Recently I talked about my new novel plan - the Sci-Fi/Fantasy story about a journey to a parallel world. For this I had to research quite a bit of physics to be sure about the possibilities of parallel worlds. At the Book Fair there was a stall from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland. I figured why not ask them about my ideas - best thing you can do - just ask people and don't be shy. They were more than willing to be helpful.
I also decided to take part in their LHC@Home project. This is a connection from your laptop to their system. You get tips on how to make your computer more efficient and in return they sometimes use some of your capacity to calculate some theories - millions of computers together are more powerful than one large computer. You should really check this out.
I also finally found the deeper meaning in my story. While writing a proposal for the Dissertation this novel will be part of, I had the idea to include some of my recent, quite innovative discussions in the story. After some training sessions about sexuality, forms of life and understandings of society, I was slightly confused and had to make up my mind about a few issues that seemed a bit outstanding - non-conformational. Where would be a better place to explore the difference of these ideas as in a parallel world's society?
I hope this will be something new, something at least I haven't read before.
This week I have attended the Frankfurt Book Fair on several days. On the facebook and twitter pages of PepperBooks you could also read what I experienced as it happened.
Do you go to book fairs? Do you think it is necessary?
After being on my mission to find as many ideas, networks or partners for the new publishing company PepperBooks, I have to admit that the Book Fair was anything I imagined and more.
The two freshly delivered books in my bag, I wandered around the vast buildings and halls, looked at thousands of stalls and was amazed. The first day was pretty much wasted trying to grasp all of it. I still managed to promote our literature website buchbesprechung.de a bit, talking to publishers and authors.
Later the week I got to organize some things for PepperBooks. For someone starting in the business, the Book Fair is THE place to be. You get useful information on various events and more help from different organizations. Everyone was very friendly - a wonderful atmosphere. I managed to connect to book wholesalers who thought our books looked promising and added some contacts to our friend's list.If you like books, this is where you find people like you. Some make books out of granite, some don't care about the investment into their cook books as long as it follows their strict and inventive guidelines.
I'm just a little annoyed that I didn't have time to see everything. However, I was surprised by the presentation of this year's guest of honour - Iceland. Wonderful country - great literary world despite its size.
I'm really going crazy traveling this week so much, it's like all around the world in two days. Yesterday I went three hours to London fro 1 to 3 am, then a place to near Hamburg plus another bus to Hamburg City Centre for an inspiring training session. Now I'm in Berlin preparing for the Frankfurt Book Fair, where I will go on to on Tuesday. So, I will make it short today, as there will be more posts on publishing and Frankfurt Book Fair and other things over the coming week.
See you soon,
Nahno
Unfortunately, the Smartphone Offense is still one or two weeks from now. This means that this week, I can tell you a bit about the creative side of my summer: Planning a new novel.
I'm in my third year at University now and for the Creative Writing dissertation of a BA course you have to make a Portfolio, which is nothing else than a coherent creative piece of writing of about 7000 words plus a reflective commentary of 3000 words.
It's the first time that we have a larger piece that can actually contain a bit more than a short story. On the other hand, it's still not enough to hand in a novel - bummer.
I still want this project to be a major piece of work that should end in a novel. One option is for example to just hand in the introduction to the novel (which I wouldn't wanna do, actually). I'm still contemplating how to use the 7000 words with different pieces of the novel I have in mind.
I guess I should just tell you what I came up with now. Like so many times, I got my inspiration from a dream. I love jotting down the outline of dreams and coming back to them later to use them for my writing. They are always so vivid and ... well, scary sometimes, but good material. This time I was on the run with a group of people, an older guy, a girl and someone else I think. We were driving a truck and tried to follow some guidelines to get somewhere. Suddenly there was a lightening and we had disappeared from that place - at high speed and turned up in another world.
In my mind I knew there were also some background issues. Long story short - I'm writing a novel about parallel worlds, menacing and intelligent storms and scientist apprehensions about gaining unheard-of knowledge and insights. I had to study the universe in depth to understand all the cosmic settings and the theories surrounding parallel worlds. Finally I know what Black Holes are supposed to be and what Einstein's formula is all about. If it weren't for the novel idea, I would have never gotton so much into Sci-Fi to absolutely enjoy it.
I'll tell you more about the novel/portfolio piece once I have more information. I still need to decide on a few details.
Where are you getting your ideas from? And what are you working on right now?
To work as a publisher means in the first place handling all the different stages of making the books. That can be disappointing and exhausting, but also exciting.
