state (allowing for modern mechanicals) and she gets sucked into investigating.

I can't decide which to write next . . . ARGHH.

New cover!

Sent the mss off to Booknook.biz yesterday, so things are moving along . . .

I was coming around the corner from Graceland Cemetery  when I accidentally turned onto Alta Vista Terrace,a narrow block-long street of rowhouses. Developer Samuel Gross had been in London, fallen in love with its old neighborhoods, and decided to reproduce one in Chicago. Amazingly, the street, or at least the facades) remains largely untouched today.

It's gorgeous. Unique in Chicago.Highly prized even though the lots measure only 24 x 40 and half  the homes have no parking. At all. None.

I spent the rest of the afternoon strolling around the block and heading back to the Historical Museum to see what they knew about Alta Vista Terrace. I found the original advertising flyer, drawings of the street, and a bit more.

So this time Seraphy's given the job of rebuilding one of the homes, which has been the victim of an arsonist. I have no idea what's going to happen. As with my first books, I'm starting with a building, or in this case, a block of buildings, and letting the story develop from there.

I'm accumulating scenes and characters, which seem to pop into my head at dawn and disappear too quickly if I don't write them down. When I have enough I hope they'll come together in a story. I know, it's a lousy way to plot (as my editor knows too well), but it's the only way that works for me. I've tried sitting down and starting with a plot-- results were so boring, even to me, that I gave it up.

Onward!

Done! For the Moment.

I got my beta reader's notes back last week and started to make the corrections . . . and found typos and awkwardnesses had mysteriously multiplied in the days since I thought I had At  the Heart  of Chicago cleaned up. I'm now quite certain there's a little man hiding in the guts of my laptop and he hates me.

Yesterday my cover designer, Miyuki Meyer, showed me the cover. Who knew? The girl's a genius. I thought I knew what I wanted, and gave her some suggestions. Only suggestions, since she's the one with the graduate degree in Photography and all, and I know from bitter experience I'm no cover designer. Apparently she knows this, too, because she used none of them. Thank God. The new cover is a wonder of balance, spare and elegant in black and white. Wow. I'll have it up here soon. And yes, Miyuki is available for consultation: aishamiyuki@gmail.com.

Now what? I hate to say this, but I think I should do one more final (the fourth) run-through before sending the whole thing off to Hitch for formatting. Because this morning, checking back to see if I'd gotten a name right, I found another typo lurking in chapter three. ARGHH. And if I don't catch them now, Hitch will exact a fee for each and every change. As she should. I consider it a penance for slovenly proofing.

On another topic, I woke up thinking about metaphors and similes this morning. I've been reading a mystery with a great plot, good characters, and lousy writing. I mean a really good plot, since it's kept me reading through the most dreadful similes. Someone should tell this poor author that similes have to fit the scene in which they are used. For example, picture the protagonist driving to the store for a loaf of bread and passing the seashore. With a sunrise: 'a great golden globe rolling over a crackled metal sheet'. Say what? Surely grabbing a loaf of bread at the 7-11 doesn't require all this splendor? He wasn't finding enlightenment, or having a religious experience, or even sex. He was half awake and going out for coffee and a loaf of Wonder Bread. Arghh.

Enough. Back when I'm feeling more civil.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Finally, finally finished the rewrite of At the Heart of Chicago, and sent it out to beta readers.

This one was harder than the first two, and I'm still not certain why. I finally decided to stop whining and sit down and get the damned thing done, and I did. Once I got past the first part--always hard to start--and cleaned up the prolix and dull middle, I actually started to like the story.

So. Now I have to get a cover for the Kindle version, see what the betas say, and send it off to Hitch for formatting. Then correct all the zillion errors I swore weren't in there, and put it on Amazon. Yea!
Another one down.

I'm going to take a break from writing the next one to get these three out in paper. I started to do that before and found CreateSpace beyond me--but that's turned out to be good. When I started to reread West of Western a few days ago, I wasn't happy with what I read,. Not happy at all. So I'm going to make a 2nd edition. Not to change the story, but to clean up the writing. Okay?

Then I'll have an assistant to put all three into the CreateSpace hopper so I'll have paper copies for those (like me, sometimes) who want hard copy.

I made a list this morning--all the things I have to do to make this happen . . .

Long Time No See

I promised myself in the beginning I'd never be one of those bloggers who just babbled on and on without anything to say, and I haven't been. Sorry if you think that's hardly an excuse for not writing for over a year, but it's all I have.

