Tuesday, July 10, 2012

No, I'm not dead in a ditch someplace....

Sorry I have not posted in a while, but here is the situation. About a month ago I got another job, and it's one that pays money (although it's measly). It also requires a lot more energy than what I am used to, which normally involves sitting in front of a desk or computer (in other words, I didnt expend much energy at all before hand). So, while I plan on continuing to write, I have not really had to time to do it. These days when I am not working I tend to find myself sleeping, even while I'm in the midst's of visiting with friends. I am beginning to feel like a narcolepsy patient.

Again, I plan to get back to writing, but it may take a while for me to get anything done. It doesnt help that everyone else at work has been calling in sick the past two weeks. However, once I have adjusted to my more active life I will come back to my projects. When I do, I will update my sites.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Guess what I got in the mail? My requested documents from the Air Force!!

Can I just take a moment to say WOOOOHOOOO!
Ahem. I have to take a moment to re-compose myself, but I am super excited right now.

So I don't know if I mentioned this in my past posts, but for months now I have been trying to dig up solid evidence about what happened on March 28, 1944 when Lynn Drollinger (my grandfather) was shot down.

After weeks of searching on my own, which was relatively fruitless, I decided to shoot off an e-mail to the U.S. Air Force. I figured, if anyone would have information about the date in question, they would. However, I wasn't sure if they would get back to me, or how long it would take. After all, an e-mail from little ol' me asking questions about events from the 1940's is not exactly high priority. I cant remember, but I think it was a separate e-mail than from prospective Air corp. questions, but I'm sure they get more than a few e-mails in a day.

A couple weeks passed and I got an e-mail back from a well-mannered guy named Tobias. He politely informed me that the Air Force doesn't have documents from before 1947, which was when the Air Force split from the Army to become its own entity. Then he pointed me towards the Air Force Historical Research Agency website. I couldn't find what I wanted off of their site itself, so I sent them an e-mail asking if they might have any files from the events of march 28th, 1947.

Some time passed and eventually they sent me an e-mail saying that they were behind schedule in answering questions but that they had not forgotten about me.

Yesterday, I went out to get the mail and there was a beautiful orange envelope waiting for me! And boy, they sent me more information than I could have even hoped for! It looks like all of the reports from back then have been declassified. I cant wait to spend today looking them over in more detail, but its already looking like I'm going to have to re-write parts of the first chapter now that I have a better understanding of what happened. So thank you everyone in the Air Force Historical Research Agency, you have made my day!

Thursday, March 22, 2012

I Wish I Were Like Tolkien

I have to say, one of my favorite book series is the Lord of the Rings. Yes, I do like them more than the Hobbit. Everyone I know argues that when the trilogy, when  compared to the Hobbit, has too much walking around and a serious lack of dragons.

I'm not entirely sure why I like the trilogy more, I just do. Perhaps its the fight scenes. Although I liked Bilbo's cleverness in keeping the trolls talking until the sun came up it's just not the same as scenes like the battle for Helms Deep. Or maybe it's the lack of female characters for me to bond with. Both Eowyn and Arwen went to the aid of the people the cared about. They didn't just sit around on their hands saying "Oh well I guess the men will handle it." I liked that about them.

When you take all of Tolkien's works together I don't think there is a single bit that isn't riveting. I think the world needs more books like his. No one cares that his works are adaptations of old fables. He created an entire world for us to wander through, which was more than any dusty fable had given us. That's especially true for modern readers.

That's why I think my next work will be one I had started years ago, but never finished. All it has right now is a shaky foundation of a story, but I am willing to work on it until it shines. I guess I shouldn't distract myself with that one yet though, since I have not finished Escape and Evasion. I'm not quite half way through writing that one and then I have to edit etc.

I'm a little torn though. I also want to work on a story involving Zombies since I miss the days my friends and I would sit around and argue about the best way to survive the zombie apocalypse... Gah! There is too much I want to do and never enough time.

I'll just have to sit down and tell myself to focus on one project at a time. And that means finishing Escape and Evasion before I even think about Tolkien-esk projects. Although, I do hope people read my books before I die...Poor Tolkien never got to see his books get truly popular. His son truly did the world a service when he dusted off his father's old manuscripts and got them published.

Friday, March 16, 2012

Lynn's documents are now available!

