Fighting Formatting

Finally, I am in the home stretch with the proposal for my Fast Track Thriller series. I took a little break for the Labor Day weekend because our son who lives in Kentucky came home for the holiday, and we hosted a dinner and game night with all three of our children and one spouse. Nothing fills a momma's heart so much as when all of her children are back at home together!

Now that I'm back at it, my nemesis has become formatting issues. I'm sure you've probably experienced this yourself, no matter what your field of expertise. Since the first two books in the Fast Track Thriller series, Peril and Conspiracy, have already been published, their manuscripts are highly formatted. Plucking the text from those manuscripts and dropping them into Word, of course caused some formatting issues. They were tedious to fix, but once I got into the groove, it was just a matter of repeating the same corrections over and over again. 

Putting my one-sheet into the document, even though it is a Word document, is proving to be much more challenging, because nothing with pictures is easy to work with in Word. At least it didn't mess with the text boxes too--except where they intersected with the pictures. For some reason, Word keeps wanting to put the pictures of my book covers behind the text boxes. I thought I fixed it multiple times, but the moment I clicked S-control to save the document, the pictures disappeared behind the text boxes again! This has happened three times so far. 

I just went back to check that the one-sheet part of the proposal saved correctly, and it looks like I'm back to the drawing board, as the pictures of the covers have once again disappeared. So the fight with the formatting is still on. {sigh}

Suzanne Hartman
Author of the Fast Track Thriller series:

An Unexpected Snag

 Well, I've run into a snag I should have expected, but had forgotten about. After I decided to start Revenge in a different place, I had to do a Chinese fire drill, or 52-pick-up, if you will, with my chapters. I had finished the first half of the first chapter enough to pass it around to a number of people to get a feel for how it came across. Then I apparently got distracted with something else--not uncommon--and when I came back to working on the proposal, I moved on to a different section.

So that left the second half of chapter one and all of chapter two to be reviewed. Not really a big deal, since I had already reviewed them before I switched up the order of the chapters. Chapter hree, on the other hand, left me with some decisions to be made. I had played with what the new order of chapters should be, but hadn't set them in stone yet, so I wasn't quite sure where I was going with chapter three.

I dove into the problem, but came up coughing and sputtering. I had been putting so much stress on myself to get the proposal done as fast as I could that whenever I faced this setback, I just dove in and dealt with it. For some reason, however, when I dove into this issue, it felt more like cliff diving than jumping into a swimming pool. 

I know it was Satan trying to take advantage of a weak moment, but I felt like I was setting myself up for failure. Suddenly, I saw failure all around me. The devotional I did that evening was about failure. The next day, when I met with my Bible study ladies, the bookmark one of them had in the book we're starting to study had the word "failure" written on the back. I began to ask myself if God was preparing me to to receive a rejection letter from the publisher I was preparing the proposal for.

I spent some time in prayer and felt like God was telling me that the publisher was interested in The Fast Track Thriller series when he saw it at Realm Makers, and he will be interested in it whenever he receives the proposal. Now, I don't think that was a guarantee from God that this publisher would offer me a contract, simply a reminder that there was interest there before and it would still be there. 

After days of considering God's response, I feel like I have been putting too much emphasis on this particular publishing house. Before I went to Realm Makers, I felt like this publishing house offered my last chance to be published traditionally. When I had my publisher appointments, however, neither of them were turned off by the fact that two of the three books had already been published. Maybe because both of the circumstances that surrounded the need to get my rights back, I don't know. 

That should have opened my eyes, but I've been so concentrated on getting this proposal done (and it didn't help that I had Covid, we had birthdays and an anniversary to celebrate, and my mom was in the hospital for two weeks) that it's taken this long for it to sink in. Once I get this proposal done, I've got all he building blocks I need for preparing proposals for other publishing houses. So maybe God is preparing me for failure with the publishing house I'm preparing the proposal for now, only so I can be offered a contract with a different--maybe bigger--publisher. With God, you never know. He is so much bigger than us, and His plans are so much deeper and wider than we can even imagine. But either way, I can know that He is with me and has a plan for me.

Suzanne Hartman

Author of the Fast Track Thriller series:

Bad News! I Brought More Than Just Books Home From the Realm Makers Conference

I woke up yesterday morning with a headache. No big deal, right? So I went to Bible Study, as usual. By dinner, my headache had passed, but I had a stuffy head, a sore throat, and had started wheezing. After these symptoms continued to worsen over the course of the day, my husband finally pulled out a Covid test and told me to take it.

It didn't take very long after inserting the specimen from my nose into the tester before the line indicating a positive test showed up. I called my doctor today, and since it had already gone down into my chest and I'm at risk for a virus to turn into pneumonia, she sent in a prescription for a strong antibiotic and recommended something available over-the-counter for the symptoms.

To make things even worse, I exposed my husband's entire family at a gathering we had two days ago...at our house, because my husband's sister and a nephew who live in Las Vegas were here for a visit. I am praying that none of them get it too! 

What a terrible time to be sick! I'm so excited about the positive publisher appointments I had at Realm Makers, but the work I need to do to get a proposal ready then start to finish two books will have to wait until I feel better. Right now all I want to do is crawl into bed and sleep.

Suzanne Hartman

Author of the Fast Track Thriller series:

Computer Trouble

Just when activity in my new critique group was picking up and I was beginning to navigate the technical issues better, my laptop decided to insert itself into the mix. It has been having issues, and I knew it needed to be looked at, but we had been holding out due to other things we needed to take care of first Thankfully, I had been able to save all the important stuff--pretty much everything LOL--and I was working off of flash drives...until the laptop suddenly bumped itself to the top of the priority list (maybe it had delusions of grandeur LOL). When it stopped being able to save anything to a flash drive, I was in trouble. 

So, off to see Geek Squad we went, but at that point, the discussion was about transferring everything from the dying laptop to a new laptop, not about saving the old one. After less than a day of anxious waiting, Geek Squad called and everything was taken care of.

Since then, I've been testing things out, and all seems to be a-okay. YAY! 

Suzanne Hartman

Author of the Fast Track Thriller series: