Just Another Writer's Journal

Amazon UK is running a “Kindle Storyteller” competition, open to new books published between May 1st and August 31st. It seems any author can enter, as long as they publish their book in the Amazon UK store. I’d seen a post about the competition before, but I hadn’t done anything because I didn’t think that my book would exactly capture their attention.  But they just sent me an email to remind me about it…the only problem is that the email read: Thank you for recently publishing your book 'GPS to Joy' Ahh, that’s not my book! I guess my book really didn’t capture their attention. For a moment I did wonder if there had been a mix up in their database, and maybe I would be getting someone else’s royalties! Unfortunately, no, they don’t seem to have done that. The disappointment is crushing.

Just after I paid for a year long subscription to Grammarly, Microsoft went and announced their own AI-powered grammar and style checker for Word Online: Ideas In Word .  According to the article, "Ideas for Word might propose swapping 'society as a whole' for the more concise 'society.'"  Oh come on, really? We're getting rid of all filler verbiage?! That's going to make things very short and concise and boring. Meanwhile, Google has announced it's own AI-powered grammar suggestions feature coming in Google Docs. Microsoft getting into AI-powered grammar checking reminds me of a certain utility that Microsoft offered a long time ago; Clippit, commonly referred to as Mr Clippy. Mr Clippy got a lot of—probably deserved—bad press. One of my favorite pieces about Mr Clippy was in an episode of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me  when the panel was imagining Mr Clippy being taken out and shot.  

I used Amazon's application Kindle Create to make the electronic version of my book They're Watching You . The tool is very easy to use and compared to creating the printed version, creating the electronic edition was simple. It was almost as simple as copying and pasting the text, and adding the index. I did, however, encounter one major problem.  In a couple of chapters, there were a few emojis in the text. As I was working through the text, I was pleased to see that the app had an emoji's menu, and I carefully added the emoji's into the right places in the text. Things were looking great! But after I exported the book, and went to upload it, the upload wouldn't work (and Amazon gave a very unhelpful error message why it wouldn't accept the file!) After Googling and finding nothing about why an upload might not work, I tried deleting the front matter and the index, and it still didn't work. I tried deleting some other stuff, and still had no joy. A

To celebrate the release of " They're Watching You ," and the July 4th holiday, I'm holding a book giveaway. Send me an email before Monday July 8th, and I will randomly pick one winner of a copy of the book. And if you haven't read anything else on this blog, the book is a gay romance/thriller. To enter, just send an email to gabrielcaldwell@gmail.com , Subject: Book Giveaway.

They’re Watching You is a gay romance about two musicians, Ed and Aleck. Ed is out, and Aleck—who is much more successful—isn’t. This story is about the dynamics in their budding relationship, and also about some external issues they face. Like a lot of my stories, They’re Watching You started with a real person. I saw an interview with a musician, and something about his character appealed to me. He was shy and didn’t like talking about himself—or anything really—and I found it so endearing that I ‘cast’ him into a story idea. Or should I say, I had an idea for a story based loosely on my impressions of him. That story begins with the initial meeting between Ed and Aleck, and I knew that the story was primarily about how they met and whether they ended up together. The character in the book is not the real person or even meant to be a portrayal of that person (which is why I’m not going to say who it is.) Instead, I sort of see it like they’re an actor I used in this st