2013 was a difficult year for writing for me. I got ALONG THE RAVENSWOOD out and piddled around thinking I'd design a web site (didn't come to anything) and get both Ravenswood and CHICAGO STORIES: WEST OF WESTERN out in hard copy. That didn't happen, either. It was early spring by then, so I thought, well, I'd get to work on the next Chicago story. I already had a rough draft. Maybe I could even get it up on Amazon by July.



Obviously that didn't happen. I ditzed around all spring and summer, writing this and that, tearing out my hair, spending a lot of time working in the garden. I hated the way the story felt. It was boring and not at all like the Pilsen I remembered and loved. The characters bored me stiff. They even bored Seraphy.

I told myself I didn't have to love writing. It was a job. Stephen King has talked about that. Put your butt in the chair and write. I kept putting the butt in the chair and writing and the result was a fat butt.

Then I decided to change my main character (besides Seraphy) from Matt to his significant other, Alex. Alex, a second-generation Mexican/American, a fashion designer who's worked her way through school and started her own business, a woman on the verge of major success. Hmm, things were hotting up. She has blue-tinged temper tantrums. Seraphy was never interested in fashion and isn't sure what to do with her. Better and better.Matt remains a strong character but takes a place in the background.
The schoolhouse's former owner turns up, very dead, in the disused dumbwaiter, just when Seraphy thought the demolition was going well.

Better, but still not much is happening. Add in Paco, ten or thereabouts, a kid from a huge family barely hanging on in Pilsen, part legal, mostly not.His father and uncle and two cousins have disappeared. He can't go to the cops because they're illegal . . . the missing men and forty others had been living in the old schoolhouse Seraphy's redesigning for Alex. All disappeared just before Alex closed on the building. Seraphy is shanghaied into hunting for them.

It was all getting better, but didn't really come together until the fourth or fifth revision, when I began to understand just what I was really writing about. It's always like this for me. I write a story and am the last person to figure out what it's really all about. Not the surface story, the murder mystery, that's obvious from the start. But there's always more.

 It took a comment from my writing instructor at Gotham Writers  to point out that the theme of West of Western was home--Seraphy's learning how to make her home and what it means for her to be home. There's more,of course, the power of imagination and the havoc wreaked by those who lack it, the strength of unexpected friendship, and kittens.

When I started writing Along the Ravenswood, I intended a straight-forward mystery thatwould take place in upscale North Side Ravenswood. I ended up writing about the essence of fine architecture, what it means to be a family, what happens to old soldiers. Wow. I never saw it coming.

So why was I so surprised when AT THE HEART OF CHICAGO refused to materialize as another genre mystery, turning  into a story about immigration, about new beginnings and old evils and friendship, but above all, about what lies at the heart of Chicago. Because Chicago, ever since the days of John Winthrop, has been for so many the city on the hill.

I'm sending the manuscript off to my editor, the fierce and perceptive Elizabeth Lyon, tomorrow or the next day. Then, after she unerringly points out the icky parts,I'll fix them and send it off to Booknook for formatting--then, in a month or three, I'll sling the result up on Amazon. Really.I will.

Daniel Silva, The Fallen Angel and Me

Daniel Silva's The Fallen Angel

I've had the book for a while now, sitting on the mantel, saving it for the right time. It's a hardback, The Fallen Angel. I don't like hardbacks. I like to read in bed or lounging in my recliner. They're heavy, but I bought it and that should tell you something as well. I don't buy many books now, since I got my second Kindle and discovered the freebies, only those books I know I'll read again and again, books I want to hold and tuck into a bag when I go. Books that become part of me.

Today's the second day of writing my third book. I'm in that magical state of awareness,  with the words waiting to be written down always in the back of my mind, a program constantly running in the background. Driving to the grocery, waiting in the dentist's office, vacuuming the basement stairs—whatever's happening on the surface, underneath I'm deep in the story to come.

I like to read while I'm loading the three cups of coffee it takes to get me up and running in the morning. This morning it was The Fallen Angel, and I only managed to get through the first chapter. Don't mistake me, I was as totally fixated on Gabriel Allon as ever, but I run on several levels at once, and this morning, my writer self was ooohing and aahhing and rolling over in admiration at Silva's technique even as I was falling in love with Gabriel all over again.

