One Little Life

We had rats. Anyone who has poultry and a pond has rats. If you also have several mild winters, you then have a rat problem. Mr Rat Catcher came with traps and poison, but we still had a rat problem. So, we decided to get cats.

We found some cats that had been born in a stable, not feral as they had been well cared for, but they were used to living outside. We bought two, Milly and Molly, brought them home, and put them in the garage. For three days, I didn’t see them, and wondered if they had escaped! Then I took the dog into the garage with me, and two tiny kittens tentatively appeared. They had been raised on a farm with German Shepherd dogs, and they recognised Kia as a friend. Gradually they learned to like us too. When they were bigger, they moved to their home in the workshop.

Two cats wasn’t really enough to cure the rat problem, so we didn’t spey Milly and Molly. After about eighteen months, both were pregnant. Between them, they gave birth to four live kittens. Both cats are tabbies. Their kittens were a mixture of silver tabby, smoke and black. They had clearly never read any of the parenting books about how to care for kittens, and regularly sat on window sills where the kittens couldn’t reach them. I had to check them frequently and reunite mothers and kittens so they could feed. They weren’t really keen on any of them. Apart from the black one.

Milly had given birth to the black kitten, but they both wanted him. So they would hide him. I would go into the garage and all the kittens would be mewing in a heap, the mothers would be sitting somewhere high, and the black kitten would be missing. I found him at the back of shelves, in empty boxes and behind gardening equipment. When I put him with the litter, Molly would try to steal him, ignoring her own kitten.

Eventually the kittens were weaned. I decided we had too many cats, so gave one kitten to a friend, put two kittens with the mothers to live in the workshop, and kept one kitten inside, as a house cat. I chose the black kitten (I wanted him too!) We called him Mungo.

Now, everyone thinks their pet is special, (and people without pets think they are slightly mad.) So I won’t bore you with details of how Mungo would ‘beg’, reaching up with his front paws when he wanted to be picked up. Or how he would chase a plastic egg for many hours. Or how he loved the dog and would dive bomb her paws when she was sleeping. Or how he regularly killed the kitchen towel. Or slept in a very ‘uncatlike’ manner, on his back, with all four legs outstretched, often in the dog's bed. Or how he adopted Husband ("not a cat person") and ran to meet him when he arrived home from work and sat on him all evening. But he was special to us, and we loved him.

Initially, the plan was to keep him inside, for him to be a house cat. Then one day he escaped. I found him outside, playing with his siblings. He looked so happy, it seemed cruel to keep him locked inside. But the traffic in the farm lane worried me. So we decided that at night, when there were very few cars (about 4 per hour) he could go outside. During the day, when the roads were busier, he would stay inside.

We soon had a routine going. Every evening, Midge, his brother, would loiter around the cat flap, waiting. When we went to bed, we would let Mungo into the utility room, so he could use the cat flap. Every morning, around 6am, when we let the dog out, Mungo would run in. His siblings often were with him, it was like they were saying ‘Bye’ to him when he came inside. He would then eat, drink, and follow us around, asking to be picked up. Then he would nap for most of the day.

Until the last day. Until the day when he didn’t come in when we let Kia into the garden. The day when a man knocked on the door at 7am, to ask if I had a black cat.

I rushed outside. Some landscapers had found him, on their way to work. They had parked their vans in the lane and were carrying him in a sling made from an old towel. There were about nine of them, young men in their green uniforms. It was so kind of them to bother. Sometimes people are nice.

We could see Mungo had, at least, a broken leg, so we rushed him to the vet. As we drove, he took my thumb into his mouth, like a child holding my hand. Then either pain or fear became intense, and he bit down, both sides, straight through my thumb. It hurt.

He spent all day at the vets. Apparently, the most dangerous thing for a cat is shock, so they kept him warm and sedated, planning to operate the following day. He died that evening.

