Greetings Backers,

TL;DR: No action items for you. I've given you another chapter to read. (It is on time scheduling and project management, which feels very relevant to me right now!) Your next update will be the week of May 12-16.

I need to keep my update today very short because I'm surrounded by urgent deadlines. One of those deadlines is trying to get SLSC off to print in time so that I can have physical books to sell at Gen Con in August.  I'm pushing to get it done as fast as I can.

I'm a little more than a month out from the Writing Excuses Retreat in Minnesota. (You can still get tickets here.) I'm really looking forward to attending this again, particularly since I get to be an instructor this year.   I'll be teaching Learning to Believe in the Value of Your Own Work and Maintaining Creative Momentum. Those classes join several Worldbuilding sessions, a short story practicum, and Finding the Path from Idea to Story. Class time also includes small group break out sessions where you can get critiques, but also lots of free time for people to wander the trails and do their own writing.  I loved the location last year.

I even got to design some self-led activities for writers that help people not just get word count, but also rest and store up creative energy to take home with them. Retreats are a wonderful way to reset, but my class on Momentum is placed last because at home is where the real creative work has to happen.
If this retreat sounds good to you, we could use a few more ticket sales to reach the optimum group size to build community.  Get more details and buy tickets here.

By the time I get to June I'm really going to need a breather. In the next few weeks I've got some urgent home repairs, helping launch the Locus Magazine annual fundraiser, shipping packages for one Kickstarter, placing merchandise orders for another, and a smattering of other tasks.  Life does not stop and I've still got to finish editing SLSC, so I'm trying to make sure I spend at least 30 minutes on the book in the morning before I get tangled up in all of the other things. Hopefully I also get a work session it later in the day, but at least I'm getting something.
Life feels a lot like this gif. (Hopefully Backerkit lets you see it move.)

There is so much more I want to tell you, about the book, the process, the joys of making this book, the stresses. Instead I think I need to get back to spinning plates. The one on the end is about to fall.
I'll send you another update in two weeks when I'll be past some of these urgent deadlines.

Thank you so much for being part of this project!
Sandra

Greetings Backers,

TL;DR: No action items for you.  I've been testing pens on paper and I've got some preliminary layout to show you.  If you have questions or concerns about anything relating to your order please email [email protected]. I'm giving you all another chapter to read. The chapter can be accessed by clicking over to Backerkit and logging in.   Your next update will be the week of April 28 - May 1. Details below.

Details:

It has been a very stressful few weeks for people (like me) who work with Chinese based companies to get products manufactured.  One of the reasons I love working with my printer in China is how proactive they are about solving problems and how precise they are with producing products. I want to continue to work with them. They've saved my projects from huge errors and delivered top quality items.  The chaotic announcements of tariffs, changing of tariffs, and rescinding of tariffs has played havoc with business planning. It is very difficult to budget a project if the cost you'll have to pay doubles while the product is in transit. This is the situation for anyone who put a shipment on a boat anytime in the past month.  I know of people who are choosing to warehouse their projects in China until there is a stable set of costs and they can do math about whether they can afford them. If the margins are slim, some projects will end up being pulped because that is the easiest way to cut losses. 

Here is the good news for this project: Bound paper goods (like books) are exempt from the new tariffs. This is because the US President has invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose the tariffs and country based reciprocal tariffs by declaring a “national emergency”. The IEEPA includes a specific exemption clause in the Berman Amendment that protects publications, both commercial and otherwise, from its regulations, ensuring U.S. citizens' right to access information. As a result, even if tariffs increase, printed books will remain exempt as long as the IEEPA is used as the legal basis.
(I have learned a LOT more about tariffs and exemptions this week than I really wanted to have to know.)

I still get to work with my preferred printer to produce this book for you. The Custom Designed Notebooks will be shifted to their Maylasia plant because Journals are not exempted.  I'll keep you posted about whether that shift will create a change in the delivery timeline.

I tested various types of pens on the paper that will be used for the custom notebooks. I wanted to make sure that it will be nice to write on and will support various inks without smearing. The paper does really well!  The only pen which had a smearing problem past 30 seconds was the dip pen, which is due to the nature of dip pens and not a flaw of the paper.

I'm also working on layout for the book this week. I use InDesign as my layout tool. In this

Immediately after grabbing that screenshot I realized I did not have the section title on the left hand page, so I updated that. I also realized that InDesign had the wrong "workspace" selected. So you can see a difference in available tools between the first screenshot and the second.

I tend to work in only the Typography workspace because I've learned exactly where all the tools are located. In the other workspaces I feel lost.

Here is a different page spread in InDesign

One thing that is very important when working layout is to recognize that the blue and red guidelines affect how you view the page and they won't be in the final. So I always export to make sure I'm seeing what the reader will see.

The pages look different without the guides. I can already see some problems I want to fix.

