Being perceived as a thing

Holy crap, it is HOT outside. I do not wish to be out there. No, I do not. I walked out of the office today and the heat all but smacked me in the face. I couldn’t imagine living in one of the really hot states or countries where the weather is like this often. I guess you would probably get used to it eventually.

On to some behavioral observations.

Lately I’ve noticed people trying really hard to be perceived as something they find admirable. They have fixated on some trait that they want people to notice about them, whether it’s intelligence or wealth or appearance. Then they go at that trait with a fervency that nears obsession.

The exertion manifests in a certain kind of…almost anger. And if the value of that trait or their notion that they possess that trait is somehow threatened, they freak out a little.

Was it happening all along and I just didn’t notice? Or is the heat scrambling their brains? Who knows? I don’t! But I am kind of fascinated by the behavior. There’s a certain level of insecurity there, I think, that makes them grab onto this one thing so hard that their knuckles go white and their jaws clench.

I just want to ask them, what makes you so intent on people viewing you this way? I want to know what the motivations are. What do they expect to gain? I can’t ask, though. People don’t like when I ask questions like that. I guess it’s rude or something. I shall continue to observe.

in which limitations were learned

I think it's Rihanna who has a tattoo that says, "Never a
failure, always a lesson". I've had some lessons in the last few days.
Let's review, shall we?

First, my release date (Tuesday) snuck up and sucker-punched me in
the back of the head. I had a task list for the day before the book came out.
My intention was to minimize the task list for the actual release day.

Monday was Presidents Day. That day, we all (husband plus
children) had the day off, so we went to the Children's Museum in Indy. It was
a lot of fun. I did not realize the significance of the date aside from the fun
I was having on the holiday. After having a much needed day off with my fam, as
I lay down to go to bed, it hits me - tomorrow is release day. Stream of curse
words in my head.

I woke up an hour early to get the ebooks on Smashwords and Amazon
running. Laptop screens are glaringly bright that early in the morning, btw.
Then I headed off to the day job, did my time there, went back home and started
updating the website, the book trailer, posting the release announcement on the
blog, setting up the limited edition on lulu, which I decided to do last
minute. Basically, I ran my ass off to get where I needed to be.

What did I not do? Send out the stuff for my first blog tour stop,
which was supposed to be today. I spaced it. so very my fault. I did end up
sending it last night with no reply from the blogger. I'm guessing she was
irritated with the late entry. I can't say that I wouldn't be annoyed if
someone did that to me. It just sucks because that was not one, but two blog
tour stops on a site with great traffic.

So what have I learned?
1. Hover over the calendar the week before release day and set up annoying
beeping reminders on my phone, so that I don't have to leap out of bed before
work.

2. Do not schedule any activities other than updating links and
making announcements for release day. It just doesn't work, not for me, at
least.

3. Do not piss off the bloggers.

trailer time

Ello, lovelies! Trailer time.

The trailer is not yet listed. I have to wait until the book pops up on Barnes and Noble because the trailer indicates that the book is available there. I also have to wait to launch the series webpage because I don’t really want to have to go back and update the page right after I put it up. That would be annoying.

I did change the thumbnail image to one closer to the beginning of the trailer, but that change might not have taken effect when/if you view it.

Also, I realize the picture ratio is a little off from the standard youtube size. I’ll do a better job of fitting the next one.

procrastination plus book trailer update

Today I was reading through the remix project and I discovered that somehow like 200 words or so had vanished from the manuscript. It’s weird because I have no idea how or why they disappeared. Luckily I still had a hard copy printout of the previous version, so all I had to do was find the corresponding page and type the missing part back in. I’m just glad that I hadn’t taken the pages to the recycle bin yet. Yay procrastination!

Ok. Guess what. No…not chicken butt. Book trailer update! I have completed the flower animation. I have also resolved the problem of the crap-ass picture quality.