It was a bizarre day. I ate four doughnuts and drank lots of coffee. Completely missed lunchtime, it was suddenly mid-afternoon. I had walked the dog and cleaned out the birds and was wishing we had something other than Mr Bump plasters in the house for my sore thumb. Felt weird, sometimes fine, sometimes contemplating losing all the other people and animals I care about. Everyone dies. It’s always horrible. There isn’t a way to protect yourself, not without being hard.

I wondered where God was in all this. The thing is, we aren’t protected from the rubbish in life. God helps us get through it, but we aren’t ‘owed’ by God, whatever our relationship with him. He isn’t a genie in a lamp, we cannot pray and ‘make’ God change things. Life is horrid sometimes. It hurts. It’s tough. We can only try to survive and recover from the hurt. But I do believe he cares. When we hurt, God hurts too. It doesn’t have to be lonely even if it is always hard. I did pray, but in a sort of wordless, lifting the sadness sort of way - a young child raising their arms to a parent sort of way.

In time, I will thank God that I had Mungo, even though a year was too short, his life was too little. But do I have the right to say that? Sometimes, when we are hurting, we feel the loss more than we ever felt the joy. Mungo was a cat. In a few days, life will be back on kilter. I will carry the loss of my father's death for the rest of my life. However, I have no 'rights' here, I did not create any of the things that I have loved, I can feel pain, sadness, loss. But should I feel anger? Whilst it is a natural part of the grieving process, there comes a time when I should let that go. We have never been promised a pain free life, not here, not now.

If you have had a pet, I don’t need to explain the sorrow, the tears, the huge hole that he has left. My thumb was sore for days, but the pain was sort of helpful. It was something physical that recognised the pain I felt inside.

There is no happy ending here. Sometimes in real life there isn’t. I wish I had never let him outside at night. But then, I am glad that I did. He had such a happy little life. He climbed trees and played with his family and did everything that cats are designed to do. I know, eventually, I will think of him and smile. I will recognise that he gave us one year of lots of joy. But right now, I miss him. Thank you for reading.

     

    

    

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 anneethompson.com

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If you are interested, you can read why I think prayer doesn’t work at:

https://anneethompson.com/christian-tearfund-materials-and-poems/why-i-think-prayer-doesnt-work/

Self-Publishing : Part Three

So, after you have had your manuscript edited, have proofread it about a million times, and are fairly sure that you have picked up as many typos as is humanely possible, it is ready to send to a type-setter.

The type-setter puts your book into the right format for the printer. You can assume a cost of about 90p a page. It depends on print size, but a 100,000 word book is about 300 pages. They will send you examples of different text, ask if you want the first letter of a new chapter written as a capital, or the first word, or the whole of the first line. These were all things I had never noticed before (and I am an avid reader!) I think I only notice if something is ‘odd’, if a self-published book has strayed from what my eye is used to seeing. I was therefore grateful that my type-setter knew more than me. He had done this many times before and could tell me what a ‘normal’ book looked like. I had to keep running to my bookshelves to check things.

You also want someone with experience so the margins are the correct size - you don’t want the words running into the fold of the book, nor do you want massive margins because that means more pages, which will cost you more money.

Some people choose to have a running header, with either the author name of the chapter title on each page. Some people like the page numbers in the centre, some prefer them at the top. I didn’t have strong opinions on much, I was mainly just keen that my book didn’t look odd : that chapter one began on a right hand page, that the starting margins were full width and all others indented, things like that. This was all learned while I was answering questions and checking inside other books.

I was told that pages are bound in batches of 16 (I think it depends on the size of your book.) This means there might be some empty pages, at either the front or the back. My type-setter suggested that this would be a good place to put some ‘tasters’ of my other books, to encourage people to buy them, a ‘free’ advert.

You might also like to think about the copyright page. There is fairly standard wording inside most books, but you can adapt it to suit yourself. In England, copyright is automatic, if you have written something, you own the copyright. Proving that you have written something might be difficult, so it is possible to register your copyright - there are details of how to do this in the Writer’s Handbook. It does not mean you now own the copyright (you did already) but if someone challenges you, you have proof of when you registered it.

