Tales from the Annexe

#bookreview – Tales from the Annexe

I’m chuffed by this lovely review and interview on Liz Gauffreau’s blog.

Elizabeth Gauffreau

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My Review

As its subtitle indicates, Tales from the Annex is a collection of seven stories based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West character, followed by seven other tales. 

I went into the collection not having read Driscoll’s Herbert West novels or anything by H.P. Lovecraft. I was very curious to see whether these tales could stand on their own, as well as to gain insight into why this character would inspire a contemporary writer to reanimate him in her own fiction. 

About half-way through the Herbert West section of Tales from the Annex, I sought out and read Lovecraft’s original story: “Herbert West: Reanimator.”  I had my answer: Herbert West is in the literary tradition of the prideful scientist who seeks to conquer death by bringing the dead back to life. Endlessly fascinating! 

After reading the seven Herbert West stories, I was…

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Reading Aloud: “Fox and Glove”

Here is a video of me reading* the first few scenes of “Fox and Glove,” one of the stories in Tales from the Annexe.

If you want to read the rest of the story, Tales from the Annexe is free on Amazon from Saturday, December 19th until midnight Pacific Standard Time on Sunday, December 20th.

*Saying “revivification” isn’t easy. Just try it.

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Wait, wait–there’s more! The rest of my books are available at discounted prices, or even free, at the Smashwords store until January 1st. Find them HERE.

Blog header: Twenty Years a Writer

Twenty Years a Writer, Part 6: Don’t Forget to Justify!

When I published Tales from the Annexe, I had to go back and correct some infuriating mistakes in both the ebook and print versions. The most obvious was forgetting to justify the text for the print version. There I was, admiring the formatted document and thinking formatting had been relatively easy this time, when I realized something. The text was left-aligned (like this post). Unless I justified it, my book would have ragged right margins.

Aargh!

A book with ragged right margins is perfectly okay — except it looks self-published. Some potential readers will reject it for that reason alone, even if the story looks interesting. Unfortunately, self-published book = crap is still a thing.

So I had to justify. And pay attention to other niceties of formatting, even for ebooks. Ebooks don’t need page numbers, headers, or footers, but hard page breaks after the title page and between chapters, or the stories in a collection, are a nice touch. When I first uploaded the ebook document to KDP, it lacked those page breaks. (Now it has them.)

Formatting a Word document so it may be turned into a print book boils down to this: set the margins for your trim size, justify the text, add Section Breaks (odd or even), add Footers (page numbers), add Headers (title, chapter or story title, and/or author). For headers and footers, the crucial thing is Link to Previous. If you want the header/footer to be the same as in the previous section, you leave this alone. If not, you click to turn it off and then make your changes. Look at a traditionally-published book to see which pages need headers or footers.

Always take a good look at your files before you publish. KDP provides online previewers that show exactly how a book (e-version or print) will look. They are definitely worth using. Even so, I overlooked the details I’m talking about here.

Like the print cover image, for example. Only after I uploaded it did I realize that part of the title was ever so slightly off-centre.

Aargh!

At first, I told myself these details didn’t matter; no one but I would notice the ragged right margin, the lack of page breaks, the off-centre title text. But of course some potential readers would notice and might conclude that the contents were probably crap. And those deficiencies would always be the first things I saw when I looked at the book. My book. And because it’s so easy to upload corrected files, I had no excuse not to do it.

So I went around the mulberry bush a few more times — added the page breaks, fixed the cover image, and justified the text, created new PDFs, downloaded and uploaded, and waited the extra days for the book to go “live” again.

Now it’s perfect. Or as close as it needs to be.

Fellow writers and publishers, how much trouble do you take with formatting? Do details like these matter to you?

Tales from the Annexe is a free download from Friday, November 27th until Saturday, November 28th, (midnight Pacific Standard Time)
AMAZON: US UK CA AU

Final part next time: Unwritten and Unrealized.

Images for Tales from the Annexe

Pictures for Several Thousand Words, Part 2

Pictures for Several Thousand Words, Part 1, with images for stories from the Herbert West Series, may be found here.

The first two speculative fiction stories in Tales from the Annexe predate my acquaintance with Canva, so I did not have images for them when I began putting this post together. I decided to do something about that, and I am pleased with the results.

