My Conversion To E-Books

I do love printed books. There’s nothing like that feeling of a book in your hands - the weight of the book, the texture of the paper, the smell. I would buy a perfume smelling like old books, really. Yet, I’ve decimated my collection of them from four full bookcases to about one and a half.

 

Why did that happen? Because of e-books, of course. You see, I do love printed books for the feels and smell, but first and foremost I love reading. Reading is no longer tied to printed books and e-books take far less space in a flat which isn’t that big to begin with than printed books do. I admit that a lot of my printed book collection got sold when I moved into a new flat - I wanted to get rid of them and the move gave me a valid reason to really look into it, so I made a hard cut and sold everything but my art books and my most favourite other ones.

The good thing about e-books is that they need so little space and are so easy to take along. I prefer an e-reader to my phone, even though I could use my smartphone as well, yet even an e-reader is much easier to carry around than a stack of physical books. I always take a book along when there’s a chance that I might have to spend some time waiting. You never know what you get in a doctor’s waiting room and government agencies aren’t known for providing a lot of interesting reading material for the waiting citizen with an appointment, either.

If e-books had been around when I’d been a kid - well, let’s say I’d have had all my books with me on every vacation with my parents ever. I’d have had a lot to choose from during the breaks between classes in school, too. Yes, I’ve taken a book with me to school for most of my time in secondary school.

 

When e-books came out, however, I was not convinced (like it took me a while to get into audio books). I do like the physical side of books, as mentioned above, and found it hard to imagine walking away from that. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be bound to a company who’d offer those new e-books to me, either.

My first e-reader was mostly for stuff I’d downloaded for free from Feedbooks. Old books out of copyright and books written by others and distributed for free were what I got from there. However, Amazon with their large collection of e-books beckoned and I’d already bought a lot of physical books from them. I was prepared for a commitment and when my e-reader got damaged, I went to a nearby electronic store and bought my kindle paperwhite which I’m still using. Since then, I’ve built up a respectable library of e-books, both bought and created on my own.

 

Of course, I have a completely different position on e-books now that I’m releasing my own stuff in this format. I can hardly say they’re bad and then produce them myself, now, can I? I’m not that much of a hypocrite.

There are a lot of good things to be said about e-books, too. My dad has his own e-book collection and one great thing for him, as a man of 80, is that you can easily adjust the letter size. What meant getting special books, highly expensive, in the past, is now just a question of pressing a few areas of a screen to make sure the letters are large enough for comfortable reading.

Lately, my collection of e-books has also expanded beyond the regular stories to comics and manga. I’ve got a small collection of digital comics (both in e-book format and in .pdf format) which is nice to read on a tablet and I’ve begun to collect at least one manga series (“Moriarty The Patriot”) digitally, too. It’s too bad that some older manga, like “Hellsing”, are not available digitally.

 

Physical books can be damaged easily - especially when your account says you’re going to buy paperbacks - and then you have to say goodbye to them or re-buy. I’ve bought Steven King’s book on horror, “Danse Macabre”, three times: once in German, which has disintegrated, once in English, which has disintegrated, and now once in English as an e-book.

Theoretically, an e-book could be ‘destroyed’ by no longer being available anywhere and by me no longer having a suitable reader, but the chances of that aren’t that high. As long as there’s a way to convert formats or to store my e-books somewhere I can retrieve from later, they’re not lost.

 

For me, the change to e-books hasn’t been easy. It took me a while to accept that I would rather have a file than a book, that I could say farewell to my well-read, nice-smelling books and go with a simple bit of data in the future. Yet, it has come with many advantages - not just with being able to publish books myself - and I recognize that.

It’s also not just the e-books. Audio books have been a lot of fun as well, something to listen to while I’m doing other stuff, something which makes my bedtime more fun, too, because I don’t have to keep my eyes open. I can start the audio book, set a sleep timer, and just lie there, dozing off as a professional narrator reads me a book - bliss! I also buy new music as download by now - I used to transfer the CDs to mp3 format, but there’s no reason to do that any longer. Buying mp3 and downloading it right away is a lot more fun, works every day of the week (the same goes for e-books - I can read as soon as I’ve bought, no waiting for the parcel to arrive or for getting home), and allows easy transfer between different devices, so I can also listen to my music on my smartphone or a tablet.

