Progress

I haven’t posted about my novel Veiled in Shadows and my self publishing plans since around Christmas.

The absence of news has really been due to… well to a lack of news.

Now though, I have some to share.
My formatting is complete, I am finally happy with the way the thing looks.

I have now been taking care of some of the formal measures I have to complete to become a publisher.

I received some news last night that I was going to share today.

This photo shows my excitement at receiving formal notification that the business name I have requested has been approved and registered.I am a publisher! At least I now have a business name registered in my name.
My little (or is that microscopic) enterprise is titled.

Drum roll please…

Xantharea Press.

What is a Xantharea when it is at home?
I have chosen to name my business for a family of Aussie native plants called Xanthorrhoea . Commonly known as grasstrees (or less politically correctly as “blackboys”) Xanthorrhoea are a typical Aussie bush species. They are as tough as old boots, they survive drought, or bushfire and live for thousands of years. After a fire they are often the first green you see coming back in the bush. Not a bad icon to take for a publishing venture especially given how tough the industry is these days.

I decided to modify the spelling from that of the Latin proper name because I hate the correct spelling and it reminds me of a medical condition.

As if I wasn’t happy enough with that when I got home this afternoon I found an email from Bowker’s Australian subsidiary confirming the registration of my ISBN.

This is starting to feel real. Very exciting, a bit scary too, but very exciting!

Enough for tonight as I have had a long day today and need to do a few things in preparation for another long day tomorrow.

Of Editors and Agents

A very Quick post tonight. We have been out having dinner with some dear friends from Queensland and it is past my bed time.

I promised the other day to talk about the editor who has just finished reading my manuscript. I think I will simply post the text of the email I received from her mother (my other half’s colleague) when she had to return to England.

I have omitted her name, as they say in many a TV drama, to protect the innocent.

“.... managed to read Allan’s novel and was really impressed.
Her comments were:

• A clean, well thought out script – ready now to go to a publisher. She was very complimentary of the formatting, layout, with absolutely minimal corrections.
• The opening scene is a good hook and just the sort of thing a publisher would be looking for.
• The concept is good
• The structure works well – she commented on the skill in keeping the narrative ongoing whilst telling the story from different perspectives.
• She thought the characters were a little underdeveloped but could see why, but it wasn’t a weakness as the story itself is important.
• She is confident he could hand it in as is.
• Advises doing some research on which publishers are producing this kind of genre and targeting them
• Says no need to worry about making changes – the nature of any further improvements would be a personal preference and more a subject of the publishing house.
• If not accepted don’t be disheartened because it may be because of the economic climate and current circumstances and that you should resubmit at a later time – but she emphasized to keep trying because it’s good and worthy of publication.
• She also thinks it would make a great film
She suggested I should read it – do you mind if I keep the script for a while? I would really like to after she raved about it.”

So all you agents and publishers out there here is one fellow who is awaiting your call :-)

Sorry if it seems like I am boasting, but I just can’t help it. This feels really promising to me.

Now I am off to bed, talk to you next time.

The Good, the Bad and the Very, Very, Hard

As you can see from the title of this post, I am going to talk about a few things, good and not so good.

I think I will talk about these items in reverse order to my title so I finish on an up-note. (Much better for my long term sanity I am sure).

In my work I deal with many people facing very many problems. Some significant, some not so bad, and some potentially life threatening. I am always amazed by the capacity many people have to cope with the most impossible situations, but the reality is that some people reach a point where they no longer have the strength to go on. At this point some contemplate death, and some take the ultimate step and commit suicide.

Yesterday, I spent a couple of hours with a young man who was very distressed by his circumstances; in fact he was so distressed he was talking about suicide. In my current role, and previously when working for charities that specialised in supporting people with mental illnesses, I have unfortunately faced similar circumstances all too often.

Now I need to stress here that if anyone reading this needs more information about suicide prevention a good start is doing a Google on “suicide prevention”. If you are really concerned about someone seek medical help for them, if you feel it is urgent dial your emergency services number (000 in Oz, 911 in The US and Canada, or 999 in the UK, other countries look here). All threats or talk of suicide MUST be taken seriously.

Having said the above, as a professional it is not so simple. Don’t get me wrong Australia has a quite good health system and unlike in the US it is largely free, especially for the poor. But there are never enough services to go around and hence charities like the one I work for often end up carrying a load they are poorly resourced for. So in a situation like the one I was faced with yesterday you have to make decisions on the run about how best to proceed.

