Alright, it took me roughly twice as long as I was hoping to get this far, but I’ve spent roughly 32 hours of the last 40 working on getting my books converted to a variety of E-Book formats and uploaded to my site and a couple of others. There’s still work to do (I have to fax some paperwork to Lightning Source to get set up for E-Books there, and maybe convert to a couple more formats for that), but I’m as done as I can be for right now.

Which is to say that my novels are now available as screen readable PDFs, printable PDFs (galley-like layout), basic HTML, RTF, Mobi, .epub*, and plaintext files. They are also available for purchase on the Amazon Kindle. All my print books (including poetry) will (soon?) be fully searchable on Google Book Search & purchasable via same as E-Books. After I get them set up via Lightning Source, they will also be available for purchase through all major online E-Book retailers, but that could be a couple of weeks.  Oh, and I also created preview PDFs of my poetry books - I don’t want to give those away for free in their entirety, and think their format doesn’t work as well as E-Books.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll be recording audiobooks almost full time for a while, and accompanying videos soon thereafter. For now: sleep.

*I’m not sure that my .epub files are formatted correctly - I couldn’t get several of them to open with Adobe Digital Editions, but they did open in other readers. I haven’t tested them on my PC yet, only my Mac.  Anyone use the .epub format who might be willing to assist with getting these to work better / look better?  Thanks

So, today was my first real, full day of running Modern Evil Press full-time. Mandy had last week off for Spring Break (she teaches High School, remember), so I worked on and off and tried to use the week and half between leaving ICE and today to transition myself mentally and emotionally for this. I worked on putting together a semblance of plans and goals and … I don’t know, action-item lists… Is that what they call To Do Lists these days? Trying to have some idea of how to go from where I’m at to making money from my books and my art, so I’m not merely floundering. The general day-to-day plan, for time-management sake, is to get up with Mandy and work (at least) as long as she’s working. So, M-F, 6:30AM to 4:30PM.

So to get off to a good start, I started with a painting. I’ve been meaning to document my “process” better, so I also took a quick shot of the first coat of paint with my iPhone and threw it up on flickr (thumbnail at right). It’s a sort of a landscape right now. The image I’m planning for this background, which I will now describe as a “…monster with a robot head…” is not what it sounds like. Maybe I’ll post some more images tomorrow, when I’m working (digitally, of course) on adapting the sketch for the canvas. I sortof jumped the gun on the composition of the background without doing proper previsualization, but it’s no problem to work the elements together on the computer screen before I apply any more paint.

Ooh, thinking of it, I actually took a photo of another painting first, while the sun was still quite low. It’s one of four paintings I finished last year that I’ve only just put on wretched creature: ‘what… and why?’ was today’s photo, and I’ve been working on getting ‘it’s the internet…’, ‘without you’, and a (currently) untitled one with a face … Okay, admittedly, when I finished it I had a name for it, and I didn’t write it down or put it on the site right away, so … I can’t remember it right now. I’ll update it later, in the event I can recall the full name.

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