I love writing stories and experimenting to build my skills. I find writing stories to be not only a fun and rewarding past-time but a truly therapeutic endeavor. As of late, I have had little time to spend with my writing because family situations have required all of my time. However, I am first and foremost above everything else - a mom. So, as I'm sure is the case with other moms, my Mom duties had to come first.
As to Janetta, I have two topics I would like to cover in this post. First, I wanted to talk about the inspiration for the book.
Admittedly, I first came up with the character, a girl who loves to read books so much that she would rather do that than socialize. After conceiving of Janetta, I developed the reason for why she was that way and then weaved the significance of that into the story. Ultimately, it's not solely her personality that makes her like books more than people, but it is because of her past history of having been bullied. I see her as a person who finds books to be a refuge from the bullying problem she has experienced. In reading, she can take herself to other places and other circumstances and use it as an escape.
For those adults among us who were bullied as a child, we all know how that impacts a person. It leaves lifelong scars that affect how we trust others and how sociable we are. Janetta has nervous emotions that make her a little hesitant of others but it also gives her great understanding and empathy for others who have been bullied. In this book, she gets an opportunity to meet another person with a similar experience to hers and to use that understanding and empathy to make things right for that person. She gets to be a hero.
Please note that I intentionally did not provide the details of how bullying may have occurred in fairy land. In fact, none of the fairies in this book actually engaged in any intentional bullying. However, they unwittingly participated when if they had asked questions they would have realized what they were doing was not right. They also made assumptions that continued to effect an exclusion of the bullied fairy.
So, fairy land - just like the real world - is not a perfect place. Somewhere back in this fairy's history he was bullied and excluded. These experiences led to him pulling away from others even more until he was outside of all groups and all alone. He is fortunate to have someone like Janetta, with empathy and understanding, help the fairies see what is going on. It changes his life and provides him with a group of supportive friends. However, having a group of supportive friends doesn't on its own address the bullying issue just as it doesn't in the real world. I may decide to address that bullying in a later book. However, I haven't decided that yet.
The second topic is that I have had some struggles with how best to format the Ebook version. Books without images inside tend to be more versatile and less likely to have formatting problems from platform to platform if they are kept simple and created as flowing text. Unfortunately, with images, formatting is much more difficult and can yield more unexpected results.
I initially thought that a fixed format was the best way to form this book. However, although it looked good on my screen, the format didn't carry over well into Epub or Mobi formats. One such problem was the overlapping of images over some of the text. I kept trying to overcome the format problems, but I just couldn't figure out how to do that. I would fix one issue, and then another would come up. Nothing seemed to work.
I almost reached a point where I could have decided to either give up and pull the ebook format for Janetta, making it no longer available for sale, or pay someone to format the ebook format. However, I decided to give it one last try with flowing text instead of using a fixed format. After many different attempts, I finally found the solution - at I hope so. It turned out to be a lot simpler than I would have thought. What I did was to anchor the images as if they were characters.
Hopefully, my solution will turn out to work well, and my formatting problems are over. Regardless, it will not be perfect because the text will end earlier than I like on a given page. However, that is a small issue in comparison with the other problems that I have had.
If you happen to read the ebook and see a formatting problem that affects readability, please feel free to reach out to me. When you do, please describe the problem and what device you were using to read the book. I would be most appreciative if you do as it would give me a chance to fix the problem.