 

E-books have a lot going for them and there’s no longer a reason not to buy them. It’s cool to have a library full of books - and don’t get me wrong, if I had the space, I’d have one -, but for practical purposes, a file on your devices can be much more useful than a physical, printed book.

Review: The Jane Austen Handbook

First of all, I’m not really a fan of Jane Austen. I’ve tried to read “Pride and Prejudice” more than once, but never made it. I fought my way through “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, but didn’t enjoy the experience. Yet, I do enjoy “The Jane Austen Handbook” by Margaret Sullivan, which speaks clearly for the entertainment value of the book.

 

I have always been interested in history. I do enjoy certain eras more than others and have become interested in the Regency era (the time in which Jane Austen lived and her novels are set) quite a while back.

One big problem with history, though, is that we know little about the life of the everyday person. There’s written protocols of what happened every morning when the king of France was getting ready for the day, but there’s no notes on how your average citizen of Paris started their day. Rulers matter, the ruled don’t, so there’s little information about how the ruled spent their lives. To be honest, even newer and newest history, both from a time where people have written down a lot, rarely talk about the life of the regular people. You don’t easily find a biography about the baker around the corner, but there’s lots about celebrities and politicians.

“The Jane Austen Handbook” delivers precisely on that. Okay, it’s not about the life of a simple peasant, but it is about regular things in the lives of the landed gentry of that time. There’s chapters on how children were raised and what they were taught by whom. There’s chapters on how to spend your day as a member (especially a female one) of the landed gentry. There’s chapters on where to spend which time of the year for optimal exposure to eligible bachelors, on how to plan a big dinner with guests, on what kind of servants were employed for what - a lot of the small details of life at that time, right up to what people would be wearing when. Did you know that women at the time of Jane Austen usually went commando (no panties, bloomers, or suchlike)? Because I didn’t and it gives me a thrill to think of it now. All those well-behaved young ladies and elderly matrons weren’t wearing panties - panties were even thought to be ‘suspicious,’ since only women who regularly lifted their skirts would need them.

 

The writing of the book isn’t just informative - almost all non-fiction works I’ve ever read can do informative. Non-fiction is supposed to do ‘informative.’ The writing is also amusing and makes it much easier to digest the information delivered. Reading “The Jane Austen Handbook” is not a chore, it’s a delight, which is why I’m on my third time through right now. I even call it research this time, since I’m about to start writing a book set in the Regency era and among the landed gentry.

There’s also beautiful pictures to go with the writing. Some are actual diagrams to explain things like netting a purse or writing a letter (though I think the ‘write in all four directions on the same page’ part is not meant seriously) or dressing in the morning. Others are merely breaking up the text and showing things mentioned before - like a harp-playing young lady or a landscape showing ‘the picturesque’ in all its glory. Yet, all of them are very pretty, even on the black-white-and-grey screen of my kindle.

There is a lot of information, too, from the definition of ‘landed gentry,’ which is necessary to understand whom we’re talking about in the first place, over a complete schedule for the day of a married lady of the Regency era to things like ‘what do Mr. Darcy’s 10,000 £ a year amount to by today’s standards?’ (Depending on whom you listen to, the answer is somewhere between 500,000 £ and 6,000,000 £ - you can see now why Mrs. Bennett wanted one of her daughters as his wife, can you?) It’s not just the big parts, it’s a lot of the small ones, too. After reading the book, you can imagine what the life of a young lady looking for a suitable husband was like or what said lady (aka ‘any of Jane Austen’s heroines’) would probably do as soon as she was the mistress of an estate after the wedding. (Especially Elisabeth Bennett - I mean, six million pounds a year? You can do an awful lot of picturesque landscaping with that money.) It’s a lot of fun.