Silva's master class, chapter 1: set the scene, using an accessible character, check. Make it an intriguing setting, check. Don't be a travelogue, check. Drop a small bomb. Check. And Gabriel—show us his deep humanity, check. His importance, check. His unique ability to speak to the paintings in his care, check.  Make him nuanced and vulnerable and  so, so skilled.  Most of all, make me love him. done.

Sorry, for some reason I can't understand, this picture won't rotate upright. The reason I took the picture was it's so essentially Pilsen--St. Matthew's church, offering immigration services a notary public, and food to the community it serves.

Torn now, between reading on and writing Seraphy's next story. I want to do even a tenth as well. There's a title waiting—In Pilsen, South of 16^th.  The title to pins the story down, gives Seraphy a place to stand, and, if it’s the right title, brings a little sense of what's to come.

   

I think I'll read Silva's first two chapters again, try to learn a bit from the master. Hmm. I just had a flash, generations of would-be painters standing in front of Caravaggio's Deposition, studying the masterwork. And that's how it's done. 

A Good Year for Imagination

Yup, end of one wild year and time to start off again.

I just totaled up my Kindle sales, including free promos, and as far as I can tell, some 5877 copies of Chicago Stories: West of Western (known around here as WOW) have gone to good homes. At least, I hope they're good and have given the readers something. I don't know yet about Along the Ravenswood, too soon for figures to come in.

A good year for me. I published WOW, my debut novel, in mid-January, having no sense of what to expect, and started fumbling around learning how to promote a book. Joined Twitter and Facebook, spent far too much time doing the things folks used to do--notifying alumni magazines, that sort of thing. I did some things right, too, like spending a lot of time finding good Facebook friends (thanks here to Sisters in Crime) and Twitter connections and telling everyone I knew about the book.

And I finished my second book, Along the Ravenswood (ATR), published in mid-December.

There has never been a year when I learned so much so fast. I originally intended to write a straightforward mystery novel, well-crafted but not so different from many others. A good plot, interesting characters, a nice two or three hour read on a rainy afternoon,maybe. Somehow other things slipped into the stories as I stumbled along, and I ended up revealing far more of myself than I'd intended. Maybe that's partly because WOW is sited in my old neighborhood and some of the events in the book were taken from events in my life.  Maybe it's because Seraphy's named after my great-grandmother, Seraphy Temperance Taylor.

Someone on some Sunday morning TV show several years ago was talking about gangs and commented that the real problem was a failure of the imagination. I don't remember the name of the show, or the commentator, but what he said burned itself into my thoughts and sits there today. My friends and I lived by our imaginations, although I hadn't thought of it that way before. When  I was a potter, my studio partners had a bad spell (no sales, no $$ to live on) and asked me what to do. Without thinking, I said "re-design," and that's what they did. That's what we did.

Gangbangers may be the way they are because that's the only way they can imagine themselves. I sometimes wonder what might happen if we all started thinking about that, and what could be done to change that . . . I know many have tried before, but maybe not quite the right way?

When something's not working, come up with a new idea. This isn't true for most folks who have jobs, because having a job means someone else has thought up the whole job. Thinking a project, product, business up from scratch is very different. For those who do that, whether we're Steve Jobs or the guy in his garage with a mousetrap, for us imagination is the basis of survival. We really are different from others.

We tend not to have absolutes because we know reality is only an idea.

I'm going to stop now before it gets any deeper.

ALONG THE RAVENSWOOD up on Kindle

LIVE ON AMAZON! tinyurl.com/c6zqjd5

It's about time! I had thought to get Along the Ravenswood on Kindle last June, but as you know, reality intervened. Well, actually I read the manuscript. Yikes! By the time all the edits and proofs and so on were done, not to mention finding a cover designer, I was lucky to get her out before the end of the year.

Lots of folks helping to get the word out this time: a herd of Twitter followers, Facebook friends and others. I woke up to find that the EReader Cafe had featured CHICAGO STORIES: WEST OF WESTERN  (tinyurl.com/83aqnfn) at the top of its page this morning. I'm running WOW (West of Western) FREE 12/21-23 as part on my coming out party for ATR (Along the Ravenswood) in the hope readers fall in love with the series . . . sorry, I have no thoughtful tidbits to offer today, too excited to be at the end. Or is it the beginning?

