Patti O'Shea's Blog

Coffee does, indeed, rock!

In the Darkest Night is a finalist for Best Paranormal the Daphne du Maurier Award! I received the call Tuesday evening and it made an otherwise long day suddenly turn awesome. If you haven’t read this book yet, you can check it out on my website. There’s an excerpt and links to buy.

I’m not sure I ever blogged about this, but I upgraded my phone about a year ago. Since I don’t use it often, the old, out of date one was fine for me for a very long time. This new phone takes pictures, but all my attempts to email them failed miserably and this is the only way to get the images off. But then a couple of weeks ago, when I renewed my activation, the email function suddenly began to work.

This was very exciting for me! Even better, I could email them to Twitpic and post to Twitter.

But alas, almost as soon as I got this new functionality, Twitpic changed their terms of service. Not only did they take the right to sell users pictures without their permission and without any financial compensation, they also made a deal with some company who wanted to buy the images!

Now the odds of this company wanting my pictures were slim, but who knows what would happen in the future and I found the rights grab offensive in the extreme. I deleted all my pictures and deleted my account.

I moved to yfrog. I set everything up and tried to email a picture through their service. I got a white box where the image should be. I tried a second time on a different day from a different location. More fail. Someone suggested Moby Picture to me and I signed up over there next. This time my test picture worked!

Then I discovered Moby Picture will post to more than Twitter.

This is my long way of saying that I now have it set so that images I email off my phone will post on the blog. Which means you’ll be subjected to random pictures at various times. My question to you is do you want me to post images here?

If you feel strongly one way or another, please post a comment or email me through my contact form and let me know your opinion. If enough people don’t like this, I’ll delete the blog and only post to Twitter and Facebook.

I have the rights back to my first four books and novella. Because this publisher had me do a lot of work on hard copy, my electronic files don’t match the finished version. I thought about adding in my revisions–I have them in separate files–but there were still changes made at the galley stage and hunting those up would be time consuming and difficult.

On Friday, I priced out scanning the work and balked a little at the cost. I thought about heading to a pirate site and downloading my work from there, and I did search one title, but I literally became physically sick to my stomach just looking at my book being stolen. I knew I couldn’t do this just because of the emotional price.

Saturday I came up with a scathingly brilliant idea, though. I have Dragon speech recognition software, and while it’s not perfect, it can’t be worse than OCR scanning. I’ll just read my books aloud and get the final version that way.

At least I was smart enough to start with the novella.

I started out at first correcting Dragon paragraph by paragraph, but that was slow, so I did it every few paragraphs. Still slow. After expanding a few more times, I finally decided to just go through it at the end.

Some issues I expected. Like the hero’s name is Nic so I expected to see Nick from Dragon. I wasn’t disappointed. What did surprise me was when I said Nic’s, I got Knicks. Um, some basketball fan programmed this? I also had Dragon continually putting my sentences in present tense. I would say was and Dragon would type is. I’d say had, Dragon would change it to have. And on and on. Sigh.

Other things were unexpected and I’ll be going through the hard copy, book in hand, a few times to find all the errors.

I was still reading aloud on Sunday, late into the afternoon. As I wrapped up the novella, I realized there was no way I was doing this for a full-length book. I bought the scanning package for my four books.

Now, I need to get covers made, write some back cover copy, and when I get my scans back, proofread and format for Kindle, Nook, and other ereaders. Watch this space for release information.

Sorry, no blog today. I’ve been under the weather all weekend. I didn’t even do any writing which puts me behind schedule on my proposal.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

I hope to be back to normal by Tuesday.