I have to admit that this book (which I bought in e-book format together with “Monster, She Wrote” which I’ve already reviewed here) also helped me to come up with the story for “The Haunting of Winterthorne Hall”. It gave me the necessary knowledge I needed to figure out how to put my characters in their places and how to progress with the plot. Being able to imagine what the life of Emilia and Florence would be like, especially once Emilia is exiled to Cornwall for slander and Florence has come with her, helps a lot with plotting the story and figuring out what will happen with the haunted wing of Winterthorne Hall. Knowing what kinds of servants to expect at the hall, what a day they would have there, how they would spend spare time helps make the story feel more alive.

I couldn’t have done all of this without “The Jane Austen Handbook” - just as I would never have thought ‘it was Old Man Munson all along’ would be a valid solution for a Gothic Romance novel without reading the entry on Ann Radcliffe in “Monster, She Wrote”. Who would have thought that the basic plotline of all Scooby Doo episodes is that old?

 

I’m sure that “The Jane Austen Handbook” will be even more thrilling for fans of Jane Austen who have a much bigger interest in all the things described and discussed within the pages and can connect them to the books they love. Those are not the only target audience, though, despite the title. The book has a lot to offer and is certainly worth your time if you like the Regency era (or want to become acquainted with it) or generally love historical topics or just want to read something that’s both informative and entertaining.

Hang In There

It’s not always easy to finish a story. If, like me, you mostly have a problem with endings, it can be very hard indeed. I admit, though, that outlining beforehand helps enormously with that. Recently, I had a hard time finishing “The Fourth Reich” - not because I didn’t know the ending, but because I found it hard to write the story. Yet, it’s done, which is good, and I learned something from it.

 

According to my bullet journal, which is reliable, I wrote (or rather rewrote) the first two chapters of “The Fourth Reich” on the 29th of March. Also according to my bullet journal, I wrote the last three chapter of the story on the 7th of July. For a twenty-eight-chapter novel, this is a long time, at least for me. In between the first and the last chapter, I plotted a host of new stories, including a lot of erotica, three fan fictions, and some more stories to eventually release. I wrote a Johannes Cabal fan fiction without Johannes Cabal in five short stories, trying out a new book structure I then used in plotting more stories. I wrote two of my erotica and started a few more. So, no, I wasn’t just writing that story and rewriting chapters to make them better all the time. Neither was I not doing anything worthwhile with my time. Yet, a little over three months for twenty-eight chapters. I usually write about two chapters a day and eight to ten chapters a week when all goes well. Twenty-eight chapters should be done in about a month.

 

The reason why these twenty-eight chapters took me so long to write is that I was leaving my comfort zone with this book. The topic of “The Fourth Reich” is that the Nazis made it to world domination on the second try, using genetically enhanced soldiers and diseases brewed in a laboratory (the idea was conceived before Covid-19 became a pandemic). With this topic, I didn’t want a tone that was too light. Yet, I’m not usually a fan of grimdark stories and have no tendency to write them. I try to balance out the severe with the much more light-hearted in my stories. There’s nothing truly light-hearted in “The Fourth Reich”. I start with a torture scene and I finish with a carefully-hopeful look into the future.

That’s why I needed breaks in the writing. That’s why I wrote some shorter stories in between and did a lot of plotting. That’s why it took me a little above three months to finish a story I could theoretically have finished in under four full weeks.

 

What did I learn from it? First of all, that grimdark is outside of my comfort zone, but I knew that to a degree already. In addition to that, I learned that it pays to come back to what challenges you and continue with it, even if you need to take breaks in between. I have finished “The Fourth Reich”. It will be released in May next year and I am proud of my work with it. It was worth stepping out of my comfort zone for.

 

The breaks themselves weren’t wasted time, either. I wrote other stories, trying out a new structure for future books. I managed to rework and re-plot a story I wanted to write and make it much better. DI Colin Rook was meant to meet the Countess of Blood, a powerful vampire, in the first novella I’d plotted, right after learning the supernatural exists. Now he’s facing off against her in the last of six short stories, after gaining experience throughout five other cases.

