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IN THIS ISSUE OF CHAPTER THREE


Year 2020 Review and Predictions
This year has been a difficult one but our chapter has survived it. I expect greater challenges in 2021.

Elements of the Writing Craft Challenge
Lesson 11: DAILY DRAMA IN NONFICTION.

Publishing My Novel
I continue recounting my efforts to self-publish as an object lesson. In this article, I discuss what I’ve learned about creating an ebook cover.

Articles and Other Worthies
The latest from WriteOnSC, Yak Babies, and the Write By Night blog.
 

COLA III End-Of-Year 2020


Season’s Greetings and Happy Holidays to you all! I do hope your holidays have been enjoyable and spent with family and friends. Every day is precious and every joy should be savored.

I think few would argue that 2020 has been a tumultuous year for the world. Events and subsequent conditions have certainly affected COLA3 and the SCWA.

MEETING FACTS AND STATS

For a portion of the year (March and May) we were in a mandatory “lockdown” and COLA3 did not meet in-person at all. We only missed three regular meetings, but that and the generally fearful atmosphere blunted the momentum with which we began the year. For COLA3’s first five meetings, we averaged 9 writers in attendance with an average of 5 reading. When we started meeting again, our average attendance dropped to 6 writers with an average of 4 reading.

What I take from that is that we lost the newer attendees (perhaps mostly to “pandemic” fears) but retained those core writers in our group who tend to be the regular readers. I take these statistics as a positive thing. They indicate an artistic determination defying fear and authoritarianism (corporations do not understand art).

Still, the stresses of the year have been, I fear, cumulative. Hence, we canceled our usual Christmas party in the face of low RSVPs, part of which came from illness and illness fears.

Considering all that, our meeting statistics for the year of 2020 were:

Total Meetings: 18
Highest Attendance: 11
Avg Attendance: 7
Highest Reading: 6
Avg Reading: 4

This is a small decline from 2019 where, for 22 meetings, our average attendance was 8 and average readings was 4. 

These numbers indicate that our chapter weathered the lockdowns pretty well and I’m glad to see that. During the time we didn’t meet, we tried to carry on with our work by placing our readings on Dropbox and editing them with our critiques. A few of us did this and it worked fairly well once everyone got the hang of it. But it was always a minority of our group working this way, and they did not keep much enthusiasm for it. I am among that number.

This “online critiquing” experience underscores for me that there is a limit as to how much people can work together effectively on anything via Internet. There is an energy from face-to-face working sessions that is so important to artistic endeavors, and seems to be especially so for writers. Young people can probably tolerate working remotely better, but I think they don’t realize what they are missing. 

THE EFFECTS OF LOCKDOWN

We should recognize that lockdowns aren’t over. Those edicts were put in place via local government (executive orders at the state level and ordinances at the municipal level) that are still in place, though modified. Some restrictions were eased such that local businesses could reopen, though with constraints. I don’t know if the Columbia curfew was ever lifted (at least I’ve not seen where it was), and the masking/social distancing edicts are still in place with stronger penalties (in Columbia; it varies city-to-city). 

And so the SCWA declares on its revamped website that all the chapters are currently meeting online (via conferencing apps like ZOOM). All SCWA events are “virtual,” including its planned 2021 conference.

In truth, I do not know how many of the chapters are really meeting via Internet, meeting in-person, or just not meeting. All I can say is that, as far as I’m concerned, as long as you guys are willing to meet in-person, we will.

THANKS TO THE COBBS FOR OUR MEETING PLACE!

At this point I have to extend, on behalf of COLA3, a special THANK YOU to Larry and Carolyn Cobb for hosting our chapter meetings every month. They have opened their home to us since about March 2019 after the Baptist church started charging us to use their meeting room. This has saved us much expense and hassle, and has provided us a reliable place to meet. It also allows us to meet without masks and distancing. We are all most grateful for Larry and Carolyn’s kindness and dedication to our group.

THE WORKS OF COLA3

Recently, Danielle Verwers won a contest hosted by the Poetry Society of South Carolina for her poem, Birdwoman. She has had other publications of her work over the last year. I’ve noted them in this newsletter, but I don’t have a list of our members writing accomplishments. That is remiss of me and I hope to correct it in the coming year (that’s one resolution). So please let me know every time you get something published, reviewed, commented on, achieve a major goal, or any kind of prop for you as a writer. It all reflects well on our group and I want to be able to recite our accomplishments. 

I do have a Goodreads shelf of books that current or previous members of our chapter have published. You can see it here

Also, I must note that our chapter has at least five long works of fiction in progress by its members. I believe all are novels. There is Dea’s Desert Courage thriller/romance, Larry’s The Letters mystery/romance, and my Power of the Ancients post-apocalypse science fiction. Jim has been working on a historical murder mystery based on a true event in his family history. And Sharon is well into a historical novel, Lippencott Street.

Over the last two years and more, we’ve seen these projects grow along with the skills of their authors. I think they all have promise, and I would love to seem them reach completion, or close to it, in 2021. For myself, I am aiming for having my novel self-published on Amazon (via Kindle Direct Publishing) in January or February.

PREDICTIONS

Making predictions for the approaching new year is a common tradition. I’m not a good prophet, but I’ll make three predictions based on trends I see likely to affect our chapter’s work.

1. Constraints on movement/activity will become a permanent fact of life, regardless of what happens with any “vaccine.” Our ability to meet in-person will eventually be impacted.

2. SCWA will become a mostly online entity. They will try to return to live events, but requirements for vaccination proof will lessen attendances and add hassle in any case. Also, even with vaccinations, the mask/distancing edicts will not be lifted. So operations will be carried out primarily via Internet.

3. Chapters will do their work “online,” or meet in-person (requiring masking or vaccine proof), or fade away. 

CARRYING ON

We don’t live in a vacuum. What happens “out there” affects us and we need to aware so we can make adjustments. At this point, I recommend carrying on with your writing projects. Art is a very human thing to do and we must hold onto it, drinking deep of the inspiration it gives us.

I’ll close with a quote from Bill Shakespeare:

Write till your ink be dry, and with your tears
Moist it again, and frame some feeling line
That may discover such integrity.


Our next meeting will be on January 12th. 



You can always check the status for the next scheduled chapter meeting here.

Ray


 
ELEMENTS OF THE WRITING CRAFT CHALLENGE
 
 

PART I: STORYTELLING

LESSON: 11 DAILY DRAMA IN NONFICTION

PRINTED BOOK PAGES: 17-18

READING EXCERPT: Winter Work: Diary of a Day Laborer by Don J. Snyder

"I slammed the door on her finger," Colleen said sorrowfully as she set Cara down on the counter and took off her blue mitten. Then I heard her scream. "Her finger came off! The top of her finger came off, Don!"

It was more than the bills for the emergency room and the hand surgeon that carried me back to the house to ask for a job. It was the memory of me just standing there in the kitchen inside my fears, taking all that time to feel sorry for myself while Colleen zipped Cara inside her down coat and ran outside into a snowstorm heading for the hospital seven miles away.


MY NOTES ON THE LESSON

Mr. Olmstead tells us that this excerpt by Don Snyder is an essay, not a piece of fiction. The essay is an examination of a man’s sense of desperation and inadequacy from being poor and jobless with a large family to care for. The man’s feeling of inadequacy is only worsened when he gets a job as a carpenter, because he knows he is not qualified. Mr. Snyder uses the true account of an accident expressed as drama to emphasize the theme of helplessness that is the aim of the essay. It is a clever and effective tool.

Mr. Olmstead then homes in on how this theme-supporting drama is moved through the narrative by strategic use of words and phrases:

“Notice how the word as in the first sentence efficiently creates simultaneous action. The word then moves us forward within the small drama of the moment…After the word coat, thirteen more words get us out the door and on the way to the hospital.”

This use of strategic storytelling is I think, a nice tool to use when we want to support a point in our essays.


MY ANSWERS TO THE WRITING POSSIBILITIES

1. People are always getting hurt. Remember a real situation where someone you cared about was suddenly injured or suddenly discovered he’d injured someone else. Rewrite the beginning of the quote. Use the following frame:

“I let him run barefoot through the brush-pile,Donna said sorrowfully as she removed Dillon’s shoes and socks. Then I heard her yell to me. “He’s got a hole in his foot.

2. Continue with the second movement, the one that references but does not tell all that followed. You can change subject matter or actually continue with exercise one. Notice the movement of Snyder’s in…inside…inside. Try to replicate this as you write, perhaps with another set of prepositions. Use the following frame:

It was more than the clinic bill and the drive through the freezing rain that carried me back to our first house. It was the memory of Dillon crying with the red hole in his foot inside the after-hours clinic, feeling sick over my little son’s pain while the African doctor massaged the wound, trying to find a tree branch splinter or other object lodged in it.