It is usual on the copyright page to name the publisher and to put their contact details. If you use a self-publishing company, they will, I presume, put their address there. We weren’t using a company, we were doing it all ourselves and I wasn’t keen on having my own address in the book. We therefore made a company name, The Cobweb Press, and made a website. This gave us an email address that we could use in all the books. (I am sort of hoping no one ever looks at the website, as we made it in a rush, and it’s not going to impress anyone. But it serves a purpose and means strangers can contact me - to order books - without knowing my home address.)

You might decide to have an ISBN number. These are usually included on the copyright page and also on the back cover. It is not essential to have an ISBN number, but shops like them (some shops will refuse to stock the book unless it has one) and it makes it easier for people to find your book if they know it. You buy them. I bought 10 numbers for £149. There was some paperwork to fill out (husband did that for me) and then they were issued, to use as I wished.

We also needed to register the book with the British Library, and send them a copy when it was published.

You need a cover for your book. Go and look at some. I wanted something that would stand out, but not something that looked odd. Find someone who has done other book covers. You need to consider how thick the printed book will be, because that changes the thickness of the spine (and the cover is designed as one long, -front/spine/ back - file.) My typesetter had also done other book covers, so he also did my cover. For the front, you can look online and find many different photographs that are available to buy to use as book covers. These range from textures to use as backgrounds, to full pictures. I opted to have a person on my cover, as the book is about people. The ‘cover guy’ came and took lots of photographs and I chose the one I liked best. He then added the words, designed the spine of the book, suggested ideas for the back. I included the ‘blurb for the back’ in the file I sent to the editor, so that was ready to use. I think you need to allow £35 for a cover, plus a price for the photograph.

We were also discussing choices with the printer. We used cpi (if you look at books you have bought, it usually says who has printed them; ‘cpi' have printed many of the paperback books that you find in the bookshops.) They were very helpful and gave us a menu of options. We could, if we had wanted, had just a single book printed. If anyone has a book they want to see in print but they don’t plan to sell, they might like to have one copy made. Obviously, the more books we had printed, the cheaper the cost per book. If your print several hundred, it comes to about £2 per book.

They asked us which thickness of paper we wanted and what size of page. I didn’t have a clue! They kindly sent samples of books they had printed, so I could ask all my family and friends to turn the pages and tell me which thickness they preferred. Made a change from talking about the weather.

If you read all the terms and conditions that the printer sends, you might find that one condition is that you have indemnity insurance. This was quite a hassle to arrange, and I don’t think actually it will cover much should anyone ever sue me, claiming I have stolen their ideas. But if you read all the small print (husband is good at that sort of thing) it was a condition of being published, so we did it. We had to estimate my probable earnings for the year - the insurance company told us they didn’t go that low!

I really want to tell you about the things we did to market the book, why I had to register for US tax, and how much shops will want to make when they sell your book; but this is too long. I will include it in Part Four. Why not sign up to follow my blog so you don’t miss it?

anneethompson.com

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Thank you for reading.

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My first book, Counting Stars, is available from Amazon. 

You can buy it as a Kindle book to read either on a Kindle or an ipad. Why not take a look?

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Publishing a Book - Part two

All the characters in my book had the same names as my cousins. I have a lot of cousins. This was completely unintentional. 

When I write a story, it's like watching a film, I see what is happening in my head and write it down. When a new character arrives, I pluck a name quickly from the air and continue. Obviously somewhere deep in my subconscious, my cousins' names popped up. I didn't even notice until reading the manuscript a few weeks after I had finished it. None of the characters were like my cousins, they just shared names. I changed them (the names, not my cousins.) I now use the internet to find 'the most popular names in' a certain year, and choose a surname from the telephone directory. It is safer.

My point is, it is difficult to always see what we have written. We are too involved. This is why I think an editor is an excellent investment. Someone unconnected with the book can point out that you use 'that' five times in a sentence and that it isn't always that essential. Plus all those split infinitives that want naughtily to creep into your writing.