I finally got the documents up! Now you can go and enjoy old timey photos, letters, and so forth. I'm inept with zip files, which is where most of my problems were coming from. I also didn't blur out last names like I had planed, but hopefully it wont bother anyone. Most of the images are easy to read once you have clicked on them and google zooms in. There is one article that is an exception and I'll figure out to make that one readable later.

I hope everyone enjoys looking through all of these as much as I did!

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

New documents

I met up with my cousin B. the other week to visit with his family. While I was there we got to talking about my work and he mentioned that after Howard (Lynn, we all call him by his middle name since he didn't like the name Lynn) died B. and his Dad went through a bunch of old wallets and things that Lynn had kept over the years. They scanned them into their computer and B. had a copy of everything.

Long story short, B. loaded all of those documents onto a thumb drive for me to take home. There is some outstanding stuff in there! Copies of Army information and paper work, certificates, more letters Howard received, etc. It's really answering a bunch of questions I had. Thank the stars Howard kept in touch with Lucien (one of the nice French men that helped him escape). Lucien was half French half British, and bless his heart, because he could write in both languages, and a LOT better than Howard. So now I know a bunch more people's names, how they are connected, and how to SPELL them. Good grief, that was driving me nuts.

I'd kinda like to add those documents to my blog as well. I don't think anyone would have a problem with that. I mean, how many of these people can still be alive to care?

The main problem is that I am still learning to use blogger as I go. So I have to figure out a nice way to organize all that stuff under a new tab. It's not like the home page where I write a post and it just tacks on to the top of the page. Then I could make each scanned document into its own post. It's more akin to making one giant post out of all those images and any text I want to add, only in a separate page that you can go look at. For all I know, I'm just not going about it the right way. I guess I'll throw those up like the letters, and if I find a better method later then I'll fix it.

Also, if the images aren't large enough for people to read then that could be a problem. I'd rather not type them out like Howard's. I'm going to throw up a little sample of his writing in there as well. Then you'll see what I was up against.

So you can look forward to that later this week, as long as everything goes according to plan...

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

I Swear I'm Working!

Hey there!
Sorry I haven't posted in a while, life is crazy.
I have been working on Escape and Evasion, and I have completed the first chapter. I know, it doesnt sound like much, but I am trying to get all of the facts right. There have been discrepancies between what Lynn said when he dictated his story to my Aunt and what others said when they wrote to the family years ago. I would like to just put everything down as Lynn said, but there were miscommunications when the story was dictated. Plus the boys who wrote letters back in '44 may have remembered events better than my Grandfather when he was retelling the story for the billienth time several years after the fact.
Also, parts appear to have been exaggerated. Ex: Lynn said he bailed out at 20,000ft, another guy said he was only 10,000ft. I'm not sure what height they would have flown their planes at. Your probably not worried about noise for people on the ground when you are trying to blow them up. So, I'll have to track down info on that.

Then there is the fun of "who is going to care if I use actual people's names in the book?" To be on the safe side I am not going to include last names (and occasionally I'll use made up names). Of course, the French names are going to be a complete guess. Neither my Aunt nor my Grandfather spoke any French so the names of people in the underground were written down phonetically as he understood them to be pronounced (Again, most of his story was written down many years after the war. So who knows if he even remembered them correctly). I have a feeling they are incorrect.
That is the kind of fun I'm having right now.

P.S. you cant trust the Internet for anything. I found this British site that said Col. Egenes died on march 10, but I definetly found papers indicating he had shot down enemy aircraft on the 16th of the same month and year. Pilots had to file reports after they had shot down an enemy stating how they knew the other pilot was dead. Thats how they received credit. Most of them read like this: I opened fire and took off a wing. Last I saw, that puppy was on fire and in a nose dive towards the earth with the pilot still inside. So Im thinking he didnt make it.
It's kinda hard to shoot someone down if your dead.

Anyway, I might post a bit of the first chapter later, but I have to work the bugs out.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Escape and evasion

Yes folks, this is the working title for my next project. It's a story about my grandfather Lynn, who was a WW2 fighter pilot. When he was a member of the 8th Army Air Force he was shot down over occupied France. This is the story of how he made it home safely, more or less, with all of the close calls, danger, and brave souls he met along the way.

I THINK I'm done with the outline. I have been trying to make it as detailed as possible so I wont forget anything. Most of the story was captured in Lynn's own words before he passed away. However, there were some gaps, and fuzzier parts, and he didn't usually go into detail about what happened. So I am trying to fill in the blanks with the use of research, old war letters, and the parts of the story my dad knows by heart (but for some reason they were never written down).

