Category: personal

I, Robot

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

Yeah, so I have an author website launching soon and a website designer who wants that launch ASAP and I am floundering pulling my content together. I mean, talk about your writer’s block suddenly hitting, your word-smithing skills crapping out, and your total lack of Photoshop-fu being your undoing.

That. Me.

So I remind myself, you know, self, when you launched All Things Philosophical on Jan 1, 1999 (!), the show was in frigging season 3 and you were still sweating over your desperate need to prove the philosophical genius that was I Robot, You Jane. People still visited your site and came back when there was more to see. Having more to see is what brings people back.

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Adventures in Indie Publishing, pt IIa: formatting for print

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

I think the most difficult, grief-inducing part of self-publishing is formatting. I say that because I am still getting into the marketing part, but stay tuned, because I might change my tune later. But I spent a good two months getting my manuscript into a form–no, I take that back–THREE forms–that would deem it acceptable to book distributors.

The three forms are (1) print, (2) eBook ePub, and (3) ePub mobi. Print is pretty self-explanatory, although not easy, necessarily. ePub is the most common eBook format and you can find services that will turn your manuscript into an ePub file, but you have to do some work upfront to not have aforementioned manuscript kicked back to you as “not ready to be turned into an ePub yet.” mobi is just a fancy word for the format used by Amazon Kindle, which in their infinite near-monopoly wisdom is different from every.other.eBook.seller.everywhere, who of course all use ePub.

Print Formatting

Good Reads

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

So I’m setting myself up on Good Reads, which is proving more difficult than it should be. ‘Cause there are books

(1) I own, but read so long ago, I don’t remember if I liked them or not,

(2) I think I remember reading, but that was so long ago, I am not sure if I read them, or maybe it was my sister that read them, or my best friend in junior high….

(3) I read during that period of time when I was poor and living in San Francisco and got all my new reads from the library, so I didn’t keep a record of them,

(4) I own, but for the life of me, can’t remember if I read, or if I just bought them intending to read them but haven’t,

(5) I own them, read them, maybe even liked them, but don’t want to admit it,

(6) I’m pretty sure I only saw the movie. But maybe I read the book. Or maybe not. If it’s the former, it’s tough to judge a book by its movie.

(7) I read, I hated… do I dare list it to let everyone know of the hate, or risk giving it the attention it doesn’t deserve?

This could give me hours of amusement.

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 6 Comments

Ganked from superplin on PhaceBuk

http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/toys/randomsentence/write-sentence.htm

“The fiction of praxis opens a space for the fantasy of pedagogical institutions.”

ETA: and hee! You get hi-brow commentary on your generated sentences of abtuse academia.

“‘Your painstaking examination of the fantasy of pedagogical institutions is a testimony to your diligence, if not to your perspicuity.'”

Introductory post

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 30 Comments

I don’t think I’ve ever done an introductory post before, seeing as I’ve known most of my flist for years and have survived internet kerfuffles, raging forest fires, and DoubleMeat Palace viewings with them. But I recently gained a few new flisties from a Merlin fandom friending meme and apparently an introductory post after that is what All the Cool Kids Do.

So if you know this stuff already, feel free to move along.

Masquerade the Philosopher: a primer