My Crazy Journey with Createspace

For goodness sake! Whose stupid idea was it to put a novel into print? Yeah, that’d be mine then. I had never really felt the need before and was perfectly happy with all my books on Kindle and Smashwords. They’re doing fine there. Occasionally I would get asked if someone could buy a physical copy and I would shrug and suggest that they downloaded it onto their phone or something. Admittedly that wasn’t awfully helpful for those who pulled out a brick-sized, battered Nokia, but hey, they probably wouldn’t really have bought my book anyway. Would they? And then I saw it. It was a photo of Jalpa Williby holding her latest novel. Outside her front door.

I was jealous, I admit it. I yearned to post photos of my novel and all these random images went strolling through my head.

My cat holding my novel in her little ginger paws.

My novel by the toilet - what? We all do that, just admit it.

My novel on the edge of the bath.

My novel driving the car (that one might be harder to fake, but not as hard as keeping the cat still.)

My novel watching TV with me, knitting, having dinner, watching a soccer game under an umbrella.

The possibilities are endless.

My unborn novel took on a personality of its own and I wanted it so bad. I wanted to touch its glossy cover and in the tradition of all proper readers, I wanted to thoroughly sniff it.

So I did it.

I logged onto Createspace and I did it.

I would love to end there so that you all thought I was amazing and clever and produced a print book just like that. But I would be lying and I only do that on very special occasions.

Actually I did an awful lot of screaming, some swearing and a fair bit of threatening over a terrible four day period, in which lots of awful things happened in the world and I saw none of it.

For those of you who understand that you type in A4 on your laptop, well that’s awesome, but I didn’t. You cannot load an A4 size manuscript into a 6 x 9 inch book and expect Createspace not to bark at you. I wasted a whole weekend trying to eliminate inexplicable gaps from the proof that just appeared without warning and I Googled solutions until I was mystified. Lots of posts about gaps and the frustration of gaps. 

No solutions.

My private technical specialist, who also foolishly married me was away for a few days, luckily for him. He looked at me strangely on his return, probably because I was still sitting in the exact same spot as when he left, wearing my pyjamas, only now I looked oddly crazed and demented through sleep deprivation. He had driven for 12 hours through hail, sleet and snow, toured a university and slept in a noisy motel and my first words to him were,

“I can’t make this stupid thing work!”

Seriously, if it hadn’t been for Demelza Carlton, author of the Ocean’s Gift Series, there would be no print copy! My stroke and sniff urge would have died a tragic, painful death by technomoron. She took me, a blithering stranger under her wing and put up with my dumb questions and nursed me through a process that I’m not sure I ever want to go through again. So, thank you Demelza Carlton for your tireless patience from across the ditch and international generosity for a fellow Oceanian. (And please can my moronic agonies with the cover remain a well-kept secret? Other people don't need to know all my mistakes, this is humiliating enough!)

I got an email this morning.

“Your interior and cover files for Blaming the Child meet our technical requirements for printing.
The next step in the publishing process is to proof your book.”

Oh, the excitement!

Until I saw the damn postage price.

$7 if I don’t mind not seeing it until late September.
$17 if I can wait until the end of August.
$33 and I have no idea what for because I couldn’t bear to look anymore. I figure for that price, a Createspace representative will be knocking on my door having read and reviewed it on the plane over.

Honestly!

I wanted to pay the $7 and sulk and complain for 2 months, but my financial advisor and credit card controller (who also doubles as my technical specialist in case you thought I was a bigamist) took pity on himself and paid the $17 so now he only has to put up with me sulking for one month.

When it finally arrives I will be temporarily elated and promise that I will take lots of wonderful pictures. Then I will pick holes in it, find mistakes and decide that I don’t like the cover. Because unfortunately things don’t stay shiny for as long as we want them to.

Blaming the Child, my teen mystery will be out in print...soon.

