FREE BOOK

Today and tomorrow, Screwing Up Babylon is free at Amazon! Click here to get the free e-book.

 Also today, Screwing Up Babylon is being featured at Kindle Books and Tips. If you haven’t heard of KBT, check out their website for great free and inexpensive e-books. Click here.

How to Get a New Fridge

We’re getting a new refrigerator. (It’s hand-me down, but a really nice hand-me down.) I'm excited. But don't get me wrong, I appreciate the one we currently have—it's a 1950s model and it came with the house when we bought it over seven years ago.

As the realtor walked us through the house, he said, “Well, you’ll have to get a new fridge—this one’s very old and it’s so small it’s not good for much beyond chilling soda.” And because no one has any extra money when they buy a house, we decided to wait for the fridge to die. Only it was made before planned obsolesce. And it’s still running. Of course, the internal lights don’t work. So when you open the door, you can’t really see anything. On the other hand, it’s not that deep. But you do have to move food around in order to see anything.

But I’ve learned to take an odd sort of pride in my fridge. It’s kind of like an antique. And a friend who visited said, “Hmm, if the Kellers with their six adults can live with a fridge like this, I need to stop complaining.” And we could live with it. Sure, stuff sometimes fell onto the floor when we opened the door.  But I discovered that those years of playing Tetris had real life applications—I can pack a fridge like nobody can.

Despite my old fridge love, when I was offered a new fridge, I jumped at the chance. The new fridge is stainless steel and has an ice/water dispenser—we’ll be living the high life. (Though one of the older minions pointed out that we’re getting the new fridge just months before two kids leave for grad school. Too bad.)

This experience has taught me an important lesson. Contentment. Clearly, contentment leads to very cool hand-me-downs. Now I’ve decided that I’m really content with my lawn. The only thing…I don’t think anyone will be giving me hand-me-down-weed-free grass. Oh, well, a girl can hope.

N.B. I finished the first major edit of book three in the Screwing Up Time series. In celebration, I've put Screwing Up Babylon on sale for 99 cents! It will be on sale at Amazon from today through next Friday, April 26.

Okay, our fridge is more modern than this one. But only a decade or two.

Photo by Infrogmation of New Orleans, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Screwing Up Time for FREE!!

Thursday is not a normal posting day for me, but I have some exciting news. In celebration of the release of Screwing Up Babylon and the release of "Screwing Up Mongolia" in Winter Wonders, I decided to give away Screwing Up Time for free from Dec. 6 through Dec. 10. Click here. Enjoy!!

Screwing Up Time is a 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Quarterfinalist.

Winter Wonders!

Saturday is a big day. It's the release of Winter Wonders, a winter themed anthology of short stories published by Compass Press and recommended for those aged teen and above. "Screwing Up Mongolia," a Screwing Up Time short story, is one of the stories included in the anthology.

The story is set in the time between Screwing Up Babylon and book three of the Screwing Up Time series. And, of course, the story has Mark (Henry) and Miranda in it.

Here's a link to the e-book version, which is selling for $4.99 at Amazon.
Here's a link to e-book at Barnes & Noble, also selling for $4.99.
And one final link to the paperback version, which is selling for $9.99.


One more bit of information, all the proceeds from the anthology go to Literacy Inc., an organization that teaches teens the importance of reading and offers them a chance to win  a free college education.

Screwing Up Babylon Release Party

Late Friday night Screwing Up Babylon went live on Amazon, we had a release party here at home.

And I promised photos. Unfortunately, I gave the camera to my 16 year old son. He took scads of photos--of the champagne. You'd think he'd never seen champagne before.

Here are two photos he took of me. (Also with the champagne bottle.)

And he took one photo of some of the food. Wensleydale with cranberries, smoked salmon with cream cheese, jalapenos, crackers. There was also chocolate and a West African beef stew.

We had a great time, even if there aren't many pictures to prove it.

And the sales seem to be going well. Here's a link to the book.

Screwing Up Babylon Release!

Screwing Up Babylon is now available at Amazon. Click here.

Book Release Draws Near!

Assuming the confluence of tropical storm Sandy and the Nor’easter doesn’t wipe out my proofreader’s internet access, Screwing Up Babylon should be available by this time next week. (Squee!)

In celebration of that, I’d like to set up a blog tour with hopes of spreading the tour out over several weeks.