Riding the Artist's Cycle

Once long ago, when I was once again back in graduate school and trying to figure out how things worked, I came across a psychologist's theory about how artists worked. And sorry, I can't remember his name right now, and probably the details of his theory have evolved with time. His book was huge and fat, if that helps. And had a blue cover.

He suggested artists run on a defined cycle of restlessness/seeking, creative spurts, and depletion/depression. I remember this after thirty years because it seemed to me to be spot on. First the restlessness: roaming around, trying a dozen different things, looking for some undefined something.  Starting books and tossing them aside. Standing in front of the open refrigerator. Running around town on unnecessary errands. Walking anywhere. Cleaning closets. I now think this is the charging-the-batteries period. I try to use the extra energy while charging to clean up whatever I've put off--basements and garages, mostly.

Next, I become totally involved with the project, whatever it may be. All the materials I need are ready, having stewed for days in my subconscious while I was rambling around. Now is the time. I start the project, leaving everything else aside. For a long time it was making pots, then rehabbing a house, researching and writing a dissertation. Later on, for a short time painting (not very good at this). Quilts. Now it's usually writing.This is my favorite time, working hard, excited about the work, seeing something come from a conglomeration of materials. Often I don't fully realize what the end product will be, not consciously. Even now I'm intrigued to read my work, after it sits a few weeks. Did I really write that?

Then the down period. Depleted, tired, dissatisfied, bored. Seeing the flaws in the completed work. Why am I doing this? Blah, blah. Once this was the pits, even bordering on clinical depression. I thought I might be bi-polar, when that was popular. But actually, I'm just an artist of sorts, with an artist's cyclic personality.

Having a structure in mind has been a lifesaver. I ramble around in the restless period with an undertow of excitement, knowing that eventually I'll be ready to make something new, and have learned to see the down time as simply time to rest, not wallow in depression.I'm social during my restless phase, anti-social and distracted when making things, and long for company when resting.

So thanks, psychologist-whose-name I can't remember.

Looking for the Anal Retentive Inner child

Yesterday I finished my first round of formatting edits for ALONG THE RAVENSWOOD. It wasn't really the first round. The first round was going so badly--I'd reached 108 changes before I was a third of the way through the pdf--that I pulled the plug and asked Hitch & co. to start over. Paying another formatting fee was going to be much less that all those individual change fees.

Before I sent the new and improved word document, I went through the whole thing again, being as neat and focused as possible. I swore there were no mistakes this time. I'd get it back and it would be clean. Right. I got it back right away, and it was much better. Unfortunately that morning I'd waked early with the realization I'd misnamed a crucial street--all the way through the book! So, with that and one thing and another, I had 56 corrections this time, a record low for me. But this time, it will come back perfect. Right!

I'm hoping for free of typos. I'll settle for that and get it up on Kindle ASAP. Because, if I let myself think, there were bits here and there I'd like to rewrite. Dialogue to sharpen. Sentences to reword. Images to focus. Sure, and the damned thing would never get published.

What now? I'm planning to put both books out as trade paperbacks through CreateSpace. It's rather scary for me, as new things can be for we Luddites. My friend Stephan tells me he'll help. I live in a university town and can get drugs . . .

I looked at CHICAGO STORIES: WEST OF WESTERN. It's been a year since I finished that one, and I can't let it go without a revision, so I'm calling the paperback the 2nd edition. (Probably have Hitch format the 2nd for Kindle, too).  I didn't make any big changes to the story, but there were a lot of words and phrases that needed something. Anyhow, the rewrite's done, and I'll proof it and upload it soon. Arghh.

They Come in the Night

They come while I'm sleeping, those infernal Typo-beasts, to frolic and reproduce on the pristine pages of my ALONG THE RAVENSWOOD pdf. How else could it be that after reading and rereading and rereading the mss, both I and my friends have declared it perfect, only to find it riddled with typos the next time it's read? Even on this, my absolutely, definitely last run-through? I'm just over half-way through and already have listed 123 corrections, for which I shall have to pay. Yikes.

I have two days to get this done and off to booknook.com (again), where their resident geniuses wave their wands and fix it all. I hope. Then, sometime just after Thanksgiving, I'll upload the new and improved pdf and ALONG THE RAVENSWOOD will be live on Amazon for Kindle.

I'm also proofing the word mss for both ALONG THE RAVENSWOOD  and CHICAGO STORIES: WEST OF WESTERN to publish as trade paperbacks through CreateSpace. I'd love to say they're coming in a couple of weeks, but I've never done this before, so we'll see about that.