In theory the best approach in Victoria is to phone a CAT Team (Crisis assessment and treatment teams). However in my experience CAT teams can take a long time to respond and often seem to want to push responsibility back onto the person who has called due to their own limited resources. Better results are usually achieved by calling an ambulance, but often you hear of people being turned away from ERs because they are either not taken seriously or they minimise their issues once they get there. Unfortunately, there is such a huge stigma to being seen as crazy that many people try to back out of receiving help at the last minute. Overstretched services sometimes fail to support people when this happens, occasionally with tragic results. The best results seem to happen if someone can go with people to support them while they are waiting to be assessed and even repeat what was disclosed.

Back to the young man in question, I was with him for a couple of hours as I and a volunteer phoned around trying to get him the support he needed. In the end we were able to get him linked up with the supports he needed at the time. Then as a manager my responsibility shifts to debriefing staff (in this case volunteer staff) and trying to assess the level of impact such stressful events have had on them. A key to avoiding burnout is to make sure staff get adequate support and just as importantly understand support is available if they need it.

Sometimes you can’t help, no matter how hard you try, sometimes there are tragedies. Usually though you manage to help someone along the road to the help they need. Oddly, this type of event is not only incredibly stressful, but on other levels very rewarding. I have found incredible satisfaction in simply knowing I have done my best to help another human being.
So that is the very, very hard bit dealt with.

My post has already gone on far too long, so I’ll just hint at the Bad and the good and leave them for next time.

The Bad – in my previous post I mentioned an editor reading my manuscript; she has jetted back to England before I could catch up with her.

The Good – she has forwarded some brilliant comments that I couldn’t be happier with.

Until next time.

Just for fun a photo of Green Cape Lighthouse

Self Publishing can it work?

I have been thinking about self publishing lately.
Not that I am about to leap into anything.
As I said the other day I have an editor reading my work as I type.
But I am fairly sick of the traditional route into publication and I have hardly begun yet.

Like many of us I have had a curious look at outfits like Lulu.com and Booksurge.com and wondered if they were any different from vanity publishing of old.

Of the two mentioned above, Lulu looks less like it will subject a prospective author to an aggressive marketing campaign to sell add-ons. Lulu seems to allow you to self quote; Booksurge wants to put you in contact with a “publishing consultant”.

One difference I can see between this model and traditional vanity publishers is that with Print on Demand a client of such businesses would not necessarily end up with a garage full of unsold books. I know more than one person who has suffered this fate.

Still the author is left with the problem of how do they sell their books? If I can’t manage to market well enough to get an agent to read my manuscript, how do I go about marketing my book to the world?

Dilemmas, dilemmas.

Now just ‘cause I like them, a couple of photos.


These guys are Rainbow Lorikeets they are quite common along the east coast I snapped them at a local park near the Yarra River during February.


Also another sunset, this one near Lake George in June last year.

Wish Me Luck!

I have had an interesting possibility come up regarding my manuscript. In a case of who you know rather than what you know, I have an editor from a UK publishing house reading my manuscript.
Oddly she is the daughter of a colleague of my other half. Does that make sense?

She is home in Oz to see her family and the cheeky approach has paid off.
There are still a lot of if, buts and maybes. Firstly, she has to like the book. Secondly, although she is in publishing, her field is not fiction. So even if she likes it, the most she is able to do is suggest me as a possibility to some of her colleagues. Still this is the closest I have got to getting someone on the inside to read the piece so I am happy.

And of course nervous

Cold, cold, cold again today.
Once I came home from work (among other things I run a breakfast service for homeless people) our eldest was bouncing around saying "Let's go to the snow today. There's bound to be snow on Donna Buang."
So after warming up with a cuppa' we piled into the car and drove about an hour up to Mount Donna Buang.
There was snow, I took a photo of it (of all of it I might add) just to prove it was there.
And just to prove it here it is! See it does get cold in Australia.

The sign in the picture (which I accidentally cropped) says "no tobogganing", I suspect there is not much danger of that rule needing to be enforced at the moment.
It was cold and wet, but apparently not enough for snow. What was there has well and truly melted.

So after waiting in the cold for someone who shall remain nameless,

we piled back into the car and drove back to Warburton at the bottom of the mountain for the much more civilized pursuit of drinking hot coffee in one of our favourite cafes.

This evening, for a change I went out in the cold again. I have been wanting to get some shots of the city at night. Tonight was a first experimental foray. I spent a lot of time driving around looking for places safe enough to stop (traffic, even on Sunday night is quite busy around the city).
I was moderately happy with some of the results, but I think two things will improve my shots:
I had the ISO set too high and most of the shots are over exposed; and a darker sky would give better contrast, tonight there was low cloud hence a lot of reflected light from the buildings below.
Anyway I was happy enough with what I took to try again another night.

Just a couple of photos I took tonight to finish off.

This one is St Patricks Catholic Cathedral, just east of Melbourn CBD.

This is the Bolte Bridge down at the docklands area of Melbourne.