Luckily, there are and were no problems in the team - I've never felt so much part of something. In a way social life and work gets mixed up, when we had sandwich parties on Thursdays, fun promotion events and trips to Berlin underground musicians.
Then there is outside communication:
For the first book, a marketing idea consisted of getting confectionists to help us with a recipe for "Harald"- the chocolate-bean-chocolate cake, the main protagonist of the children's picture book. We got two recipes, one for Harald and one for cupcakes, for the kids to bake.
The illustrators:
Here you can be lucky or not. For our second book we employeda wonderful illustrator who almost feels part of the team. She quickly adjusted to our ideas, made different cover versions, combined the best ideas and even adjusted minor things in no time. This makes work easy and fun.
Other things can be a bit tricky, especially if your illustrator is also friends with the author and sees the project as a freetime fun thing. It's a balancing act between getting the necessary changes done and not coming across as a mean publisher who wants to destroy the original ideas behind the project. I would say there are some aspects a publisher just knows better about selling the final edition. Still, our goal was to suit the book and the author more than just making profit - being an alternative to popular publishers.Last: the printing agency
I'm so glad we had an understanding printing agency. Otherwise, we would have been lost. There are so many things you have to learn about printing and without their help and support we could have messed up bad and be utterly disappointed with the results. (well, we don't have the books yet, but I'm confident)
Now we know how to
- layout the printing file,- what format it has to be,
- what pdf x-3 is,
- that ICC profile are a hassle,
- what book sizes are better than others,
- which fonts are totally stupid,
- how to use a ftp server,
- which paper is suitable,
- the difference between CMYK and RGB,
- and all the other choices you have to make before your job can be done.
In the next few weeks, I might take part in a smartphone customers insights survey, which would mean that I will blog frequently about choosing, buying and using a smartphone. More daily news on my new tumblr.
It's still quite hard to believe that I spend my summer starting a publishing company in Germany. After applying at an amazing online literature magazine called "www.buchbesprechung.de" (alternative German for book review), they asked me to get involved in their second project - the publishing company: PepperBooks.
So this is me all summer:
I would say the fact that I am studying creative writing helped a lot with the books that we were planning to publish. I read several books on publishing companies, strategies and layouting. Meanwhile I edited the books to the best of my knowledge, trying to highlight the fantastical atmosphere for the children and of course working greatly on grammar and punctuation. Luckily, the author of the two books is an academic and quite skilled with the rules - only one minor problem: the author had fallen for the wide belief that a soup of exclamation marks makes up rich ingredients(!).
Editing someone elses work in a business kind of way made me struggle. There are so many sides you have to consider and be aware of. It's hard to fall into the habit of thinking about it as your own work, but it's not. You have to edit in a way that still sounds like and suits the original author. At the same time - at least in my case - I had some deeper knowledge about the needs of stories, the crucial elements and the common "mistakes" from my course.
In the end I think I managed to get good results that both pleased the author and maximized the readability of the stories. As this was my first work as a proper Editor, though, I think I tended to be more legere with things - I guess it's natural to be a bit self-critical. As a writer myself I had to take back my own desires and ideas and keep telling myself: this is not my work, I just want what is there to be a little more clear/perfect&rounded up.
We'll see how it sells.
Did you ever edit someone elses work? Next time I'm gonna talk about co-operation and managing.
Hello my friends,
so this was a long summer for me. How was yours? What did you do? I wonder who travelled the most or the farthest.
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| Baltic Sea - by Susan Petzold |
Oh, and then I went to the Baltic sea and slept on the beach - yes, we had a blanket - yes, it was still freezing - no, we didn't sleep that much. From 4am on, it was more a matter of walking around and getting warm ideas than sleeping. But hey, the day was wonderful - warm, sunny, the beach was amazing and I loved the waves. (For your information: I planned to go to the sea for 4 years and never managed due to various reasons. So this was fantastic.)
So this was the best of my summer experience.
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| Summer is over |
Now back to literature, the arts of writing, the experience of being a writer. All those lovely things that I didn't have to miss over the summer, even though I didn't have time to share it on here.
Yes, I didn't share it on here yet - BUT I will do so in the next couple of weeks. I will tell you about my work experience at a publishers in Germany, how I managed handling difficult illustrators, awesome and helpful Czech printing companies and layouting a whole novel. Not to forget my personal work: my new novel is getting along nicely and I definitely need to get a progress counter on here. Updates and the whole story so far to come in the next few weeks, so be prepared ...
BY THE WAY - nice to be back and have you all back.