I ran into a slight problem. when I reread West of Western, I saw so many things (small things) I'd like to change that I decided to issue the paperback as a second edition. I think the second edition's better. I may have Hitch and company at booknook do another pdf for it and put the second edition out for Kindle as well. Hmm. Have to think about that.

With all this going on, I blew off NaNoWriMo for this year. It's the first time in five years. Arghh. I did start another Seraphy story, and got about 14000 words in, but couldn't do that and get the proofing and so on at the same time.  It's a good story, though, and I'll get back to it after Christmas.

Well, I'll probably work on getting my Pilsen story finished first--I think I'll call that one South of 16th (that's where Pilsen is, south of the viaduct that runs along 16th street southwest of the Loop). I like the Pilsen story, which I wrote as last year's NaNo novel. I have the characters, and a lot of the scenes, and I know how the ending goes. I love the ending.

The plot, though, has problems and the middle just sucks. Arghh! I hate plotting, so that's what I should do after Christmas: sit down and fix the plot, actually plan out the scenes according to my editor's advice (ugh. another first), so I can avoid those bits that jabber on and don't go anywhere. Somehow a lot of those seem to have found a home in Pilsen.

And then I have the other Nano Seraphy novel, the one about Logan Square and the apartment building full of modern-day Amazons. You know, carpenters and cops and ex-military and actors and . . . all women. The building was an old funeral home and apartment complex, has been bought by a retired Marine Corps colonel who's going blind and needs a retirement project. She's turning it into a condo complex for single women, non or post-domestic women. I like the camaraderie among the women, the building (an ode to 1920s Moorish architecture). So far the plot's pretty nonexistent, tho, and what there is, stinks. This one needs lots of work and is complicated by the fact I never particularly liked Logan Square. Hmm. Maybe just needs a bit on site research. Maybe I'll find something I love there. Otherwise, it's the round file.

The Seraphy novel I started this year is about Ukrainian Village/Wicker Park and centers around an old mansion in Wicker Park. No problem here with the neighborhood, the characters are great, and the idea behind the plot works, I think.  There's also a very appealing secret society at work. I'll finish this one, for sure.

And then there's LIBERTY, a very off-the-wall, definitely not Chicago novel. Liberty discovers she has a gift when her parents are suddenly killed and she inherits her grandmother's gift of finding dead bodies. She also inherits her Christmas Tree farm in Veedersburg, Indiana, and a few other things. Sheep, lots of sheep, and a Basque shepherd to go with them. It's a rather strange and wonderful story I made up out of nowhere for Nano a couple of years ago.  My favorite scene is when Liberty and the Basque shepherd, pursued by Chicago mobsters, run naked through a field of sleeping hogs. There is a story behind that!

Gotta go, Typo-beasties have taken over another manuscript!

Word and Image, Finding a Cover Artist

You can relax now. After several weeks of pissing and moaning and looking at hundreds (okay, dozens) of websites and covers in bookstores and the local library, I've found my cover artist, Todd Hebertson. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I'd just asked the good folks at booknook.biz in the first place. When I emailed them looking for the AWOL Dustin Ashe, they told me others were also looking for him and he'd apparently disappeared. Again. I couldn't wait for him to show up and asked for suggestions. Indira suggested two possibles, one of whom was Todd Hebertson.

So I looked at his website and his work was professional, but the images not quite what I was looking for. More weeks, more banal covers, more pissing and moaning. Finally I decided to check Todd out. There's a lot to be said for professional. He emailed me back within the day. He didn't ask for clips or the ms of the book, just a synopsis and technical specs. Not a good sign, I thought. How can he come up with images that fit the book if he's not read even parts of it?

He didn't. The first proof came in a day or two. I loved the layering, the layout and the font and he'd somewhere found a photo of the Krause Music Store in Ravenswood (where the book opens) taken before the huge tree grew up that blocks photos now. But the cover looked like a romance novel: Seraphy had a page boy, wore a suburban car coat, looked like she was on her way to teach kindergarden, and the cover was in shades of orange. Arghh. Try again, I said.