Finding an editor was not altogether easy (nothing was, to be honest.) To begin with, anyone can call themselves an editor, so how do you know who is worth employing? It will be a major outlay before you can even think about recouping any money - about £750 for a 100 word manuscript. If an editor is worth having, they will be busy, so sending them samples of work as a ‘test’ is unlikely to be possible unless you intend to pay them for that. You can of course ask which other books they have edited and buy them. However, how do you know if the splattering of unnecessary commas and the split infinitives are because the editor didn’t spot them or because the author/publisher rejected their editorial points? We decided on two editors eventually, one for Hidden Faces and one for Counting Stars. We figured that whichever one we preferred could then edit my other books (which had now grown to four, as I had finished writing Joanna, my story about a psychopath.)

One person (who had better remain nameless) was an editor by trade, did a lot of work for mainstream publishers and was very busy. So busy in fact that we had to wait three months before she would start work on my book. This was annoying, but I felt she was ‘a professional’ and therefore worth waiting for. The other editor we chose, was a writer himself, a writing lecturer and had edited various other books.

I think you need to decide what you want the editor to do. I thought I wanted them to simply proof read my work. This is a confusing term. A proofread is the final thing that happens, after the work has been edited and type-set, before it goes to the printer. What I actually wanted is called ‘copy-editing’.

My use of English is not terrible, I have taught English, I know most of the ‘rules’ about using possessive apostrophes, using fragments of sentences, all the usual stuff. I also knew that it is very difficult to notice mistakes in my own work. I tend to read what I meant to write. I also tend to miss things if I have rewritten something, and perhaps the tense is now different, or the possessive comma is now in the wrong place because I have changed to a plural noun. There is also lots of formal English that I do not know. I am hazy on when you need an Oxford comma, when to use “had -plus -verb” in past tense, when “leant” should be “leaned”. I would guess that most of my readers would also not know, however, I find badly written books irritating to read. I did not want my book to irritate someone who was better educated than me. I did not want to be embarrassed by my book (letting strangers read my work is embarrassing enough as it is!)

Editors will also check for continuity. It is easy to lose track of days in a story, and then you find that you have a nine day week. Or a character enters a room wearing a blue sweater and leaves wearing a red one. The editor should spot these mistakes. I also wanted to be told if the book was too long, or had boring parts, or was confusing. It is difficult to know yourself, because you have written it, you know everything about the story, someone else has to tell you if you have communicated it effectively.

The final thing an editor will do, is prepare the file for the type-setter. So, when everything is edited and all the words are perfect, they will prepare a file that shows where the time breaks are, which paragraphs should be indented, things like that.

As a separate point, do you know where paragraphs are indented? I thought a new paragraph was always indented. My editor pointed out that actually, the first line of a new chapter or after a time break, is NOT indented. I had never noticed that before! This is the sort of thing that makes paying for an editor worth the money. If I had simply printed my book (the “vanity press” label) then I would have started the chapter with an indented paragraph. Then, when someone pointed out to me that actually, ‘proper’ books do not have this format, I would forever be embarrassed by my book. (In case you haven’t noticed, this is a big fear of mine.)

Now, the actual process of editing was also unexpected. Editor 2 took my manuscript immediately and in roughly two weeks, returned it, with comments put in using ‘track changes’. This allowed me to read his comments and either accept or reject his advice. It was good advice, I accepted it. He told me things like, I had built up a lot of tension, and then immediately let it go, I should keep the reader in suspense for longer. Or, I had used “then” four times in a paragraph. Or, Max had put a drink into his bag but the next day he took out a snack. He pointed out split infinitives that I had missed, some dodgy spelling and suggested I lengthened some descriptions. All very helpful, well worth the money.