I plotted other stories, including two more books with Gabrielle, one of them a novel, the other utilizing the new structure with loosely-connected short stories. There’s two more books for Isadora coming up and John Stanton will get a third set of cases. The second collection of cases for the Eye is plotted as well. I have more stand-alone stories coming up, too. Even a tribute to Fantomas is in the line-up and might turn into another series (it’s not Fantomas, it’s the Phantom and there’s a lot of differences, okay?).

Sometimes the idea of having to write more of that story you’re struggling with might actually motivate you to get other things done.

 

When you find a project challenges you - a story you want to write, a picture you want to paint, or something else -, hang in there. If you need to take a break from the project, that doesn’t mean you have to abandon it completely. Some authors took years working on one book, taking breaks, doing other stuff. It’s okay to need some distance for a while, sometimes distance helps you see why you struggle.

Do I want to repeat that experience any time soon? No, definitely not. Am I going to write more stories that are out of my comfort zone? Yes, most likely. “Spirit Master”, which is still in a plotting stage, will no doubt be more grimdark than my usual stuff, too. Yet, it will be one more time I do that, so it should be easier. The first was “Heart of Ice”, the first story of “The Loki Files Volume 1”, where I have depicted signs of depression during a time when I was still struggling with the remainders of a burn-out (which is a very mild form of depression). “Heart of Ice” was much harder to write than the following five stories - and not because it was the first time I worked with those characters. The second time was “The Fourth Reich” which did challenge me, but which is written now as well.

My next project on the list is “The Haunting of Winterthorne Hall” and this one will not be grimdark at all. It’s a take on the genre of Gothic Romance, but without too much angst in it. It’s more of a Regency version of Scooby Doo without a dog, honestly, so I’m looking forward to writing it. Other projects that will follow soon also won’t give me much grief, so I can get them done more easily and will certainly not be forced to take several breaks to finish them.

“Fallen Angel”, already plotted, goes into grimdark territory and is going to be more on the gory side, but it’s not going to be written for a while now and it’s a short-story collection, so I can take breaks between the stories and do something else if I need to. Besides, it’s going to be more over-the-top and there will be some lighter parts for balance, too.

 

Hang in there. It’s the only advice I can give you for challenging projects. When a project forces you out of your comfort zone, hang in there. Allow yourself a break every now and then, but don’t give up on it. The harder it is to get things done, the more rewarding it is once you can say ‘this is finished and I’m proud of it.’

My Organisation

While a lot of stuff I put on this blog is about writing as a such, there’s another level to it as well - being organized enough to keep writing. I do like being organized and that means I’ve tried out several things over time, for doing my outlines and for keeping an eye on my writing in the physical sense.

 

In 2020, I migrated my outlining from OneNote to Campfire Pro and, even though it was a pain in the ass to do, I’m glad I did it. Campfire Pro has all I need to keep my notes on my series together and in the same place. It’s flexible to use and I certainly can work well with it. That doesn’t mean OneNote didn’t work for me, but Campfire Pro works better.

Usually, I’m using three of the areas for my work: characters, timeline, and encyclopaedia.

The character area is pretty self-explanatory, I should think. There, I keep names, characteristics, and other information about a recurring character. It helps me to keep things constant, especially with my series. I would hate to give a character a different look all in a sudden or give them skills they’ve not had before and which haven’t been introduced in any way.

The timeline is where I do the actual plotting. I use the ‘event’ pieces for the scenes and build my story that way. Like this, I lay out what happens in the story from beginning to end, see where the plot goes, see how to tell the story. It’s a good way to do my ‘discovery plotting’ and helps me find big holes before I start writing the story.

In the encyclopaedia, I put down important things happening in a story, the non-recurring characters, and a summary. This is where I can look up information when I need to reference something from another part of a series, which can come in very handy. In essence, all stuff that doesn’t go into the character or timeline area goes here.

For some stories, like those about my necromancers, I also use some parts of the world-building pack to write up magic or organisations.

 

The second thing I couldn’t keep organized without is my bullet journal. I actually started to use one to track my word count each day in 2014 and it developed from there (since 2019 with the help of YouTube and the internet…).

I have a work tracker for each month which I reworked in April this year, switching from only tracking my words per day and my editing on release months to tracking my words, my editing, my plotting, and my research every month. I’ve been doing it for two months now and have entered the third and it works wonderfully. It’s much more representative of my work than my old tracker was, which does wonders for my motivation.

In addition to that, I’ve had a list with my books for release for a long time already and have recently added a list with stories I still need to write and a specially-made kaban board with all the stories which are at least in the plotting stage and not yet out of release.

Every month, I set myself a goal in words and list a book to release on a release month. Every week, I list the chapters I wish to write or to edit. Like this, I have a good plan of what to do in a week and know what to do next. That doesn’t mean these plans always work out - real life does exist and interferes often enough. It means, however, that I can judge what I can do in a week and what I might be able to finish when.

For writing longer stories, such as a novel, that is very helpful. A novel seems pretty long when you start - when you can write down chapter one to eight or ten for the first week (that I can do in a week and I know it), it looks much shorter. A chapter is much less scary than twenty or thirty or more, much more manageable. Yet, ever chapter brings me closer to the big goal of finishing a novel or a set of novellas.

I’m glad I have my bullet journal for this part of the organisation. I could do it in a digital form, too, but sometimes it’s just so nice to have something analogue, something you can touch and carry around with you. I’m doing much better with a self-made calendar I can use whatever way I want and need to.

 

For the actual process of writing, I have a pomodoro app which I’m very glad for. The pomodoro method, for those of you who haven’t heard about it, is a way of pacing the work day. Usually, it’s 25 minutes of work, 5 minutes for a small break, and, all four cycles, a 15-minute break for a bit more rest. Like this, you can work very focused without getting too exhausted. It’s much better than trying to work without a break or getting distracted every few minutes after a while because your concentration goes down. With the 25/5 rhythm, concentration can be kept up for much longer, at least for me.

I use my app both for writing and for editing (for my novels I set work time to 30 minutes in editing, but that’s the only change I need). It paces me and enables me to write two chapters of 3,000 words each per day. I don’t say I could never do that before, but it’s certainly much easier with the app and I can do it reliably, not just when the muse strikes me.

 

Discipline is a must, but good organisation helps with writing, too. Campfire Pro gives me a way of plotting in peace and ironing out the problems with a story before I put the first word into my word processor. My bullet journal helps me keep an eye on what I’m doing for my work, how much I write, when and what I plot, what I edit or when I’m doing research. The pomodoro app helps me to focus while I’m writing or editing, efficiently working and doing things in as short a time as possible. All three together keep me organized and allow for me to keep up a four-books-a-year publishing cycle.

Taking It Easy

I’ve been diving into more books written by Annabel Chase recently. A while ago, I started out with her Eden Fury series and I enjoyed the books. Not so much for the cosy mysteries, but really for all the characters in them and the way Ms. Chase handles them. That isn’t to say the mysteries aren’t good, it’s just to say that they’re not the only or main reason why I read the books.

 

 One big problem I have with cosy mystery series normally is suspension of disbelief. Why would a retired professor, a widowed author, or any other number of amateur detectives be dropped into a new case over and over again? It can work once, if they’re the ones accused of a crime or a close friend or relative is. It can work twice. Three times is a risk and anything above it really means I have to work hard on the suspension of disbelief.

Both the “Federal Bureau of Magic” series featuring Eden Fury and the “Spellbound” series featuring Emma Hart get around that problem by having the main character be a professional in Eden’s and semi-professional in Emma’s case (see this post on types of detectives). Eden is an agent of the Federal Bureau of Magic - a branch of the FBI which handles supernatural cases. Emma becomes the new public defender when she arrives in Spellbound, a town full of supernatural people, and can’t leave again, since she has legal training and the last one was just murdered.