If I'd been thinking, I'd have realized Todd couldn't read my mind and it was not his fault I didn't manage to tell him what sort of image I had in mind (I was used to Dustin, who reads the clips and presto! a brilliant, perfect image appears. If he ever gets to it). I thought about exactly  what image I wanted. Make the figure smaller, I said, and in silhouette, and get rid of the orange. Blue or green or gray are okay.  I sent a slew of photos of Louis Sullivan's work I'd taken in Ravenswood to give him the idea. And a page of the coded WWII journal that leads Seraphy to the killer (I had fun writing that using a toothpick and instant coffee on watercolor paper).

The second proof was better, but now it was a nasty greeny-yellow I hated and Seraphy was still too big, wearing leggings and her shoulders slumped--not a housewife, but a sad sorority girl. Okay, I said, kill the shrieky green, think Williamsburg blues and greens, make the figure smaller. Look at photos of Adam Lambert and Lisbet Salander (The Swedish version,w/Rapace, not the American one) and make her edgy, not ordinary. Todd was now answering emails in one word. I figured he was about ready to see me off to Devil's Island.

A couple days later I got the third proof. Wow. Perfect colors, Nice dark, mysterious Seraphy silhouette, great architecture in the background, nice overlay of the journal page. I loved it! I was so excited I spent the last two days finishing proofing my manuscript so I can send it off to booknook.biz for formatting tomorrow, along w/ the new cover.

All this has me thinking about word and image. If the artist hasn't read the book (and that would take far more time than usually feasible), how do we tell another person, who has totally different life experiences and visual referents, what we want our cover (illustration, whatever) to look like? What words will mean the same thing to him as they do to us? Todd is of a different generation from me and lives in Utah, while I am in central Illinois, so different cultures. Somehow we did it and he created a cover that expresses the love of architecture and mystery I wanted, and better, the multilayered story. Good on you, Todd Hebertson!

Almost Done. Again. Finding a Cover Designer. Arghh.

Once again I see I've neglected to write for over a month. Sorry about that, but you see, I don't like to write if I don't think I have anything to say. Or maybe it's that I'm just slothful and thinking of something seems too difficult.

Anyhow, I'm here now. September was a strange month, starting out so hot I had the AC on constantly and ending cold enough to turn on the heat. At least the drought ended and with the first rain, my garden revived, both the grass and the flowers returned. A few of the spring flowers are even blooming again.

And I finally finished what was to be a proofreading of my second novel, Along the Ravenswood. Proofreading turned into a rewrite and took far longer than I planned. I can't spend more than 3-4 hours at a time working on the book or I get dozy and start skipping through and missing errors, so I spent afternoons on Something Completely Different--tuckpointinng and limewashing the basement of the old house I own next door.

Here's an old photo from three years ago--the porch and the small balcony now have new railings, or restored old ones. Much better. The lilies have grown into a goodly green fence/hedge.

It's a huge old place 45' x 45', divided now into four apartments, two up and two down, with a central hall. The brick foundation's a hundred years old and there were  places I could have stuck my finger in between the bricks, if I didn't mind the spiders, which I did. WhenI bought the house in 2000, the basement was a black hole, wet, moldy, filled with junk and dripping with spider webs. Since then I've had over four dump truck loads of stuff taken out of it, the foundation exterior tuckpointed, the floor paved (yes, it had a dirt floor!) and all the gas and water lines replaced. Now the basement has a large central room with a 9 foot ceiling and 3 rooms on each side that open into it. All these brick-walled rooms were dark and spidery. I put off doing anything about that for over 10 years.
 
Rewriting and proofing were driving me insane to the point where even working on the basement seemed attractive. I wasn't interested in cutesy panelling and carpet.I like real basements--a painted concrete floor and white limewashed walls that create a clean, dry, bright work and storage space. So that's where I've been. 18 bags of mortar mix and 9 bags of hydrolized lime and I'm nearly done, as done as I think basements should be. I've only one small room left to tuckpoint yet, then a final coat of limewash. I'll leave the whole thing to dry out and paint the floor (pale gray, what else?). It should be done about the time Ravenswood goes live on Kindle.   

Today and the rest of this week I'm doing one more (THE LAST) read-through of Ravenswood, writing the blurb, getting all that forematter and endmatter and so on written and sending it off to Hitch at booknook.biz for formatting.

I'm also making up my mind on a cover artist. Dustin Ashe seems to have fallen into a black hole, so I've been looking at hundreds of covers. Almost none of which I liked--too many feel alike, some are too cute, many too trite, some too slick, etc. Some designers don't even ask about the book. Some offer stock covers from which to choose. Arghh! Is there no one who thinks he or she should read the book, or parts therof, and design a cover with some relation to that book? Such a radical thought! I finally have someone in mind (suggested by the folks at booknook.biz), but I'll decide by the end of the week. Arghh.

