Tag Archives: Slovenia

Borders, borderlines and choosing when to die

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DSCN6758 - Version 2

Border Line (as print and ebook) in the UK and ebook worldwide will be on sale from December 5th 2014

“Of course love is the ultimate luxury, but I am unwilling to continue the trek in the certainty of its absence.”

Eleven people travel across Slovenia in a small coach. Grace and the other nine members of the group all wish to die, while their leader, Daniel, appears only to want to help them. He involves them in actors’ exercises and therapeutic games. They tell stories, travel like tourists and surprise themselves with laughter. Daniel promises he will take them, at the end of the trek, across another border to die. Though they are free to change their minds at any time, by day twenty-one they must make their choice.

Border Line is written as  an entertaining and comfortable-to-read story about ordinary people. That said, its USP (Unique Selling Point – see, I have the jargon) is: ‘An upbeat love story about suicide’… So, any sane person may conclude that I have either trivialised a very serious subject by wrapping it in a love story, or the reverse; I have spoiled a decent love story by weighing it down with the heavy subject of how we choose to die. (I am long past judging whether it is either or neither).

Three things kick-started Border Line:

  • Some lines in a poem titled Rehearsal by Eleanor Green                                     … for an exercise/I look at his hands/to improve our relationship/onstage?…
  • A strange and wonderful day with a Frenchwoman, an American/Hungarian(?) woman and a taxi driver from Ljubljana, in which we communicated in many tongues while trying to see most of Slovenia. We got lost in a forest in fog.
  • Curiosity about people who feel a particular kind of guilt. We try to help victims, but what happens to decent people who cause bad events.

DSCN1906 OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThe Borders in the story are Slovenia’s. This amazing country, about the size of Wales, and has four of them and, being at a cross roads in Europe, a lot of nations have tramped through it.                                                                          DSCN1940OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The borderlines in the title are also those of the mind. Suicide causes untold distress to relatives and friends. We all know this, and most people who contemplate it at some time in their lives recover and go on to complete their natural span. Yet living is, for some people, unbearably difficult and I personally have never felt I could blame someone who chooses the exit route. I also feel, ever more strongly, that we should have some choice about how and when we end our lives.

I also believe that there is much to live for and that the majority of people are kind, trustworthy, interesting and loveable and the world is an endlessly fascinating place that I will be reluctant to leave when my time comes.

eBook cover adventure

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The last week or so has been too packed to blog. Happy family visit, soft proofs to check, print cover to approve and The Great eBook Cover Design Competition. I was the lucky winner of a free Book cover from the Writer’s Workshop. This came too late for the print version, but seemed like a good idea for the eBook. I was given £189 credit for a bronze cover design from 99Designs.

First, I had to fill in a Design Brief including images to give potential designers a direction. Being naive, my brief was misleading and my reduced heading read: ‘An upbeat story about suicide, love and Slovenia’. Then, the brief is opened up to designers worldwide online for 4 days. You select the best designers during that time and then go on to refine entries until you choose to award a winner (total 7 days for bronze).

To start with I didn’t have many entries (though there were things I could have done to increase this). The ones that did appear were often distressingly inappropriate. Prettily-coiffed girls with computers in meadows and mountains – sort of modern Heidi on Holiday style. I rated (stars) and commented on each entry, and updated my brief to explain that in my story a computer is only used at night in Devon and that the girl had unruly hair (difficult for designers with limited English). Some Wild Girl in Wild Landscape designs followed –teenage adventure style. I tried asking for something a bit more grown-up and got raunchy, steamy romance covers, then Airport Monumental, I asked for sad and got Noir (I wish I could show you). By this stage I was struggling between laughter and tears. One designer was particularly persistent and I worried that he was putting in so much work with only negative feedback from me. I assumed that he was on a different wavelength.

There are also ‘watchers’, that is designers who follow the competition, looking at the entries and the feedback. You can go and check their designs and invite them to join in. However, out of the blue, my persistent designer produced a perfect (stock) image for my story. With enormous patience, and feedback from me, he adapted it, tweak by tweak, until it was just what I had hoped for. Here is the winning entry from didiwahyudi.trend all the way from Indonesia. It links quietly to my print cover, while giving me the all-important figure I need for the eBook thumbnail. Hope you like it.

BL- COVER fix

My proofs and the print cover went back to the printers last night and my new eBook cover arrived on my desktop 20 minutes ago.

Now I shall go and cultivate my garden.

DSCN6286 - Version 2

 

Self-publishing progress?

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Another week of mayhem and progress – of sorts. Having made my proof-readers’ lives hell by pressing them to complete as much as possible against the clock (with the rather minimal bribe of runner beans) I entered all their brilliant catches into my final file in InDesign and… pressed the button to send the text to the printer.

I then got my head round the file requirements of the cover picture, recreated the file with the correct dimensions (then correcting that when I found I had misunderstood) and sent it for checking to a great designer (whose time I can only afford by the minute).

BL Cover Finaljpgsmall

On Saturday I received an email:

Apologies for the s – l – o – w announcement of a competition winner, but the announcement (and my reasoning) can be found here:
http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/blog/win-a-free-cover-design/#comment-101835
Well done, Hilary. Commiserations everyone else. [there were all of 6 entrants]

Umm… although I have reservations about my cover (because it has no figure in it), I have grown fond of the beautiful image my daughter put together and I want it to go to the printers as soon as possible. (NB you are never sufficiently ahead of the game in publishing), so I felt I had to turn down this opportunity – something I would have lain in the mud for a few weeks ago. However, we have a compromise. I will now have a design by Bronze Design for my eBook version of Border Line.

CORRECTION: I now have bronze level design by 99Designs for my eBook version of Border Line.

I have also been in touch with the travel company, Just Slovenia, who, way back in 2009, helped me set up an itinerary to research many of the places that feature in Border Line. They responded and I have now sent them a PDF of the novel.

I’m not accustomed to so much progress up the ladder, I’d better get ready for another snake.