 

It helps, of course, that Annabel Chase doesn’t put the full focus on the cases. They’re there and they are something Eden and Emma are working on, but it’s the interpersonal level where the books really shine. Interesting and unique characters crowd both towns and interact with the main characters on a regular basis. Whether it’s Eden’s friends and family (a topic all by itself) or the many new friends Emma makes in the cursed town of Spellbound, there’s many people around, populating the world, making things interesting.

Another thing Ms. Chase does very well is the romantic sub-plot. I am very aware that cosy mysteries almost always have one, one way or other. I’m not always happy about it, especially when the two parts of the romantic plot are shown as opponents in the beginning (such as the sheriff/detective who officially has to solve the case and the amateur sleuth). In both series I’ve read so far, this is not the case. Yes, Eden’s love interest is the sheriff of the town (strictly speaking the new one, as the old one dies in the first book), but as a member of the FBI officially and the FBM really, she’s not working against him or trying to divert his work - they’re working together on many occasions, growing closer in the process.

Emma’s love interests (so far, I’m at about half-time with a strong suspicion about the guy she’s going to end up with) are not opponents for her, either. They’re men from the town, several types of supernatural beings (fallen angel, vampire, minotaur), who have nothing to do with law enforcement. I’m completely up with the books surprising me, but my money is on fallen angel Daniel, as it were. As a matter of fact, with the Valkyrie Astrid taking over the post of sheriff, there’s no opposition in the sheriff’s department, either - the former sheriff didn’t like Emma looking into things because he was more than incompetent.

 

With all the pesky ‘I am the law and I want you to stop meddling in my affairs’ out of the way in both series, there is no silently sneaking into a place because the sheriff doesn’t want them to be there - Eden and Emma, to a degree, have the right to be there and, should that fail, have a good relationship with law enforcement which allows for them to offer their help. There’s also little to no suspension of disbelief necessary - Eden or Emma getting in on an investigation can easily be explained with their jobs and their general standing within the society of their town. It’s not ‘how can one old lady writing crime stories be in the vicinity of about 600 murders?’ as with Jessica Fletcher and “Murder, She Wrote”. Agatha Christie knew why Miss Maple did solve less cases than professional detective Hercules Poirot.

This frees up more space within the books for the interpersonal part and allows for long plot lines in that direction, too, be it Eden’s mixed luck with her relatives or Emma meeting new people and slowly becoming one of the people in town. To be honest, this is what is mostly drawing me to those books. They’re not overly long, the cases not overly complicated, but there’s a lot going on between characters written so well that I want to learn more about them. The characters quickly have a definite identity so I don’t have to think about whom this or that name refers to. I know who they are, I even might know a quirk or two they have.

 

This is why it’s fine to take it easy with a case in a cosy mystery, provided you have something else people might get into - like the interpersonal relationships and well-designed characters in Annabel Chase’s books. If there’s something about your amateur, semi-professional, or professional detective that warrants its own plot line, feel free to put it in, be it personal growth, a journey of self-discovery, or just a slow-burn love story. Keep the case and your other plot interwoven so they’re both furthered throughout the book or books and people will still enjoy it. Perhaps not quite the same crowd as with a more crime-focused story, but still a  big enough one, I’m sure.

Even though it seems almost mandatory to put the cosy detective at odds with law enforcement, that’s also not an absolute necessity. If you have an amateur sleuth, such a position might be necessary to a degree, but as soon as you have a semi-professional at least, it’s no longer something which needs to happen.

 

There are more ways of composing a cosy mystery than just ‘plucky amateur solves cases which stump the professionals.’ In many cases that means you can have a cosy mystery series which allows for the reader to keep up the suspension of disbelief much longer. Of course, if people die through murder every other week in your small fishing village, people will at some point wonder where all the victims come from, but there’s even a way to explain that (such as ‘they’re all tourists’). Take it easy with the mystery, too, if you want to, and make your personal plot for the main character as important as the case. If you do it well and keep the readers interested, it will work out.