Location: United States
Member Since: Nov. 29, 2008
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Michael W. Perry


Where to find Michael W. Perry online

Website: http://www.InklingBooks.com/

Where to buy in print

http://InklingBooks.com/

Books

The House of the Wolfings: The William Morris Book that Inspired J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings    by Michael W. Perry
Price: $0.99 USD. 91520 words. Published on November 29, 2008. Fiction.
In a 1960 letter, J. R. R. Tolkien referred to The Lord of the Rings when he wrote, “The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains.” With a foreword and introduction, this is the text of that classic tale.

Michael W. Perry’s tag cloud

c s lewis    fantasy    fiction    historical fiction    hobbit    j r r tolkien    lord of the rings    middleearth    the lord of the rings    tolkien    william morris   

Smashwords book reviews by Michael W. Perry

  • Smashwords Style Guide on April 28, 2010
    (no rating)
    George Paxton's February 27, 2010 comment is 'spot on.' The #1 problem with creating ebooks for Smashwords is that all the documentation, including that by Mark Coker, assumes that writers will be working The Microsoft Way, which is the ugly, time-consuming, inefficient, inflexible way that Microsoft Word is structured to encourage. As Paxton notes, proper writing for publication uses stylesheets (aka "named styles"). A first-level heading, for instanced, is attached to a style called Heading 1, a quote is given the style Quote and so on. Even word-level formatting like italics is done with text styles. Absolutely no in-place formatting is used in laying out the book. Font, font size, indention etc are all defined in the style definition. That makes attaching and changing the formatting easy. In a couple of seconds, every formatting trait for an entire book can be changed. Microsoft, in its infinite stupidity, makes doing that incredibly difficult, particularly in comparison to properly designed products such as InDesign. In Word, named styles are buried in the Format menu behind a series of convoluted buttons and additional windows that must have been created by a sadist intent on filling the life of everyone who uses Word with drudgery. The result is a style system so awful, few use it. Instead, they hand enter the formatting every time it changes. I know. I layout books for publishers. Virtually every time I get a Word document from an author, I find it cluttered with an infinite number of little author-made formatting tweaks that have to be stripped out to fit the publisher's style guide. It's virtually impossible to get them to think otherwise. They are slaves of The Microsoft Way. Smashwords needs to escape from The Microsoft Way. It needs to give us a book template with styles for every formatting feature users are likely to need and that their reformatting software can handle. We shouldn't be having to spend our time klutzing with Word's clumsy hand formatting and rules or fretting with what the result we look like. We should be concentrating on what we are saying not fretting over what our guesses at formatting will look like after it has been run through Smashword software. In short, give us Word templates with styles that do all the work of formatting and give good results at your output. Free us to focus on content not on formatting. Contact me if you'd like to discuss this in more detail.