Flash animation does not convert to avi format well, which is why the video looked blurry or grainy or whatever the first time I put it up on the blog. The problem was even worse when I converted the completed animation to avi. It was so bad that when I tried to play it on full screen, the flowers looked like straight up 8-bit graphics. After working so long on the thing, the bad picture made me want to cry.

But I did not cry. I looked for and eventually found a solution. The conversion from Flash to Quicktime (mov) went much smoother.

I haven’t made the final adjustments to the timing of the flowers yet. The roses will start before the rest of the foliage, with the exception of the grass blades. There will also be words in the middle, of course. The flowers, etc are just the border.

wanna hear it? here it go.

Thursday! Which means tomorrow is Friday! I do love Fridays.

I read the other day on an author’s blog that this publisher believed that an author should put out a book every 4-6 months in order to keep a steady stream of income.

4-6 months?? Holy crap. The logic makes sense because new releases usually trigger sales of the old books too, but geez. I’m not sure I could do that if I had the opportunity to write full time. Well, maybe. It wouldn’t be a leisurely keyboard tapping schedule; that’s for sure. I would be terrified of running out of ideas.

Talk about pressure.

Anyway. I learned something earlier this week. I should not edit on days in which my mood is not very good. Reading my words on days that I hate everything actually causes me to dislike my own writing, even if I’m reading something I previously. Those days are very few and far between, luckily.

I also learned that I should not let my daughter go through my mp3 player song list. She’s 14. She saw various titles containing the “F” word and another especially wholesome song called “Sex for Breakfast”.

Yes, I am mother of the year, thank you very much. She showed me the title to the breakfast song, and I honestly had no idea what it was. I took the mp3 player away from her to see what classy artist sings that ditty. Christina Aguilera. It’s on Bionic.

That’s all the wisdom I have for now. I’m going to go do some editing so that I might someday release another book.

animation update, part, uh, 3?

I did a little work on the trailer this week. I had hoped to have a significant bit of it to show off on the blog by now. I'm still relatively new to the whole animation thing, and I'm still trying to find my rhythm in Flash.

Since I last posted, I have determined that tweening is not the miracle I thought it was. Tweening is where you create two keyframes on the timeline and Flash automatically creates the states between those keyframes. Tweening works flawlessly for movement, not so flawlessly for shape morphing. Adobe hasn't quite worked out the bugs on that one.

The shapes I'm using (plant stems and vines) are complicated. Whenever I try to tween them, even if it's just a little, they implode. They get all wonky on the screen. It's kind of trippy sometimes but not really the effect I was going for. I'm spending more time trying to fix implosions than I would spend just animating frame by frame.

So I'm switching over to frame by frame. I'll bust out the bamboo tablet and get to painting. I'll have more freedom with the drawing that way anyway. There is a slim chance I might have some part of the trailer finished and ready to show off next week. But I also have 30+ pages of on-paper editing changes to enter too, so I guess I'll have to see which way the wind blows this weekend.

animation update

I spent a lot of time studying adobe flash, etc this past weekend. I plan to incorporate animation in my book trailers.

Adobe is really good at providing instructions on their products. The training video library on their website is extensive, which is wonderful because I need all the help I can get.

One thing adobe is not very good at is letting fireworks play nice with flash. I do all of my digital illustration in fireworks. It would be nice to be able to draw in fireworks and send it over to flash. Weird things happen when you try to do that. Textures are lost. Vector shapes magically change size. It's frustrating.

However.

Flash has its own drawing tools. Not as good as fireworks but they're sufficient. Do I sound like a spoiled baby yet?

I can do vector shapes. That's the important thing. As far as creating movement, Flash is pretty darn awesome. It can insert frames between two states so i don't have to work frame by frame. That handy function is called “tweening”. It’s very cool, even if there are some limitations.

I estimate the blooming flower animation to take about 8 hours to complete. I am somewhat relieved to feel like the animation is something I’ll be able to handle.

So where am I on the next actual trailer? I have story boards with words and pictures. Next I'm working on rough sketches for the finer points of the animation, like the blooming flowers. They will probably not be anatomically (should one use "anatomically" when talking about plants?) correct but still interesting to watch. That's the important thing.