If you’re interested in participating, you could just host the book or I could do a guest post on a topic. For example,

How to research

Integrating research into plot

Setting as a character

An excerpt from Screwing Up Babylon

Or something else of your choosing.

Please let me know if you’re interested in participating. (Either leave a comment or e-mail me at connie (dot) m (dot) keller AT gmail (dot) com). 

Tidying Your Manuscript's Formatting

I finished proofreading Screwing Up Babylon.* Now I have a friend giving it a once over to catch anything I missed.

In the meantime, I’ve begun formatting the manuscript for Kindle. A lot of authors don’t  consider formatting, especially if they aren’t considering self-publishing. But think about this.  Most likely, any agent considering your manuscript will probably read it on a Kindle (though a few use Nooks). And after all the work that you’ve put into the book, don’t you want them to have a great reading experience?

Now obviously, if you’re not at the point where you’re publishing to Kindle, you don’t need a linked table of contents, a copyright page, conversion to html, etc. But if you’re using “returns” instead of “page breaks” at the end of chapters to force a new page, “tabs” to indent paragraphs instead of the using the margins function, or randomly hitting too many spaces in your text, your book may look wonky on a Kindle. And, though I’m sure many agents are used to formatting wonkiness, putting your best book forward can only help.

The good news is that it’s all easy to fix. Amazon has a free e-book called Building Your Book for Kindle that can take you through the step-by-step tidying. (It’s a great “hand-holder” if you’re pubbing to Kindle, even for non-techies.)

Ironically, even though the book is great, it’s formatted very poorly. The font is miniscule, which I had to adjust by several stages because even with my reading glasses I couldn’t read it, and I have yet to find a table of contents page, though I may have missed it. I guess this is a case of “do what I say and not what I do.”

If you’re only tidying your book’s formatting, focus on using page breaks not “returns” at the end of chapters, using the ruler at the header on top of the Word file to set your indent instead of tabs or five spaces on the space bar, and make sure you don’t have random “returns” or “spaces” scattered throughout the novel. To see where they are, all you have to do is click the paragraph icon in the “paragraph” box and you’ll see all the hidden formatting. Unclick it when you’re done and the marks will hide themselves again. (This is in the 2007 version of Word—it’s there in earlier versions too, just look for it.)

Otherwise, you can Google “formatting for Kindle.” The better news is that the only formatting changes you need to do don’t force you to do anything weird with your text. And, of course, you don’t need to put your novel into html or add headings, etc., since you’re not pubbing, just tidying. So everything stays in a nice MS word document.

And for those of you who are self-pubbing, formatting your novel isn’t that hard. If you’ve learned to use a word processor, you can do this. Just bring your patience and a willingness to learn to the table. And if you don’t understand how to do something, Google it—more than likely there’s a YouTube video that you can stream where someone will show you how to format.

*In case you missed it, I posted the first chapter of Screwing Up Babylon on my book blog. Click here to read it.

Friday Chaos

It’s Friday, and I almost forgot to blog. Things have been chaotic all week.

• I finished the line edits on Screwing Up Babylon, the sequel to Screwing Up Time. I should be tossing confetti. Instead, my stomach gets queasy when I think about it. I only have one final read aloud and a final proofread. Then, I send my baby out into the world. Ack.

•  This morning, child number three has his first exam in college (a physics/engineering class), which necessitated pancakes this morning. And I was out of pancake mix. I hate pancakes made from scratch, especially the “quick pancakes” recipe I found. Instead of pancakes, they were more like weird-paper-thin-dough-like-substances. Child three and husband ate the pancakes. I ate Cheerios.

• I’m helping child number four with physics. Not my strongest subject. If child number one is home, I say to child four, "Go ask the resident physics expert." If he’s not, I say “Oh, honey, I’m sure you can do this. Just plug the numbers into the right equation.” Which works unless the child needs to derive an equation…then I take a deep breath, pray, and hope I know what I’m doing.

• Last but not least, I’m surviving the heat. It’s so hot and humid that the heat index is predicted to reach 105 to 110 today. Seriously. It’s September. I want cool breezes. I want to leave the windows open at night and crawl under a down comforter. But for now, I’ll crank the air conditioner, print up my manuscript for a final read aloud, buy pancake mix, and try to figure out how to use a TI 38 plus for physics—this scientific calculator does everything. Except I still haven’t figured out how to “clear” it. And what is “syntax error” supposed to mean?

It’s going to be a long Friday.