Mental constipation, Paintshop, PV & PT.

My writing pathway seems to have been suffering from constipation of late, perhaps because the weather has been cold and damp, which is most unlike our usual weather here and reminds my bones of UK winters. That, plus some background worries about my mum, and the taking of certain decisions in regards to the ongoing development of Labartere, had robbed me of all writing momentum. 

So then I got bored! Took myself in hand, and got myself back into the saddle. Did some ongoing link checking with my Aspects of Self website, and managed to re-edit one of the pages which needed doing. Simple stuff really. Just to ease my mind away from day-to-day stuff. 

Psychic Toolbox and Psychic Virgin time: the problem is that all I want to do is write, but being a self publisher I have to deal with all the other stuff which a publisher, editor, and  agent would do, which also has contributed to this blocking effect. Always I am breaking new ground with myself, learning new skills, which quite frankly can get rather tiring, even though keeping me mentally stimulated at the same time. 

Ebooks. Hit a wall with Lulu in regards to getting the cover into shape. Assumed that all I would have to do is use the same cover as the book, but no. Lulu assumes that an ebook is a completely different unit of work to the original book, so wants a cover done. But Lulu doesn't let you have access to the 'Design a book cover' wizard, so all you have is an inhouse cover which will be the same as everyone elses, or you can submit your own, but it has to be all the cover. 

Now my original cover for PV was designed via the wizard, so is not 'all of a piece'. What I mean is that I don't seem to be able to convert that cover over as a whole unit for the ebook. So: off into the Internet I went, researching 'how to make an ebook cover'. Then off into Paintshop to have a go, and then stopped, as have to become more familiar with Paintshop before I can go any further. More learning needed.

PT: all re-writing done, now need to do the cover. Since PT is part of the Psychic Virgin series of five books in total, I want to keep a theme running. Did the very simple graphic for PV in Word autoshapes, and Tech Team Guy Husband did some magic stuff which neither of us can remember, and into the Lulu wizard it went without a hitch. 

So did the same for PT. Jiggled about with the same graphic, called Hubs over and he pressed the 'PrtScm Sys Rq' button on the PC, opened Paintshop, right clicked mouse  over blank screen, accepted 'paste in as new image' offer, and up came the recently copies graphic complete with all the Windows toolbars as well.

On to side toolbar of Paintshop, hit the 'selection' button, then over to the graphic, put a square around the graphic, then up to top bar, Image > crop to selection. This fetched up with all the Windows stuff gone and a nice little box with the graphic neatly inserted inside. Saved as a 'png'. 

Over to Lulu wizard. Uploaded graphic. Same process as before, but now error keeps appearing. Image too large. So back to Paintshop and reduce the image. Repeat process several times but still Lulu coming back with image too large. Gave up in the end. Ignore the red triangle boldy sitting on the cover warning me that the graphic might be hazy when printed, hoping that the magic fairy would come along and make it alright somehow. 

Rest of cover didn't take too long. Used the same fonts as PV, similar layout although not exactly the same in regards to font spacings because the overall look of the cover needs to be right as far as I can judge. At some point in the future, when all the books are done, then I will improve the covers, but for the time being....well, this is a cottage industry book so will do it the best I can then leave alone.

Onto the back cover....posted up a photo of myself, believing that my (possible) reader needs to see the person behind the name. Prefer to choose photos which represent who I am in real life, so no 'spit and polish' photos with loads of make-up and tidily coiffured  hair. And definitely no studio-type poses. Just me, happy-snappying with my camera, usually capturing myself looking windswept and therefore vaguely untidy. The photo for this cover was a happy-snappy done by my daughter. There were four of us crammed  close together to get us all in the picture, and we were leaning on a log. 

And the thing is, that this photo, because it is not posed, goes with the rest of the cover, and the contents therein. It is home made. 

Now all I have to do is the blurb for the back cover........ oh dear, have a tad of avoidance creeping into me as I feel the urge to go take the dogs out for a walk! But at least I am not mentally constipated, which is a blessing!