Rat as antidote.

There's nothing nicer than having your feet up on the sunny windowsill. Buttered sweetcorn takes some beating, too.

The boss is in a bit of a frazzle. Her brow is knotted. Her shoulders, too. She mutters away, asking how come she forgets every time how much work there always is the week before an ebook launch, and how many details wait in ambush blah blah blah. She frets about being publisher and published, when one is fraught enough without the other. Checking the ePub files, she observes how tortured her prose yadda yadda. Thank goddess for Elena! She's serene in Lily-the-Pink-land and at least her chapters remain enchanting . . .


Anyway, the boss thinks I should be up and running but thanks to my Argentinean wife, I've come to believe in La Siesta so that's where I'll be once I'm down to the cob. In between mouthfuls, I'll mention the students in Coral Atkinson's Whitireia Online Publishing class, who have come up with many ingenious and practical marketing suggestions: Kaahu Bennett, Nicola van Arndt, Mary Hay, David Langman, and Laura Sarsfield. Thanks, Kaahu, Nicola, Mary, David, Laura and Coral! Awesome work. The boss'll keep you filled in on how it all pans out.

As I write, the boss chuckles. An email from her amiga, Elena: Don't worry at all, is absolutely the same at the opposite for me. I like your write jajajajaja. Probably is not going to be our best novel but we did a good job. We did an original novel and we celebrate our friendship which is a lot. We were honest.  I am very happy …   "This is true," says the boss with a smile. "We're celebrating friendship — ours first of all, and in our novel the friendship between Jude and Claudia, between Judith and Adriana . . . Yes, this a good job."

Before they had an inkling that one day they'd meet: Elena Bossi and Penelope Todd.

Okay, so can we please get some kip now? Not you, dear reader. You may tiptoe over to Dorothee's site to check out her new publishing venture, Beware the Timid Life, which makes our outfit look timid indeed. If you have an  iPad with iBooks 2, you're ready to load up her playful and surprising exploration of the first American sexual revolution.  It's a new kind of eBook – "An Exhibit, A Story, A Salon." I'll let you know when it's ready for the Kindle. Meanwhile, you can revel in some of the same themes reading The Glass Harmonica.

Bravo, Dorothee.

Amigas: reviewers sought

All right then. Time to get Amigas on the road. We'd like to have it ready for you by this time next week. My loins are girded — in lederhosen from Schladming where, incidentally, Arnie Schwarzenegger buys his shoes. The week ahead is a large and interesting obstacle course. I have a plan and a new pair of glasses. I've almost learned to yodel. Lily the Pink insists that gaucho pants and tango melodies would be more apt for my preparations to release the world's first Argentinean-New Zealand collaborative, bilingual novel. But we rats take what lies at hand and anyway, as Claudia tells Jude in one of her letters, tango is for old people.

Lily and the ratadilloes have gone off to las pampas for a week or two, while I'm preoccupied. She'll send back the odd photo to illustrate my campaign.

Jason of meBooks has sent us the ePub file for checking. A class of five fantastic publishing students has come up with a marketing plan. I'm going to chew my way through that document, savouring and activating its contents. Someone has to write a newsletter. Someone has to contact a few media types. Someone has to break the rusty hinges on the Twitter account and get tweeting.

As for Amigas: in 1969 two young teens meet while stranded by fog in the airport in Rome — Claudia from Argentina, Jude from New Zealand. They swan around together and become friends. Over the following decade, they exchange letters, until the flow peters out during Argentina's dirty war. Forty years later, Jude finds herself again in the Fiuminicio airport and again has a significant encounter.

That's the gist. The ebook doesn't necessarily take the reader in chronological order, but that's over to you. Our story is about friendship and loss and coming to terms with what is.

If anyone would like to review an advance copy of Amigas, please contact me via the comment stream.

Okay, I'm going to hunker down and eat a piece of cheese dunked in maté before I plunge into the obstacle course.

Hasta luego.

Cover uncovered

I promised to post Lily the Pink's photo of the cover image of Amigas. The plan is to send the proofs this weekend to be formatted, which means that by the end of July the ebook should be available on Rosa Mira Books.

Our story begins (chronologically — there's more than one way to read it) in 1969, when two teenaged girls, from New Zealand and Argentina, meet while stranded in the airport in Rome. They strike up a friendship and go on to exchange letters from their two countries, into the years of Argentina's dirty war. Forty years later, the threads of their stories are taken up again — in NZ, in Argentina, and in the airport in Rome.

For your weekend entertainment, nothing to do with ebooks:
a nine-year-old English boy producing Monet-like paintings; a brief introduction to particle physicist and ecological wise-woman, Dr Vandana Shiva; and does it really sound like a Cuban dance melody? The music of the Higgs Boson.

Almost uncovered

Ratty and Dasychord are picking the sellotape from the cover of the English-Spanish novel Amigas, to be launched this month. The cover image was created by Pablo Accame (some of whose short videos you can see here), son of author, Elena Bossi (talking here with Tim Jones). Isgar and the local hooligan-bird look on while Lily prepares to photograph the unveiling. I'll post the photo next time.

