From the start, I wanted to write a short story book with the theme being horror/thriller. At the beginning I was trying to come up with different stories was a challenge because I had to come up with multiple stories whereas writing a novel it's based on one story with different chapters still relating to the main story. Using google, I looked up other short story books to see what others had done. Most were collections from authors, which was annoying as I wanted to find short stories that authors wrote themselves.
I came across a camp horror stories; it was that book that gave me the idea on have all the stories keeping with the same theme, which would make writing the stories easier as at least with this way I can have the stories all relating to the same theme.
Looking at other short stories, I notice that car journeys were a themed I haven't seen yet, so I decided to make that my themed for my book.
I started with land on the google doc. All I did was write small sentences on what would happen in the story, a bit similar to chapter timelines so that when it came to writing the whole story, I knew what I need to write at the beginning, middle and end.
The other five stories I wrote down in my Idea journal because I had it and wanted to uses it, so I used it for writing my five ideas down for my stories, and it was easier to get too when a thought came to mind.
When it came to writing the whole story out, some were harder to write than others, even with the ideas I wrote down, it was still too hard to get them written down into a whole story. So it did take a while to get my stories written. Usually, I would write them either on break or at home, so that helped a lot to get most of the writing. When it came close to needing to finish writing them so that I could grammar check them there were two stories left which I ended up not writing because it was taking too long to write and I was having trouble focusing on them to write them. So in the end, I wrote only 4 out of the six stories which I still think is good.
On Grammarley
Before Grammarly, I printed out copies of my stories for me to write out loud and to highlight so that when using Grammarly I will know what to change and also with the help of Grammarly I will also know what to add in to make the story even better.
Self-publishing and printing
When I started thinking about my FMP project I knew I wanted to self-publish, because I had plan that in the future that I would self-publish my book and I thought this would be a great opportunity because here I got teachers to help me and give me their advice and also trying it out so that when I do I'll know what to do.
Why I thought about self-publishing was because it was in case one I didn't get in university I could still try to activate my dream at becoming an author and being that their's isn't much of a chance I'll get published by actual publishers I decided to go straight into self-publishing.
I did do research on self-publishing, even joined a self publishing and book marketing group where I asked questions about what would i have to if I wanted to make some money (again for the future), and the admin of the group who's from the UK said that I needed to sign up to tax self-assessment which did put me off doing the self-publishing part, since I didn't see the point on signing up for my book.
Later on, I was told that I didn't need to sign up since I wasn't getting money out of it, so I went back to planning to self-publishing, but then I got told that I did need to sign up and again got put off it and decide just to print a book off instead.
At this point, if I had decided to carry on to self-publish, I think I would have ended up not bothering only because now I do want to get my book publish in the future so instead I am going to try harder at writing in hopes I will get published. Also, I'll be going to university in September, studying creative writing, so I feel I'll have more of a chance of getting published by an actual publisher.
At this point when I decided to print my book, I decided to use Blurb because last year it was recommended to me, but I ended up using Doxzoo to print my book out which went well, but this year I wanted to try and use a different one and so went on to use Blurb. Using Indesign I started to create a layout for my book, lucky Steve called me over and told me that Blurb provides its layout for their books which saved me the trouble of creating one. One problem was that the system needed updating so I couldn't upload my finished story.
Once updated I made my start on following it information and started creating my book.
Book coverKnowing that the book cover would be my biggest challenge I decided to create two. The idea was to have one cover drawn and the other using an image. Why I chose to draw is because this was originally was going to be a self-publishing project I was worried about the whole taking a photo on someone properties or not know that the area was private property that I decided that it would be best to draw it to be safe.
The drawing was proving to be a challenge as when it came to drawing the car it needed so much more detail then I thought that I ended up leaving it and focusing on my second cover.
The second cover was the image. The image was the front of my nan's car. I also took some other random photos as well. The idea was to have only front window covered in frost with either a handprint or a pair of red eyes to give it that horror look. It took a while to create the frost effect as I was having trouble finding a video to help me with creating the frost effect on the window with using a black background.
With getting the image how I wanted I could see that it was a letdown and was no better than my last book cover from the year before. The idea was to make an improved cover to show my improvement from each book. This leads to creating a third book cover, this more of a straightforward cover so that it would still look good and achievable to do.
Finishing the third book cover, Nick suggested that my cover could be better and created his cover and help give me an idea. So for this fourth book cover, I didn't create a sketch because it was getting to the point that I need to get this book printed, so what I did was chose another image and using my imagination, created an even better cover.
Book Part 1
Using the layout from Blurb Indesign I need a certain amount of pages. It required six more pages it each time. If I had finished it and it had 34 pages it would add on two more to make 36, So I needed to make sure I used as much of the pages I needed and hoped it wouldn't add on.
When I was finished, there was still a few pages lefts which I couldn't get rid off because it would only be added back on, So I added an epilogue to help fill in the pages.
I found Blurb better than the last book printers I used because it provided the layout for you so that way you know it's right and should be printed correctly.
I would say the only problem was the spin of the book. It's blank and white which I should have added the black to make it look better, but hopefully, it will look good once printed.
Book Part 2
The book now here I can see that it is small and very light. I know that because of the way it looks that I chose the right size because anything bigger would have been even thinner fewer pages and something you couldn't call a book.
Looking over the book it looks great, the colouring looks great, the font styles are different but it all works well, and the size of the fonts is perfect, I think that there big enough for people to read but not too big that it takes up the whole of the page.
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