1. The top of page titles are much too close to the body text. This is visually confusing. I need to create separation here.
2. This header needs editing to be more like a header and less like a question.
3. I need to make sure that the page number placement isn't too close to the edges of the page. 
4. This is two lines of a paragraph floated onto the next page. If it were only one line that would be an "orphan" line and I would definitely have to move it. You never want a single line of a paragraph floating by itself at the bottom or top of a page. In this case I still might want to consolidate so that this bullet list paragraph stays together. 

There are lots of small decisions that can really affect the look and feel of a book. I get to make lots of those decisions in the next few weeks. 

That's my update for today. I'll update you again the week of April 28-May 1 after I've returned from a family trip. Thank you for being part of my project!
Sandra

TL;DR: Line editing is in process! I'm discussing paper types with my printer and will have samples soon. I expect to start working on layout tasks in parallel with editing. No action items for you. If you have questions or concerns about anything relating to your order please email [email protected]. I'm giving you all another chapter to read. The chapter can be accessed by clicking over to Backerkit and logging in.   Your next update will be the week of March 24-28. Details below.

I got stalled on editing and I didn't want to be. I can partly blame recovery from events and taking on a new admin-heavy freelance job. I can also partly blame the fact that my seven-year-old laptop suddenly went from being a reliable workhorse machine to a machine that crashes if I touch it wrong. I moved swiftly to replace it ... and unfortunately ended up with a lemon of a new machine that became non-functional inside a week. I'm now doing without a laptop while my old one sits mostly unused and my new one has been mailed off for warranty service. (I chose mailing for warranty service instead of mailing for maybe-I-get-a-refund. Still not sure I made the right call on that, but I'm committed to the process now.)  Theoretically my new laptop will be returned to me by March 26. I'm not willing to wait that long to get work done, so I've been spending a lot of time at my desktop computer. 

The other thing that had me stalled was the editing process itself. I wanted to make sure that I always had a master document, so I was manually transferring edit notes from a word document back into Scrivener. It was tedious and I kept having to push myself to get it done. When I let go of the idea of putting things back into Scrivener and instead just embraced "Accept / Reject Changes" in MS Word, suddenly I had an editorial flow that didn't feel like an uphill battle. Finding the right process makes all the difference. Which is definitely a thing I knew and even put into the book I'm editing, but sometimes we don't realize what problem we're having until we step back and experiment with doing things differently. 

Now I'm taking the chapters with edit notes done by Bob, and accepting changes, making wording adjustments, adding sentences, clarifying points. I then immediately send those same chapters off to my line editor Linda. She gets them back to me in a few days. I repeat the process of accepting changes, etc. At that point I plan to read each chapter out loud to myself because that will show me even more words I want to fix. Next I'll take that text and put it into layout. There will be one more copy edit looking for grammar mistakes and typos, but then the book is ready for print. 

I'm excited to be at this stage. I've gotten a bid from my printer in China. We're talking about paper types and they're going to send me both a dummy book and paper samples. I want this book to be beautiful to touch and hold while you're reading it. The quote looks good and fortunately books aren't (yet) as badly impacted by tariffs as other commercial sectors. So the bid, even with shipping and tariffs, still falls inside my printing budget. I am feeling some urgency to get the books ordered before pricing changes dramatically.  (Printing stateside is already more complicated and expensive because of paper sourcing and manufacturing problems.)

It is nice to feel like I'm close to the finish line on this book. Your next update will be the week of March 24-28.

I'll get to work and have an update for you in a couple of weeks. 
Thank you so much for backing my project!
Sandra Tayler

Greetings Backers!

I'm overdue on giving you an update. Sorry about that!

TL;DR: The redraft is complete! Only editing remains. No action items for you. If you have questions or concerns about anything relating to your order please email [email protected]. I'm giving you all another chapter to read. The chapter can be accessed by clicking over to Backerkit and logging in.   Your next update will be the week of March 10- 14. Details below.

 
My February got entirely absorbed by attending and running events (LTUE and StoryCon). BUT, I still managed to finish the redraft of all of SLSC. It is now a complete book with a word count of 78,000 words. This is half again longer than the 50,000 words I first intended, but I'm so glad I got to include more thoughts. Some of those final chapters in the book feel really important to me.  My next task is to do several editorial passes in quick succession. Each one will find errors and refine the text. I'll be working with multiple different editors who have different areas of focus. 

I'll be working layout tasks in parallel to try to get the basic layout figured out and to get started on the custom designed notebook now that I know what all the activities are.  Hopefully by my next update I'll have some preliminary layout that I can show you. 

I'm going to try to work fast on both the editing and layout. I'd love to have books in my hands for an event in May, but my printer in China has a three month turn around time, so that ship might have already sailed. I'm still going to work fast because I want the book in your hands as soon as it can be. 

I'll get to work and have an update for you in a couple of weeks. 
Thank you so much for backing my project!
Sandra Tayler