The only animation I completed so far is a stem growing across the bottom of the movie. That is not very interesting to watch so I'm going to wait until I have more to put it up on the blog.

TTFN

_________________________
Hey, want some free reading? Check out the fiction freebie page on this very blog!
There you shall find links to two free ebooks on Smashwords and novel excerpts on Scribd.

Other places to find me:
http://www.LeaRyan.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LeaRyan1

thinkin', readin' stuff

I'm on a sort of writing break at the moment. I say sort of because I am writing, I'm just having a bit of trouble deciding which direction I want the story in AnnaBeth2 to go. It took a turn that I hadn't anticipated but totally makes sense. It's a part of the story that will carry over to the final part of the trilogy.

I'm figuring out how to integrate certain details while ratcheting up tension to move toward the end of the book. Basically, I'm spending a lot of time working through various scenarios in my head to decide which will serve the story and AnnaBeth3 the best.

While I'm on semi-hiatus, I started reading two books - Bossypants, by Tina Fey and Empire State of Mind, which is about Jay-Z but not actually written by him. The latter is like an “unauthorized” biography.

I know. Celebrity books. Gag. I can't help it. Even though I prefer not to interact with the majority of the people around me, I still find the lives of others (strangers?) interesting. It might be a writer thing.

Reading these books (at the speed of light because I have stuff to do) has made me realize that memoirs and biographies are excellent ways to learn about creating realistic characters, especially if the goal is to give aforementioned characters a lot of depth. And memoirs are really helpful for learning about people who are nothing like you too.

For instance, let's say I want one of my characters to be an opera singer. What the hell do I know about the motivations of such a person or their obstacles? I don't even like opera. But if I read a Luciano Pavarotti biography or memoir, I bet I will have picked up quite a bit about both him and the opera thing by the end.

Aside from personality traits and career stuff, the reader also gets information about people around them, the culture, the time period, etc.

I'm not saying one should copy all the family and life experiences from memoirs, but spending 300+ pages in someone else's world/head/time can be enlightening.

_________________________
Hey, want some free reading? Check out the fiction freebie page on this very blog!
There you shall find links to two free ebooks on Smashwords and novel excerpts on Scribd.

Other places to find me:
http://www.LeaRyan.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LeaRyan1

book working plus fun facts

Oy, my brain is tired. There was far too much thinking today.

There is rain outside, in the distance. I just got back from signing the boy up for cub scouts and we saw it falling over the fields. I kind of wanted to take my camera out there and get a shot but at this point, that would require way too much energy.

Anyway, book working update – AnnaBeth 2 word count is at 39,456. Almost to 40, woo! Crossing those 10,000 word marks is exciting for some odd, dorky reason. I really like the story so far. I know I say that about everything I write, but hey, if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t waste time writing it. No I would not.

There is a lot more action in the second installment. The romance element is still there, of course, but the action is definitely up a notch this time around. There is a demon involved. Not in the romance. There’s just one present in the story. She’s a girl.

Unrelated to book working updates, I have a random fact. This is from the new issue of Allure that I received in my mailbox on this day. In the 1770’s, French women used eyebrow wigs made of mouse fur.

Rodent fur. On their faces. Ew.

Bonus fun fact – sugar-free hershey’s chocolate tastes how lightning bugs smell. Yummers! Please do not injure any lightning bugs while trying to smell them. Understanding my comparison is not important enough to warrant a sacrifice of a helpless creature. Plus they’re awesome.
_________________________
Hey, want some free reading? Check out the fiction freebie page on this very blog!
There you shall find links to two free ebooks on Smashwords and novel excerpts on Scribd.
Other places to find me:
http://www.LeaRyan.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LeaRyan1

and now for some geekinese

I replaced my Playstation hard drive a few days ago. The actual hardware replacement wasn't difficult. The pain in my rear came in the backing up of the restore data - game saves and updates, etc.