Image #2 for Welcome to the Witch House story
As if moving into a dump of a haunted house isn’t bad enough, Frank Elwood discovers conceited math student Walter Gilman is already living there, for his own peculiar reasons.
Image for The Deliverer of Delusions story
Miranda Castaigne gives up her romantic life with artistic ex-pats in Paris to discover the truth about her eccentric brother’s death in a New York City lunatic asylum.
Friends Will and Doof investigate a mysterious ice cream truck that cruises their town at night.
Image for The Colour of Magic story
Things get weird when the tenant in Marc’s basement suite insists on painting her bedroom with a very special paint.
Image for A Howling in the Woods story
When Doug’s son Todd keeps playing a recording he’d made in the woods, of a strange howling sound, Doug orders him out of the truck–and into those woods.
Image for The Glamour story
Fifteen-year-old Ann, convinced she was switched at birth with the daughter of a wealthy family, sneaks into their home on the evening of a party.
Image for The Blue Rose story
Deon the Fabricator’s obsession with creating a blue rose leads him to make a perilous journey to the Blasted Lands. His childhood friend, Luna of the City Guard, undertakes a search for him and learns hard truths about love and duty.
Cover image for Tales from the Annexe

Available at a special pre-order price of $0.99 USD (or equivalent) from these Amazon outlets
US UK CA AU DE

Images for Tales from the Annexe

Pictures for Several Thousand Words, Part 1

Somewhere in the process of becoming an indie author, I discovered I enjoy messing around with images. I’m not talking about the photos of my garden I post on the blog. I hardly ever do any post-processing on those.

But ever since I found out about Canva, an easy-to-use graphic design tool, I’ve been creating images to represent my writings. Often, I complete one or more long before I finish writing the novel or story to which they belong. The image-designing process must use different parts of the brain than whatever it is that transforms ideas into words.

When I published four of the stories in Tales from the Annexe as separate ebooks in 2016, I made cover images for them, and I designed the cover image for the collection years before I needed it. More recently, while writing the the new stories that completed the set, I created an image for each of them as well. I didn’t need cover images for these stories, but I did need regular breaks from writing them.

My first idea was to include all these images in the book, but I didn’t want to swell the ebook’s file size to the point it incurred a hefty delivery fee. Moreover, not all e-readers display images in colour. I decided to feature them here on my blog instead.

Below are the images for the first seven stories, which are by-products, off-cuts, spinoffs, or supplements (I haven’t found a congenial word for this concept) to the four novels of my Herbert West Series.

They appear in “chronological” order, i.e., the first three happen during the time period covered by the first novel. The fourth, fifth, and sixth happen between Books 3 and 4 of the series. The last story of this group takes place decades later, following She Who Comes Forth, the novel that’s a kind of sequel to the series.

ebook cover image for The Nexus
A 101-year-old professor reminisces about his most memorable–and dangerous–student.
Image for Fox and Glove story
To win a bet with his friend Alma, librarian Charles Milburn seeks the help of a dead man.
As if a relationship with a part-time necromancer isn’t complicated enough, what if it were more than friendship?
A climb up a hill near Luxor, Egypt leads to an encounter with bandits and supernatural entities.
One of the Fourteen ebook cover image
A chance meeting in a pub brings reformed necromancer Francis Dexter to a perilous realm between life and death.
Image for The Night Journey of F.D. story
Determined to confess one of his worst crimes, Dr. Francis Dexter is subjected to a terrible revenge.
Image for The Final Deadline of A.G. Halsey story
A dying newspaperwoman struggles to figure out what happened to her granddaughter in Luxor, Egypt, and to warn her of threats to her heart and soul.
Cover image for Tales from the Annexe

Available at a special pre-order price of $0.99 USD (or equivalent) from these Amazon outlets
US UK CA AU DE

Cover Reveal: Tales from the Annexe

Remember those four stories I unpublished a few weeks ago? They’ll be back soon, along with ten others, behind this cover.

Cover image for Tales from the Annexe

Seven stories from the world of Audrey Driscoll’s Herbert West Series, followed by seven other tales of illusions, delusions, and mysteries from the edges of logic.

This collection of fourteen short stories will be available for preorder within the next ten days.