Editor 1 was a different experience. As a rule, I try to not criticise people on my blog - I think there is enough negativity in the world. But I want to warn you, so you don't make the same mistakes. Some of her recommendations were valid, but many were just frustrating. She changed things that made the text clunky to read, changed the flow, made it feel like a school essay, not a novel. I spent many hours going through my manuscript, mainly changing her additions to what had been there originally. This is a definite bonus with self-publishing. If someone else was publishing my book, they may have accepted all her suggestions, changing my work into something which I myself would never want to read. I'm not sure how you would initially avoid this. People have different writing styles, so unless you have worked with an editor previously, you will not know if their style suits your own.

This makes choosing an editor difficult. If they do not actually write themselves, will they be aware of emotive writing, making the words flow easily, building atmosphere - or will they just plonk down full-stops where they were taught to in school? If, however, they are writers themselves, will they necessarily know what a split infinitive is? Will they have the discipline necessary to catch every error?

Then, when I returned the manuscript to editor 1 for the next round of changes, she informed me she had received a lot of work from Random House, she would let me know when she had time to pick up my script again.

This was a shock! I had expected that, having waited three months for her to start, my manuscript would then take priority. I felt like the person who hires builders, watches while they dig a lot of holes for foundations, and then doesn’t see them for months because they have gone to build something else. Please learn from my experience. If you hire an editor who works for mainstream publishers, those publishers are likely to take priority. If time is important to you, discuss that at the outset and put it in writing.

Also, someone who is using all their energy editing other work, will not necessarily be as thorough with yours. I found grammatical mistakes in my returned manuscript. True, I had missed them myself, but my misconception was that an editor would find and correct them all. This is not the case. I sometimes read books that have occasional errors in them. It doesn’t much bother me, they are easy to pass over, and I have always assumed they were printing errors. I now realise they might not be, they might be mistakes that neither the author nor the editor nor the proofreader picked up prior to printing. No one is perfect and three checkers do not guarantee perfection. When I queried this with the editor (and in fairness, she did lower her final bill accordingly) she said that no editor would expect to pick up every mistake, that is the job of the type-setter and author and proofreader. So, be warned, employing other people does not mean your own work is finished!

Eventually, your work will finally be edited. It has been back and forth several times until it is exactly how you want it and this takes time. It is a full book. A book takes a few days to read and every time it is returned you need to read the whole thing, from beginning to end. Hours of work. By the time I had read it for about the eighth time straight, it was beginning to lose some of its appeal. I was finding it hard to enjoy the story. This is where you need good family and friends. My sons pointed out that authors often dislike their own work when it's first published, that actors and directors are renown for not wanting to watch the films they are in. This was normal. I should keep hold of my first conviction and keep going. (Sometimes my family are nice to me.)

After the editing, you also need to consider the cover, the blurb for the back, the type-setting, the final proofreader. Then of course, you will need to sell your book, which involves some marketing. Son the Economist has studied Marketing, he had a LOT of advice. I will continue this another time.

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Thank you for reading.

My first book is available from Amazon as a Kindle book.

It can be read on either a Kindle or an ipad.

COUNTING STARS by Anne E Thompson.

xxx

Publishing a Book

 I have been working hard on my book. Getting it published as been an unexpected journey, so I’ll share my experiences so far with you in case you ever decide to go the same route.

The first (and most fun part) is writing the book. I love doing this, it feels a lot like acting - I sort of ‘become’ the characters, think about how they would feel or react and daydream them into interesting situations. Most books seem to fit into the 70,000 to 100,000 words range. Which means that after I have written the story, I usually have to go back and delete great swathes of unnecessary sentences. I found the book ‘On Writing’ by Stephen King to be a big help here.

Next comes the ‘not fun’ part. You have to decide how to publish your work. I wrote my first book soon after I realised I would not be returning to teaching (long story, won’t go into it here.) I gave the completed manuscript to Husband to read, who tends to be ‘constructively critical’ of most things I do. To my surprise, he loved it, said he had never realised I could write so well, and encouraged me to send it off to publishers. I did a Google search to find publishers and discovered that most (all of them really) do not accept unsolicited manuscripts from new authors. To get to a publisher, you first need an agent.