Playstation can do this relatively easily through the menu BUT you need a FAT32 formatted disc to do it on. Windows won't format a drive over 32gb as FAT32. Thank you, Sony! I love your obsolete system requirements for backing up restore data.

My super nice brother loaned me an external hard drive to transfer the data, but it was 100gb. I tried to partition it to 32gb (or what I thought was 32gb), managed to get it to format FAT32 once and the playstation told me there wasn't enough space.

Many bad words were spoken. So back to the computer, bigger partition, the computer kept telling me that the new bigger partition was already formatted FAT32 when it wasn't. The computer mocked me. I reassigned drive letter. That didn't work.

More bad words, this time directed at the computer.

I finally bought a flipping 32gb usb flash drive. That worked.

This was the short version of the story. It was a two-day, many-hour project. So much irritation. But perseverence sometimes pays off.

The moral of the story is, if you buy a playstation and plan to hardcore use it, you might want to upgrade the hard drive right away.

The good news is that I learned things. Let's have a list.

1. How to replace a hard drive in a ps3 (obviously)
2. What a hard drive enclosure is and how to use one
3. Also an old playstation hard drive can be used with a PC once you place it in a hard drive enclosure and clear off the playstation stuff. Recycling! Wheeee!!
4. Husband sometimes makes useful suggestions but may also use the lid of a hard drive enclosure as a drink coaster if I leave him unattended.
5. How to partition a hard drive and reassign drive letters in Windows 7

I also learned that if you ask the employees at Best Buy technical questions, they get a little nervous. The one I talked to was very helpful, but when I inquired about the recommended rpms, he started blinking a lot and hurried to his computer.

All ended well. Fin.
_________________________
Hey, want some free reading? Check out the fiction freebie page on this very blog!
There you shall find links to two free ebooks on Smashwords and novel excerpts on Scribd.

Other places to find me:
http://www.LeaRyan.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LeaRyan1

Remix Update plus Kindle Learning

Hellloooo!

Remix project progress - 30000+ words

In case you're to my neck of the online woods, the remix project is my current work in progress. I'm rewriting a century-old horror.

Judging by where I am in the story so far and where I need to go, it's either going to be a really long novella or a really short novel. I don't foresee it hitting 7000 words.

I had intended to make it a full novel, but the story isn't unfolding to that length. I'm alright with that fact because the pacing is perfect and the tone and the story are coming out as I'd hoped. I may add in a few things when I slash and burn the first draft, but I won't try to cram in any random story bits just for the sake of fattening it up. The story deserves better than that treatment.

There were a couple of discontented rumblings when What the Dead Fear was released only as an ebook. Remix is longer, so rejoice, fans of print, there will be a dead tree edition.

Work on the cover art MAY commence very shortly.

Rapid subject change.

Did you know that you can read this blog on your Kindle! Es verdad!

These directions work on my Kindle. It's the black one or dark gray or whatever they call the color. I figured out how to do this last night so I'm sharing for anyone who might not have gotten around to checking out the browser yet.

Directions. Here we go.

1. At the home screen, press the Menu button.

2. Activate thy wireless.

3. Via Menu, select the "Experimental" option (not as dramatic as it sounds) and "Launch Browser".

4. Be amazed at the awesome links already listed.

5. Click the first link to hop onto the internet.

6. Select the address bar - this may require some fiddling. I pushed up and to the right to get to it.

7. Delete the address that's already in there and type in the following.

http://Lea-Ryan.blogspot.com

The / : and - symbols are available when you push the "Sym" button on the little keyboard.

Select “go to”

8. Once the page loads, press "Menu" again and then "Bookmark this page".

Et voila!

Why the hell would you go through all this trouble to read my blog? The process isn't so difficult, is it? And besides, once you learn how to access this one, you can access other ones too. You could have a million blogs and other websites right at your pretty fingertips.

_________________________
Hey, want some free reading? Check out the fiction freebie page on this very blog!
There you shall find links to two free ebooks on Smashwords and novel excerpts on Scribd.

Other places to find me:
http://www.LeaRyan.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LeaRyan1