You will be the first to see it, warts and all. Unless there’s something wrong with the cover and then you’ll never even know it arrived...

Ocean's Infiltrator Review - The Addictive Ocean's Gift Series

Ocean's Infiltrator - a review

This novel, the second in the Ocean’s Gift series is yet another page turner. It demands to be read in one sitting, to the exclusion of all other calls on the reader’s life including eating or sleeping.

I still love Joe. I love his bumbling humanness and his worship of Sirena and I spent the entire book in as much agony as Joe, believing that she would leave him high and dry and return to her people. The ending is incredible and I should have seen it coming, but didn’t. I won’t spoil it, even though I badly want to tell. 

Demelza Carlton spins an incredible yarn, which wraps around the reader and pulls tight, too tight to escape from easily. She is obviously an immense researcher, who understands the oceans and their peculiarities in depth. Her books have made me wonder about many recent nautical disasters and their perilous origins and if the stories of old, about fantastical sirens who sang from rocks and lured ships to their deaths may in fact be true.

This novel is awesome and I devoured it. It is as much a study of behaviour and relationships as a book about mermaids.

Demelza Carlton has always loved the ocean, but on her first snorkelling trip she found she was afraid of fish.

She has since swum with sea lions, sharks and sea cucumbers and stood on spray-drenched cliffs over a seething sea as a seven-metre cyclonic swell surged in, shattering a shipwreck below.

Sensationalist spin? No - Demelza tends to take a camera with her so she can capture and share the moment later; shipwrecks, sharks and all.
Demelza now lives in Perth, Western Australia, the shark attack capital of the world.

The Ocean's Gift series was her first foray into fiction, followed by the Nightmares trilogy. She swears the Mel Goes to Hell series ambushed her on a crowded train and wouldn't leave her alone.

The suggested reading order for each series is as follows:

Ocean's Gift series:
Ocean's Gift
Ocean's Infiltrator
Water and Fire
Turbulence and Triumph (to be released in 2014)
Ocean's Depths (to be released in late 2014)

Ocean's Gift by Demelza Carlton

I liked Water and Fire, but I loved Ocean’s Gift. It was fascinating seeing Belinda in her mermaid setting, as I had got to know her in the first novel even though I knew little of her background. But in this novel, I adored the character of Vanessa. She had an innocence and yet a matriarchal power that was really enticing. I felt as though there was an opportunity to really get to know her. Demelza Carlton has struck the perfect balance between the archetypal view of mermaids and that of the sirens of old, blending the two to make a tender and yet dangerous species of females.

The storyline is awesome and frighteningly plausible. The earth is dying and nature will have seen the tell-tale signs long before man pulls his head out of the TV and realises it.

Joe is a decent man in a world full of typically bawdy males. He is solid and honourable and bashful without losing any of his sex appeal. He is reassuringly male without the unappealing baseness of the other fishermen, which is probably why Vanessa picks him. The mermaid race seeks liaison with men as a duty, but Vanessa is different. She has previously known love and it presents a vulnerability within an otherwise fearsome character portrayal.

I love how truly Australian this novel is. It has all the raw beauty of a stunning corner of the world. I appreciated the descriptions of the geography and the oceans; they were colourful and well-drawn and made the reader feel as though they were taking part in the novel. I was there in Joe’s hut and Vanessa’s boat. I liked this novel enough to read it in one sitting, not wanting to put it down and miss anything. It had enough of a hold on me, to keep me from doing the myriad other things that I actually should have been doing and I felt sad when the last page had been finished and savoured. I would have felt more devastated, had I not known that there were other books in the series to pick up.

It was incredibly well written and refreshing clean editorially - not a single distracting flaw to spoil the reading experience. I would definitely recommend it.

Get your own copy of Demelza's awesome book on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Oceans-Gift-Demelza-Carlton-ebook/dp/B00AFEO80O/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1403333968&sr=8-1&keywords=Ocean%27s+Gift