I bought the ‘Writer’s Handbook’ and found contact details for various agents. They were all different, all asked for very specific details. Each submission took most of a morning. I then settled back and waited for them to request my full manuscript. I waited a long time. A few replied with very nice, personalised letters, telling me that my book showed real potential but wasn’t something they felt "passionate enough about" to represent me. Several replied with a standard ‘no thank you’ letter. Most never replied at all.

I have since learned that a good agent already has many authors as clients, they only take on a few each year. They receive however, about 300 submissions every week. In order to cope with that, and to not spend their entire working day reading submissions, they employ people - often work experience students, who read the submission letters and decide if they think an author is worthy of being viewed by an agent. The criteria for knowing if the cover letter is 'good enough' is vague and subjective. I think, unless you know someone 'in the trade', finding an agent involves a lot of luck.

During this time, I was writing book number two, Hidden Faces. I also began to talk to other authors. They informed me that rejection was normal. I heard stories of people who had eventually been accepted by mainstream publishers, but during the editing process, their book was changed beyond recognition, it didn’t feel like theirs anymore. Publishers need to make money. Some seem to almost have a formula for the types of book they can sell, things that are currently in fashion, and they ask the authors to fit into it. I feel it is a bit like an artist painting a picture, expressing how they feel, then daring to exhibit their work, and being told, “I would like to buy your painting, but please change the sky to green and add some people and take out that tree…” Would it still be their work of art?

I was now not sure I wanted a mainstream publisher. I began to look into self-publishing. This was confusing. It seemed to fall into two categories: the rather unflattering term of “vanity press” and “self-published”. But what was the difference? It seemed that shops were willing to sell “self-published” books, but not those that used “vanity press”. But it was hard to discover the difference. Both were what I would call “self published”, as the author had paid themselves for the book to be published and they only received money if people bought it. (Generally, my understanding is that for a first book, a publisher will pay the author about £800. All profit after that goes to the publisher. However, people are shy about talking about specifics when it comes to money, so that may not be correct. When I get to the relevant parts, I will tell you what I paid for things, so you know.)

I eventually learned that “vanity press” is when an author writes a book and immediately sends it to be printed. So, no one edits it, no one checks the spelling and punctuation, no one says, “this bit is confusing, you need to change it”, no one type-sets it. You can find sad stories online of people who paid a company to publish their book and then found it had no copyright page, or chapter one began on the first, left-hand side of the book. They received books that ‘felt wrong’, often cheaply bound in very thin card, with pages that were loose.

My feeling is that if you have written a book that you are proud of, that you just want to see in print, to perhaps give to your family (but not sell to strangers), then why not? I hate the term “vanity press”. Writing a book takes time and effort, why not see it published? I much prefer the terms “home press” or “amateur published”.

However, I did want to sell my book. I wanted a ‘proper’ book, one I could be proud of. I started to look online for editors, copy-editors, type-setters, printers. There was a lot of business stuff involved. It was beyond me, so Husband took over (he is good at that sort of thing.) He started by going into a bookshop and asking if they stocked any self-published books. He then looked to see who had printed them and contacted the printers. He got quotes for printing and asked for details of editors and type-setters, people they had worked with before who they could recommend. He then contacted various people, asked for examples of their work, quotes for prices, details of what they would do.

While Husband did all this research (made me remember why I love him) I rewrote a serial, Counting Stars, that had appeared on my website, making it a complete story. I now had two new books ready to publish. (I had given up on the first one and decided I needed to rewrite it.)

This account is getting long, so I will continue Part Two another time. I will explain about editors, and what exactly 'proof-reading' means (it is not what I thought!) and why you might need insurance...

Why not sign up to follow my blog so you don’t miss it?

anneethompson.com

Thank you for reading.

xxxxxxxxxxxx

My first book, 

COUNTING STARS by Anne E Thompson

 is now available as a Kindle Book from Amazon.

xxx