It's been seven or eight years since I did anything with Green Gecko Publishing. In fact, I feel off the planet with Passion for Dogs. I wish there was some good reason I could offer, but that would be unfair to the writers involved with the project. Thankfully, they have responded with a grace I don't deserve.

During that time, I also got locked out of geckopublishing@gmail.com. I may be able to recover it when I return to South Korea.  But it is associated with both a phone, phone number and computer I no longer have all methods Google uses to verify it's you. Google has great security but in looking, but no remediation process for lost emails even for paying customers. I decided to create a new email. It is greengeckopublishing@outlook.com. I set it up as an alias on an account I have had since 1998.

I was going by Renee` Zuchniak back when I was involved with this, but forgot that I was doing that or why, lol. But I'm Mariel R. Zuchniak or just Mariel in my day to day life.

Over the last seven years a lot has changed in my life. I moved from Yeongju to Seoul where I spent one year in an English Center similar to the one in Yeongju. About this time, my friend and I bought our first horse. Then I taught in a private Kindergarten. Then I returned to Yeongju to the same English Center. By this time we had a second horse and had begun renovations for of my friend's family farm for equines. We had also started discussing an English animal education program.

Stray cats are referred to as street cats. In fact, in South Korea many of the feral population are closer to wild than feral. Our farm feeds anywhere from six to fourteen. Some are friendly. Some we only catch a glimpse of now and again. The barn is set up so they can get in and way from packs of wild dogs that form as a result of people dropping them off their unwanted pets in the country side.

We have six dogs total. I got mad when my friend added another dog while I've been away waiting on my visa but when you have five what's one more. We found our male German Shepherd one day going up to the farm. He was trying to make friends with some farm workers who where trying to fend him off with a broom. He had a bit of chain hanging off of his collar and had been tied so tight that the muscles on half of his body were not developed properly. He was about 8 or 9 months old. He is an old man now.

Our Golden retriever came from a shelter in Andong which looks more like a hoarding situation. She was tided on three foot of chain nest to a dog house. And so the stories go. Bunnies abandoned on the riverside. Three horses two slow to race and one that was forced to jump too high so that he has a stifle injury. The animals over time became my full time job, seven days a week 10 to 12 hours a day.

Before I return to South Korea Passion for Dogs will be published. After that I may or may not take on a small project. But if I do that, I will approach by getting all the grunt work out of the way before even doing a submission call. 

I wrote about formatting at the paragraph level here on my other blog about writing which isn't about writing so much anymore but may be one day again. I've not mentioned it on this blog yet, but its something every writer should know and do. Because GGP is small, I don't really pass up the tab ridden, hard indeted pieces or the ones that are even more creatively formatted. I did that in the beginning, but GGP is small and very specific in it's content needs. Also I've learned how to remove tabs withing four clicks since I wrote the posted linked above. Still a lot of people don't know how to do that and, unless you know what a thing that you want to do is called, finding how to do said thing via Google isn't exactly easy. In fact a lot of the things I know now that I didn't know then were things I stumbled upon wile looking for other thigs. Such it was with using Styles in Word.

Either enough people use styles to put it on the home menu or Microsoft belives its that import or a little of both. Eitherway, talking about Styles in this way shows my past ignorance. If you are thinking well duh, congratulations. However, based upon the submissions I get, formatting for publication is still a mystery to most writers. And truth be told using styles for submissions is kind of advanced. If your thinking of self-publishing more than a few books or starting a niche` market publishing company like GGP you have to learn this.

So what are styles? You have heading styles. This would include things like the title of the book, the chapter headings or story sections. Then you have body style which alows you to set the paragraphs of a novel or story. You can set your quote styles and more. As a writer submitting short content to magazines, you could set up styles based on the submission requirments.

To start learning how to set your own  styles, you can do a Google search "How to use Styles?" Or some such. However, from my personal experience, I had to have an pretty good understanding on formatting at the paragraph level before Styles and the tutorials made sense.

As I've been working on Passion for Dogs a topic that I've wanted to write about came to my mind yet again. I didn't know how to approach this topic previously because I was keeping my own writing career and publish careers separate. And then life happened.

By that I mean, I moved from Yeongju, South Korea to Seoul. Actually, I live in Gwacheon but after I exit my apartment building, turn right and walk five paces I'm in Seoul. The housing change was accompanied by a position change. I actually was offered two positions in the same week. I had a choice between working at Gangnam public schools or for a private academy, also known as a hogwon, though in the my case the its not quite that simple.