3. Now either combine exercises one and two or complete each one separately. Consider combining them even if you were thinking about different subject matter when you wrote them. You will probably need to change some words of fact, but change as few as possible. You may have arrived at something interesting.

“I let him run barefoot through the brush-pile,” Donna said sorrowfully as she removed Dillon’s shoes and socks. Then I heard her yell to me. “He’s got a hole in his foot!”

It was more than the clinic bill and the drive through the freezing rain that carried me back to our first house. It was the memory of Dillon crying with the red hole in his foot inside the after-hours clinic and feeling sick over my little son’s pain while the African doctor massaged the wound, trying to find a tree branch splinter or other object lodged in it.



4. Move to fiction. In exercises one, two and three you were working with real events. Do the same exercises again with made-up events.

“I should have left with her,” Fennec said sorrowfully as he lay Mithra on the pallet of furs and Branch began examining her wounds. Then I heard him sobbing. “She saved me but I couldn’t save her.”

It was more than the tearful sorrow and remorse this warrior-sage was revealing that carried me back to my father’s tears. It was the memory of a proud warrior with one leg and eye, hurting inside and failing to hide it, the constant fact of his pain making worse the guilt from my rebellion while I watched a warrior pay the price of warriors.


 

PUBLISHING MY NOVEL
The Cover

I mentioned in previous newsletters that I was undergoing a developmental edit of my novel (Power of the Ancients). Doing this myself after incorporating revisions based on COLA3 critiques and beta readings, I had trimmed off much “fat” from the story and formated it for reading in my Kindle application (on my tablet PC). Reading through the manuscript this way, I made many notes and highlights. It took about a month. I then referred to those notes and highlights to revise the manuscript in Scrivener (my writing software). 

At this point, I have a manuscript I am basically pleased with. Now I must turn my attention to the cover. This is something I’ve been hesitant about because I’ve created inadequate covers in the past, and I can’t afford to pay for a professionally created one.

I have been using a free stock cover image that I obtained and edited on the Canva graphics editing site (more on this below). It was a decent cover and I considered just going with it. Then, in an amazing stroke of synchronicity, I realized that the same cover was used for a book I had read and reviewed earlier in the year (American Cosmic by D. W. Pasulka). There were some adjustments made to the stock cover, but it was the same one. Check it out:


 
American Cosmic cover





My “placeholder” cover


 
Also, I did some reading on what Derek Murphy has to say about book cover creation (Book Cover Design Secrets You Can Use to Sell More Books). The book made sense to me and agreed with my experience of book covers. I decided I needed to make my own cover as best I could.

This decision meant I would need to manipulate an image with some kind of graphics software. Most serious graphic artists use Photoshop, but it’s complex and expensive. The best free tool I’ve used is no longer available (Foto—something). So after some research, I decided to go with Canva. This is a hosted application (accessed on the Internet via browser) and no installation is required. I had played with it some (in obtaining my placeholder cover) but had not tried to do the kind of image processing a cover from scratch would require. The app is often recommended, however, in the Independent Publishing (Indie) literature.

So I delved again into Mr. Murphy’s book (he also recommends Canva). He has much to say in this book and others, as well as YouTube videos, about Do-It-Yourself book cover creation. A good cover is one of his three must-haves for publishing an Indie book. The other two are a sales description and reviews. 

Mr. Murphy’s basic philosophy on book covers is that their only purpose is to attract potential readers to read the cover text, which should in turn point them to the sales description and hence to a purchase. The cover should be simple and attractive. It can simply represent a single concept related to the book. It does not need to be more complicated.

For example, years ago I was in a movie theater and took note of a poster for a coming attraction. The poster was just an image of a golden ring inscribed with mysterious runes and suspended in a shaft of ethereal light. It was enough to prompt the thought in me: “Wow! They’re coming out with a Lord of the Rings movie!” A complex scene of warrior elves, hobbits, dwarves, orcs and dragons was not necessary.

I had ideas for several iconic images for my story: sword-and-spear warriors, walled stone cities, ice age images, shamans, generators on wheels, images of power generation, etc. Looking on a site where you can purchase licenses to use stock photos (123RF.com), I found a number of possibilities. I downloaded low-res and watermarked graphic files that struck me as possibilities. Using Canva, I experimented with combinations of these images and cover text.

Though the professional version of Canva requires a subscription, the basic version  is free to use. The pro version would probably be great for a serious graphic artist, but the basic meets my needs. It allows you to combine graphic files, add color filters, do some simple effects (blurs and gradients), and add text. 