I only have scans of the original letters, and I have done what I could with them. My family and I did our best to translate them from Lynn's god awful left handed cursive (and the occasional poor scanning job), minus a few errors (Ex: perty to pretty). There a spots where we absolutely couldn't figure out what he had written and had to throw in an ellipses. I don't know why, but he was apparently allergic to using apostrophes, commas, question marks, etc. At least his sentence structure improved in the later years. I tried to leave all of that intact, despite the little twitch it gave me. My high school English teacher would be appalled (yes, I have taken more English classes since then, but she was finicky.)

I'm considering putting the letters up on my blog. That way anyone who feels the desire to learn more can read them. I'm a little deterred by the fact that doing so would be a lot of work, and I would be doing it for funsies. Although I am feeling burnt out right now, so I'm not as excited as I should be when it comes to starting the writing portion of the book.Plus, I find that the beginning is always the hardest part. Maybe I'll put off writing until next week and get a bit of marketing done. Then I'll think about the letters again...

Anyway, I would like to be done with Escape and Evasion in the summer. I'm really nervous about this project though. A lot more than my own pride is riding on my ability to do well. There is family honor at stake. Not to mention I have to portray tons of people that I will never meet as accurately as possible. (some of the caharacters will have to be made up, or at least fudged a little. Neither Archie [a pilot Lynn traveled with] nor Lynn talked about EVERYONE they met.]
I guess this is why these books always say "based on a true story".
Plus, I'm one of those people that finds war stories  much more depressing than exciting.
I'll be doing my best!!

Amazon is on the case!

Got an e-mail early this morning from amazon. They think they have fixed it and the site should be updated in the next 24hrs. Woot! I'll be keeping watch!

Maybe my new years resolution should have been to be more patient...

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Its a love hate relationship

Dear Amazon,
Most days I don't know how I ever got by without you. You have a larger selection of books/movies/games than any store can possibly have, and you send them to my doorstep. However, there are also times, like now, where you make me want to scream out loud.
Regards,
K.


I sent them an inquiry on Sunday. I asked them if they knew what was going on with my book's details page. I would prefer that my book didn't look like my cat sat on the enter key. I don't know if the problem is on my end or theirs but I dont know how to fix it. At least it looks fine everywhere else.

On Monday I got an e-mail from them stating we received your e-mail, and our response time is taking longer than our usual 24 hrs. That's not a direct quote, but it's close enough. Then they thanked me for my patience.

It's Wednesday now. I haven't gotten another e-mail, and the site is still messed up. Where is my customer service Amazon? I was almost hoping that it was a problem that they couldn't figure out either. At least then it probably wouldn't be my fault. The other option is that I'm really low on their totem pole. I'm pretty sure its that one.

I guess indies would be small blips on their radar. I wonder if anyone else is having this problem? All I can do is keep working on other projects and hope they get back to me soon. I may not be an obsessive compulsive perfectionist, but this is really ticking me off. I didnt spend all that time trying to weed out every last error so my book could look like that.

Ok. Im going to take a calming breath and stop ranting on my blog about this. I WILL focus on other work.
I'll post an update when the issue is resolved.

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Confused

Well, Bitten is republished on amazon. I went back to the book's page and once again weird spacing appeared in the "look inside" sample they provide. I was about to pull my hair out when I decided to download a sample of the book to my kindle. The weird spacing was gone...

For some reason, there is only a problem on the book's details page. You know, the place where people go to decide if they want to buy a book. For some reason I doubt readers will want to buy a book that appears to have strange spacing in it. So, I took a deep breath, and sent an e-mail to amazon asking them how to fix the problem. My fingers are crossed. Here's hoping they get back to me quickly about the source of the problem. Then we can work together to fix it.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

A little hitch

So I went out to amazon today to see if anyone has left me a review on Bitten. When I was there I noticed that the search couldn't find the book with "in the kindle store" as part of the search. I thought that was odd, so I ran a broader search under all departments and found it. And yes, it is definitely an ebook listed with the KDP. I'm not really sure why that's happening or how to fix it. Hopefully some changes I'm about to mention will set everything straight.

I decided to click on the "look inside" button while I was at the books page. That's when I noticed something even more annoying. There was tons of awkward spacing that hadn't been there before. Or at least it hadn't shown when I previewed the work during the publishing process.