The plus side of working for Gangnam public schools was the high pay, the hours and being able to return to writing and publishing hobby. My previous position at the Yeongju English Center left little free time for those things.

But the private academy contracts with local governments to run English centers. More importantly there is room for advancement with in the company-- I've gone as far as I can as an ESL teacher and unless I can make a living wage writing and/or publishing (ha, ha, ha) I need a real career. So I chose the later. The good news is that the new position came with a quiet, well managed office and all the things go smoothly. However, a career move comes with little free time.

If you don't know over forgotten GGP was a direct result of the free time that can come from working in the public schools. By this I mean I was bored so I was like, I'll start a publishing company. It will be easy. Ha!

So that's where I'm at personally. Working hard and hoping for a promotion into the curriculum department. This has been a great big digression from the writing point I wanted to talk about.

To be continued....

 

Passion for Dogs is next on the publication scheduled. I sent an email to all the authors. If you didn't get the email for some reason, check your spam folder and/or say hello, especially if your email has changed.

Free Kindle Promotions:
Passion for Weird Tales :  January 12-16
The Dirty GRE :  January 16-20


Kindle Countdown Deal on Passion for Cats January 12 -19.

 I love Word. Now that we got that out of the way, you can continue reading.

I started writing in a notebook about nine or so, and progressed from a notebook to a computer.  I'm not sure how seriously I would have taken writing in the days before the word processor, but I was born to them and quickly learned the art of repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different result. Every writer goes through this phase. Some grow embittered, which I did. Some press on via pipe dreams and blind faith that they're going to make it one day! (This phase usually involves more dreaming than writing=)

I did that too. Some quit while others  eventually have a first tome 9218 words too long.  Once I found myself among the latter, I also found myself with nearly thirty files creatively named "Chapter 1" and  "Chapter 10" and so on.

Managing large files in Word can be tricky so I tried other programs with the bandwagon. We hated the program for the same reasons but like many, I always returned.   I didn't start loving Word until I started learning how to use it. That came as a direct result of my first teaching job in South Korea. There are tons of tutorials on how to do the things I'll teach you about Word.There are also tons of tutorials on Google or YouTube. (Of course, you have to know what you're looking for in order to search for it, ha)  Now lets get on with this tutorial.

Way back when... 2008 and which seems two lifetimes ago. Depending on your perspective, it can be. Like, if your a hamster.

I'm not a hamster though. I'm human. Nevertheless two lifetimes ago I made a decision to separate Me, Myself,and I. But my attempts at creating a clone army has failed and I blame George Lucas. He made cloning look so easy in the movies.

Anyway, Me, Myself and I get along so fabulously I've decided to reunite myself. That means content from second blog will be transferred to Green Gecko Publishing, promotions for GGP titles will show up on mr-jordan.net and my book is going into the GGP catalog. The latter has to do with convenience and finances. Creating one publishing company that doesn't make a profit on Bowker makes way more sense. Creating zero even makes more sense, but myself threw a temper tantrum and got her way. Me and I are bad parents, clearly. Though something of a compromise was reached. No Bowker until 2016. Probably.

I'm busy on Passion for Cats and then Passion for Dogs, so the changes will happen slowly and sporadically, but they are coming.

~
Me, Myself and I

Geum (금) means gold in Korean.

Geumbi is a key part of the Green Grecko Oversight Committee. For example, one of my oversights was putting my lap top on the desk when connecting it to the monitor. In other words, it was the ideal place to sleep. After realizing my oversight for the last ten years of my life, I raised it off the desk with some books, thus creating the prefect pillow. 

Now Geumbi can oversee me work while pressing the arrow key with her face as she cat naps.

Geumbi's tenure at GGP started as temporary. That is, foster. Soon after had her second bout with liver failure due to not eating. The liver in cat's swell with fat when they loose weight rapidly, which I didn't know (She was skin and bones when she left the shelter) and the liver fails. Anyway, I brought home a really skinny cat (ignorance is bliss) thinking I'd make her fact and instead hand fed her for weeks and then, when her liver was better,  began the mystery of why she wouldn't eat and paced the house mewing. It was back and forth to the vet until she was diagnosed with stomatitis, which means she allergic to the tooth plaque. She had all but her canine teeth removed, but still receives a small does of steroids daily.

The most amazing part about the picture above is that two months ago she was in so much pain, she couldn't think of finding annoying places to sleep. Now, as I said, she has dedicated her life to point out my oversights and watching me work.