RIP Kindle?

My Kindle died two days ago. First it froze on the second contents page, then flickered to the Agatha Christie cover and a loading bar appeared, showed it half loaded, and froze. After that, nothing.

A day after the sudden death, I found myself wondering at the difference Kindle had made in my life. Not all good.

I never intended to buy a Kindle. I was the one in my reading group who held out, nodding patronizingly at those who praised its variable fonts and compact size. Um-hmm, how nice. But what about actually holding the book, admiring its cover, sniffing that new book smell? What about never needing a recharge? How about that?

Then two things changed. I decided to publish my debut novel (Chicago Stories: West of Western) as an ebook on Amazon Kindle and I entered the hospital for a double knee replacement. I would be in the hospital for almost three weeks of intensive rehab before escaping. I knew I'd go through a book a day and it just wasn't possible to take fifteen or twenty books with me, so I bought my first Kindle and loaded it up with the classics, which were free. Cool, I thought. Free is good. I also bought a few new books.

Kindles are great for hospital stays, compact and easy to hold, but my battery ran down and there was no outlet available near my bed. Yeah, I thought, just as I suspected. The fatal flaw. So when I got home, I went back to my beloved paperbacks.

Then right after Christmas, I published Chicago Stories: West of Western and discovered KDP Select, which gives authors free promo days. Soon I was scanning Facebook and Twitter for freebies and loading up more than I could read. It didn't take long to realize that using the 'look inside' feature was necessary to avoid the poorly written and formatted ebooks. I also realized that if a book read like cold molasses, I could delete it after the first page or so.  But still, I was downloading more than I could read, even though I went through at least one a day. I had over a hundred unread novels on my Kindle when it died (and can get them all back when I get the new Kindle).

So I'm not buying a new Kindle for a while. I'm sorting and rereading some of  my enormous collection of paperbacks first. One thing is coming clear: I don't think about paper books and ebooks in the same way. I buy a paper book as a forever thing--something I'll reread again and again, a part of my life. An ebook is more like a TV show, a one-time thing to enjoy (or not) and forget. Hmm. Some of my friends have been encouraging me to publish my Chicago Stories series as paperbacks through CreateSpace. Maybe I should?

I still buy my favorite authors in hard copy--Daniel Silva, for instance, Laurie King, Lindsey Davis, the ones I'd hate to lose. Because there's something inherently temporary about a Kindle ebook. I know they can be replaced, but still--what if I was, say, on the Camino in Spain and my battery ran down? What about that?

What lazy days of summer?

No lazy days of summer here. The University of Illinois starts its fall semester at the end of the month and I had four apartments turn over the end of July. Good turnovers--two tenants finished PhDs and got tenure track jobs elsewhere, two moved to larger quarters with significant others. I found great new tenants and am looking forward to a happy year. But there were things to be done before new tenants move in --painting, changing light fixtures and so on--and everything had to be done between the end of July and the beginning of August. And was!

So no writing for a bit. My buildings--two old mansions now divided into eight apartments--support me while I write, providing a place to live and work to do and more, smart and interesting tenants who are around but not too much so.  This year I have a geographer, a linguist, an engineer, a medical student, a law student, a musician and a man who sells science fiction books on the internet. Oh, and two psychologists. All good for the odd chat over the washing machine.

All this moving in/moving out business came at a perfect time for me. I just finished editing and proofing my second book, RAVENSWOOD, the Second Chicago Story and have put it away for a bit before I go back and read it through at speed to try to catch any remaining nasty bits.  Then its off to the formatter (Hitch at Booknook.biz). I'm also waiting for Dustin Ashe (Indyarmada.com) to come up with another cool cover. All this built-in waiting time is much appreciated after total immersion in editing and proofing. My poor battered brain needs the break.

The drought here is horrendous. My gardens are essentially burnt out, the grass is long dead and even the trees are beginning to wilt. That lets me off gardening, so I'm thinking about finally cleanng up my basement, limewashing the walls, painting the floor, all that.  Yikes!  A clean basement. What a concept. Must be the heat.