In his book, Mr. Murphy suggests three basic cover image types that work for any fiction genre. These are:

1. A single picture (that is, no multiple elements; just one image that speaks in some way to your story).

2. Foreground character with background scene. Variations are:
    A. Character on top with scene on bottom.
    B. Big scene with a small character.

3. Close up face (especially if the face is staring at the potential reader, because faces are interesting to us).

My experimenting followed the above types as much as I could. I eventually came up with an image I liked that is a combo of 2-A and 3. I used an image of warriors on horseback (obtained from 123RF.com) and an image of my main protagonist, Zane Landstrom. I purchased the Zane image from a local artist in Mississippi several years ago. She used Photoshop and worked relatively cheap. 

I fiddled with this image for several days, adding text and varying the color/contrast filter with Canva. I found, as Mr. Murphy said, that contrasts and color changes can make a huge difference. According to him, those changes can be quantified in sales (and he’s probably right).

When I was happy with the cover, I bought a ten dollar license from 123RF to use the high-def version of the warriors image. The license is for 500,000 uses on book covers. I figure if I sell 500,000 books, I should be able to afford a license upgrade.

So I put together the cover image I wanted and added it to my ebook manuscript. I am sure many Indie Publishing gurus would give me hundreds of reasons why my cover is inadequate. I have learned in my research, however, that Indie Publishing advice is a vast sea. Your best bet is to just find a stretch of water that floats your boat.

Here’s the result of my efforts:


I will continue to tweak this cover, mostly in the text. Please note that it is for the ebook (Kindle) version of my novel. I will also use it for the printed book (Print On Demand: POD), but it will have to be contained within some exacting specifications that include the spine and back cover, with back-cover text, bar code, ISBN, etc. The result will be another graphic file that is converted to a PDF file for use in  Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP — the part of it on Amazon that replaced CreateSpace). I’ll get into creating the POD book in a later article.

UPDATE

In computer tech there are always “gotchas.” A big one here is that images produced by Cana are always at a resolution less than 300 dpi (dots per inch). And, of course, Amazon KDP requires that images be at least 300 dpi. Research revealed a solution. I was able to convert my Canva image to a PDF file and then upload it to a site (HNET - Home of Useful Online Tools) that converted it to a 300 dpi JPG (image) file. I was fortunate to find such an easy solution.

NEXT

My next steps are to actually “create” my novel on the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) site and publish it as an ebook and a print (Print on Demand) book. This is fairly easily done but there are formatting considerations and requirements that I’ll get into. 

Independent promotion is the biggest consideration. As I’ve said, I have no money so I’m doing all this on the cheap. I’m not going to get rich off this book, but I would like somebody to read it and enjoy it. I have a low-cost promotion plan. I’ll go over that with you, too.
ARTICLES AND OTHER WORTHIES

Here are a few articles, podcasts, and videos that might inspire and lift your spirits. 

Write On SC shownotes

Episode 126: Humbugs, Grinches, and Misers
On December 19, Kasie and Rex had their last show of 2020. To play to holiday crowds and celebrate all the reasons 2020 made us grumpy, we’re taking on Scrooge. 



Yak Babies

130- The Best Books We Read in 2020
The pals share the books they got the most out of in a year that took the most out of all of us.

My personal favorite book for 2020 was A Canticle for Leibowitz. —RF

131- A Christmas Carol
The pals celebrate the yuletide with a discussion of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol as well as the many movie adaptations we enjoy.



Write By Night

Discussion questions: Write about winter. If you’d like, use any of the following questions for inspiration: What are you doing to prepare for the coming winter, as a writer and in general? Are you looking forward to it or are you dreading it (or both)? What are your biggest hopes and fears for the coming winter? And how do you feel about winter in general? What are some of your favorite winter memories? What has been your best winter as a writer, and why? 

My Reply. 


 

CALENDAR

 


Remaining COLA3 Meetings for 2021:

                           

                       

 

Web Links
 
Note: The opinions and themes expressed by COLA III's members are not necessarily the opinions and themes of the Columbia III Chapter of the SCWA or of the SCWA.

List of previous issues of Chapter Three

List of books published by COLA III members

SCWA web page

SCWA Bylaws

Chapter Three FREE newsletter sign-up web-page

Write On SC broadcast

 
Yours in Literature,

Ray
Ray's Twitter
Chapter Three
Chapter Three newsletter issue #54

Columbia III has been a chapter of the SCWA since September 2010

Copyright © 2020 COLA III Writers Group, All rights reserved.



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