It's been a great collaboration from start to finish. Elena and I met in Iowa in 2007 (thanks to Creative NZ), wrote our novel over the next two years and had its component parts translated into the other's language. When we met in Argentina in 2009 (gracias otra vez a Creative New Zealand), we spent three weeks examining our translations, checking words, facts and intention, and swapping songs on Youtube (our chapter set in 1969 is called 'Hey Jude').  Since then we've heeded the comments of a handful of discerning readers. Emma Neale did a manuscript assessment for us and we're grateful for her fine critique. While I continue to have mixed feelings about being both author and publisher in this case, Elena and I needed to stop tinkering, and to issue Amigas from Rosa Mira Books seemed the most straightforward route to producing a bilingual edition of our novel.

Book designer Caroline Jackson has put links between chapters for those who wish to read in both Spanish and English. By the same means, the letters that comprise the chapter 'Dear Claudia' can be read each in their original language.

In Argentina, besides working, we tried on clothes (everywhere we went but also) at 'Amigas' here in the small pampas town of Ayacucha (was it, Elena?).

Ratty seems to have flown off in his purple ironing board and Lily's distracted, knitting peggy squares for a friend who has produced a litter of lilac Peterbalds and needs all the woollens she can lays paws on. Isgar and Dasychord are itching to make something happen. Their hedgehoglet friend, Apostrophe, does whatever they do, in miniature

So, what is happening?

There's a fresh batch of Slightly Peculiar Love Stories excerpts ready for perusal, by Claire Beynon, Latika Vasil, Brenda Sue Cowley and Linda Niccol.

I've spent time following helpful hints about SEO (search engine optimisation) and am having a few changes put in place this week. Let's see if the collection of slightly odd phrases inserted in the website's pages and meant to sound/look natural will draw throngs to Rosa Mira Books.

I've had a couple of wonderful offers of help recently from publishing students. I'll tell you more about those when they are taken up. I'm saying, Yes, please!

Dorothee has been cooking up a treat which is almost ready to be served – a tantalising side dish to The Glass Harmonica. Speaking of which, have you listen to this entertaining piece of William' Zeitler's, written and performed expressly for the recent transit of Venus?

The English pages of Amigas have been designed; the Spanish ones won't be far behind, and the cover will soon be ready for display.

I have a couple of exceptional manuscripts in the pipeline.

All is well. Slow but well.

Road Markings makes its mark

New Zealand Books is a quarterly magazine devoted entirely to the review of NZ work by fellow writers. For those reviewed it's not usually a comfortable read but considered critique is the magazine's raison d'être. The Winter 2012 edition opens with its editorial: "Two issues beyond the 20th anniversary edition of New Zealand Books and two before our 100th issue, we've reached another milestone. The determined enthusiasts who founded the journal might well have predicted the first two … But we suspect they would have had no inkling of the third: this issue carries our first review of an ebook.   … the word 'book' in New Zealand Books has changed its meaning forever."

That ground-breaking ebook is Michael Jackson's Road Markings, published here at Rosa Mira Books. (Thanks to NZ Books editors, Jane Westaway and Harry Ricketts, for making the leap.) The opening review, it's a generous page and a half of the A3 format by reviewer Alison Gray.  Rather more an outline of content, however, than an appraisal, it's not an easy review to pick excerpts from, but here are a couple:

"Michael Jackson … uses a 2008 road trip … to explore the theme of 'firstness' both in his own life and in the lives of people affected by social and historical events such as adoption, emigration, colonisation, war and illness or death. … It's a grand undertaking …

"The strongest pieces in this book describe how individual people have handled the blows life has dealt them, but the concept of 'firstness' remains elusive. Some people … reshuffle elements of the past to create a workable sense of self; some, like the wonderful Aunt Simone amd Mlle Picard in Menton, struggle not to be overcome by what has happened; some … simply decide to leave the past behind and make a new start, while others, like Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, seem able to recover from loss without 'acrimony, blame or the need for redemption'."

Road Markings is "full of good thinking and ideas about how people construct their lives. I eventually read it twice and was well rewarded both times."

Also in this edition, Chris Else comments on his experience with the Kindle reader.

"a good south wind sprung up behind"

This week albatrosses galore have flown between Buenos Aires and Dunedin. You'll see some of them in due course but the beautiful birds are the work of talented cartoonist and animator Pablo Accame who is putting together the cover image for Amigas. Pablo happens to be Elena's son. Elena Bossi is my co-writer.

As I hinted last week, it's not an entirely comfortable decision, to publish one's own work. It's definitely been seen as the second cousin three times removed to meticulous trade publishing, and all too often the home-grown product is immediately recognisable. However, with the current turmoil of publishing, the scene is changing. Knowledge is available to anyone with an internet connection; there's no reason why the diligent author shouldn't put her work through the same stringent processes that a publisher would, and establish his own sales and marketing base. And I think that's the key: stringent processes. If an author is prepared to seek and pay for assessment/s and editing (their writing apprenticeship is another topic), then find designers who know what they're doing, and oversee the final product, then they can produce a book – hard copy or digital – worthy of their writing efforts.

So, am I apologising or what? I'm very proud of Elena's work and I'm prepared to say that mine is happy in the company of hers. We certainly had a great time working together, and continue to do so. Anyway, we have a publisher: Rosa Mira Books.

The decision to publish with Rosa Mira means that we can produce an edition in which English and Spanish versions sit side by side. Not page for page (most devices are more comfortably read with a single page open, and anyway, our translations are not word for word) but with links at the end  – and possibly the start – of each chapter so that the reader can switch between the two versions if they wish to.

Okay, that's enough for now. It's Saturday morning: the garden beckons, so I'll leave Ratty contending with the bird. More soon. Suggestions, questions and comments are welcomed.