I've spent the last month rewriting Ravenswood. My editor sent it back with extensive comments and a marked-up manuscript. The problem was, she was right. Once I got my battered ego out of its hiding place in the closet, I realized she was dead on. Finally someone had pointed out exactly what I was doing wrong--a lot--and suggested ways to fix it. I set about doing just that. when I finished, my 82,000 word novel had swelled to 109,000. Yikes. Now I'm proofreading it before I send it out to two lovely volunteer proofreaders and trying to clip out a word here and there to bring it down to maybe 100,000 words. Maybe. It's a better book than it was, and I think, a better book than my first, West of Western.

Rewriting/editing fascinates me. I have a sense of discovery, as if each change shows me more of my characters, opening up new dimensions and insights. Most of my changes are in the service of making my characters more accessible to my readers. With Chicago Stories: West of Western,  I had more than one reader comment that Seraphy seemed rather distant, but I had no idea how to change that. Until my editor, Elizabeth Lyon, pointed her mighty pen at the problem. I hope the new Seraphy is more reader-friendly.

I suspect the problem is really more about me than Seraphy. I am a very reserved person. Not unfriendly or shy, just that there is much that I keep to myself--like my characters, apparently. Writing is a lot like sitting in a shrink's office--trying to figure out just what my characters are feeling and thinking and getting that out there.

We are now officially in the midst of a severe drought. Like we haven't noticed. I've christened my yard 'Mohave,' and Urbana may have to cancel its wildly popular Sweet Corn Festival for lack of corn. I  water my hostas every few days, but my grass is on its own and has mostly gone dormant. For the first time I can remember, the old-fashioned lilies have turned yellow and look like they're dying. I don't think anything short of a neutron bomb can kill those suckers, so I assume they'll will return with the rain. If it ever rains. They say its the hottest year ever recorded and the future will be worse. I can't understand how anyone can still deny global warning.Not that the earth will die or anything like that, Mother Earth has seen much, much worse. We haven't. Yet.  

FREE Days for CHICAGO STORIES: WEST OF WESTERN

FREE! CHICAGO STORIES: WEST OF WESTERN is free today, tomorrow and Sunday on Amazon!
If you read it and like it (and how could you not?) please consider writing a review on Amazon. they use the reviews to decide which books to promote and your review would help a lot.

Running Away to Chicago!

First: the link is to Amazon and Chicago Stories: West of Western because that's the only book I have on Kindle now. But I'm writing this as I revise Along the Ravenswood, the second of my Chicago Stories.

Yesterday I drove to Chicago to get some photos of Louis Sullivan's Krause Music Store for my new cover. Dustin Ashe made me a  great cover, the one you see here, last year. I love it. but in the meantime, much to my surprise, the book has grown and changed and now this great cover doesn't fit anymore. So . . . I went go get some material for Dustin (poor boy scratches a living in California, so sad). The facade of the small store was Sullivan's last known commission, finished less than two years before his death.  the building's listed and discussed on the National Register of Historic Places.

I wanted a good shot of the whole facade and the weather was perfect, one of those crystal clear, cool, sunny days that make site work a joy. When I actually arrived at the store, though, I found the little tree I remembered being in front was now a much larger tree, so unless I wanted a shot of the tree with bits of building peeping through, I was out of luck. I did take some twenty detail shots, and have posted one for you. Dustin will have to check out the Nat'l Register to see the entire facade.

Architect Louis Sulllivan, often called the father of the modern skyscraper, was one of the founders of the Chicago School of Architecture. Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, developed the caisson foundation, making possible steel-framed curtain wall high rises. supposedly Adler developed the foundation and structural elements, Sullivan the facades and ornamentation.

My interest lies more in the small buildings Sullivan designed later in his life when, he was no longer the fashionable architect of the auditorium years. After his death, a friend burned his papers, saying there were personal detail the public need never know. Nor do we know what Sullivan was doing in those years. We have eight small banks scattered around the Midwest (notably the Merchant's Natrional Bank of 1914 in Grinnell, Iowa, the so-called Jewel Box Bank), and the Krause Music Store facade at 4611 North Lincoln Avenue in Chicago. In Along the Ravenswood, Seraphy's old architectural history professor discovers a lost Louis Sullivan church from these years not far from the Krause Music Store and commissions Seraphy to convert the little church to a private library for Sullivan studies. I'm asking Dustin to use bits from the  music store and from the Getty Tomb, an earlier structure with wonderful bronze grills and geometric designs in stone, for the cover.

And I thought you might like to see what all the excitement, at least mine, was all about.