That kind of unprofessional look is embarrassing for me, and readers shouldn't have to put up with it. I can only hope it didn't show up that way on people's kindles.

So I went back through the annoying procedures that amazon uses for self publishers. They had changed it since I published Entrhalled, and I can only say that they made the whole process more aggravating. I believe they were trying to make self publishing easier by making the writers do less of the conversion. However, their site had not been updated with proper directions as to how they wanted me to send my work to them (in fact, alot of the site pointed back to other pages that no longer existed because they were a part of the old system). Instead a huge emphasis was put on paying other companies that work for them to do all of the conversion for you.

Maybe I'm cheap, maybe I'm stubborn, but I refused to do that. Clearly something went wrong.

So, now I have gone back through all of that and found that yes, they do want the work in html formatting instead of .doc (like was implied before). So I have republished Bitten. Once again, it looked fine when I previewed the conversion. I can only hope it will stay looking nice. At least their webiste makes sense again. I wonder if I just hit them at an awkward phase while they were changing out their systems...

To make a long story short, Bitten has been modified and will be back on Amazon in about a day. And if this didn't work then I will fire off angry e-mails to amazon...seeing as how I would like to continue selling with them I guess I will have to be polite about it.

My appologies. I can only say that when I did the conversion myself for Enthralled using Mobipocket I never had any problems like this. It was a more complex yet easier life then. When anyone with a basic understanding of technology could self publish. For a while there I would have sworn that they were purposely making my life more difficult so that I would be forced to work with one of their subsidiaries. Only time will tell if I was right.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Bitten cover art

I don't think I mentioned this before, but the cover art for Bitten was done by the amazing and talented Claudia Mckinney! She also did the cover for Enthralled. I honestly don't think that there is a work of hers that I haven't liked. You should definitely check out her website.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Bitten is now available!

Bitten is now available in Amazon and Smashwords. You should check it out!

I've been a little distracted by snow. My friends and I took some time yesterday to try and pick up the largest piece of ice (We had freezing rain after it snowed 8in causing a thick layer of ice to form on top of the snow). It was fun.

But now its back to work. I'll be looking for book reviewers for Bitten and continuing with my next project that I have been working on. I didn't say much about it in my last post, but I'm going to write my grandfathers story. He was a world war two fighter pilot in the European theater and was shot down over occupied France. He had to escape across the border into Spain in order to survive. That meant eluding German soldiers, and those helping them. I'd like to say more about it, but I don't want to give anything away. I guess it's going to be one of those stories where you know how its going to end, but its exciting getting there.

I wasn't keen on the idea at first. I thought there were enough war stories out there to last each of us a life time, but my Dad talked me into it. So I told him I would start on this project as soon as I was done with Bitten. Of course, now I worry that people will assume I'm writing it because Red Tails is coming out...
I suppose it doesn't matter why people think I'm writing it. Its a good story, and if people are interested then they will read it. I just want to do the story justice, for the sake of my Grandfather and everyone he met along the way home.

Anyways, I guess I should get back to work.

P.S. I have been reading the letters my Grandfather wrote during his time in the Army (and yes I did say Army. The Air force wasn't its own division at the time). Reading left handed cursive = bad news. I swear, I need a cipher for some of these. His comments are really funny though, and I want to be sure and include them. For example, there was one letter where he had spent the week as the base's letter censor (they made sure no one was accidentally leaking any information, or sending things home that weren't legal) and he wrote "Some of these GI's sure write good love letters". I cant even imagine writing a passionate love letter to someone knowing that another man was going to read it first. I have to wonder how much of what the censors read was kept to themselves. I don't personally know anyone that's still alive to ask them.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Bitten-update 2

So I've been working on two projects at once. I don't think its working for me, but I really am done with Bitten now. Finished editing, and am writing the summary. Then I have to convert it, which means the giant headache involved with getting it set up two different ways, one for smashwords and one for amazon. I think the smashwords conversion will be done today but then I have to check it for errors, and if last time is telling, it will be re-uploaded several times. So I'll let everyone know when a clean copy is available. Then I'll start the amazon copy. Why smashwords first? Because I need to generate coupons for reviewers, which is the next phase. Lets hope they want to...for some reason my lack of confidence and self esteem makes selling myself difficult. Weird.

Anyways, I should stop procastinating and get back to work. That means I'll have to stop watching the buckets of snow falling and actually focus. Wish me luck!