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Rocket Boy, the Geek Girls, and Igor
Oct. 8th, 2009 09:24 pmWhen I joined Book View Cafe, I had no idea I'd become the Igor.
As a fundraiser for the web site, several of its members donated stories to a science fiction anthology eventually called ROCKET BOY AND THE GEEK GIRLS. The stories are a mixture of new fiction and reprints of classic stories. It's an electronic anthology, and we have plans to release it in Kindle, MobiPocket, PDF, and Sony Reader formats on October 31.
And it contains a preview of Book View Cafe's big new steampunk project THE SHADOW CONSPIRACY.
At any rate, releasing an anthology takes a lot of work. There's gathering the stories, editing, copyediting, creating the cover, contracts, and, of course, formatting. On the Book View Cafe boards, a call went out: who could format the book for e-publication? I'd already put together four of my own books for the Kindle and knew the software, and my hand slowly crept up.
Abruptly my e-mail was flooded with stories. I busily converted them to HTML, where I dealt with a whole host of issues--headings, table of contents, hyperlinks, stray codes, divisions, unexpected stupid font changes. I became Igor, shlepping around the mad doctor's castle, trying like crazy to shore everything up behind the scenes so it would hold together in time for the experiment. I even changed my icon on Book View Cafe's message board to Marty Feldman in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. "Igor! I need more Helvetica 12-point!" "Yeth, Marthter!"
But now it's nearly done. Igor is awaiting final galley edits from the authors (if he doesn't hear from you by Tuesday, he assumes it's fantastic), and then he throws the switch. Lightning will crackle, the Internet willl pulse, and the mad editor will shout, "It lives!"
And Igor will slink back into the shadows to await the next pile of manuscripts.
But if you open the anthology to just the right section and examine it in just the right light, you might find, scrawled in nearly illegible 3-point French Script, the shy words, "Formatted, with pride, by Igor."
As a fundraiser for the web site, several of its members donated stories to a science fiction anthology eventually called ROCKET BOY AND THE GEEK GIRLS. The stories are a mixture of new fiction and reprints of classic stories. It's an electronic anthology, and we have plans to release it in Kindle, MobiPocket, PDF, and Sony Reader formats on October 31.
And it contains a preview of Book View Cafe's big new steampunk project THE SHADOW CONSPIRACY.
At any rate, releasing an anthology takes a lot of work. There's gathering the stories, editing, copyediting, creating the cover, contracts, and, of course, formatting. On the Book View Cafe boards, a call went out: who could format the book for e-publication? I'd already put together four of my own books for the Kindle and knew the software, and my hand slowly crept up.
Abruptly my e-mail was flooded with stories. I busily converted them to HTML, where I dealt with a whole host of issues--headings, table of contents, hyperlinks, stray codes, divisions, unexpected stupid font changes. I became Igor, shlepping around the mad doctor's castle, trying like crazy to shore everything up behind the scenes so it would hold together in time for the experiment. I even changed my icon on Book View Cafe's message board to Marty Feldman in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. "Igor! I need more Helvetica 12-point!" "Yeth, Marthter!"
But now it's nearly done. Igor is awaiting final galley edits from the authors (if he doesn't hear from you by Tuesday, he assumes it's fantastic), and then he throws the switch. Lightning will crackle, the Internet willl pulse, and the mad editor will shout, "It lives!"
And Igor will slink back into the shadows to await the next pile of manuscripts.
But if you open the anthology to just the right section and examine it in just the right light, you might find, scrawled in nearly illegible 3-point French Script, the shy words, "Formatted, with pride, by Igor."
