The Hole is...
Well, the hole is getting wider as well as deeper. My good friend, Kate Eileen Shannon, has been working with me to help me get the first The Falls small town mystery novel, In the Dead of Winter, ready for publishing on CreateSpace. She built me an infallible template complete with chapter headings resplendent with my new logo of two sap buckets hanging from a sugar maple. Love the logo.
Of course, as you might have already guessed, I promptly screwed up the template, because my original Word document had a slew of invisible design errors in it. Once she patiently showed me how to place my Word document into a neutral note taking application and use that to copy and paste into a new template, that eliminated most of those issues.
But then, there was yet another dilemma. (You had already guessed there would be, correct?) She works on PCs and I use an iMac. So the instructions she gave me for copying and pasting worked fine for her, but for me it had a glitch. The commands and options on her PC were different than the ones on my iMac. So I blithely went along copying and pasting until I had the whole 600 odd pages of the novel installed in the template and then converted it to the pdf file CreateSpace requires. The margins were off, and the pdf file had the last letter on the right margin cut it half.
Back to the drawing board. Or should I say Word options menu? Finally, after sharing the failure with Kate, she told me to go back and look for paste options once again. In her PC it was named one thing. In my iMac I finally found an option entitled "Paste and Match Formatting" hidden away up under the edit pulldown, unlike the "paste" and "special paste" options that came up with the normal window along with "copy".
I am pleased to say that I'm halfway through the new template and the margins and text are all working well. (That is being said with my fingers crossed, toes crossed and the dragons watching over me vigilantly. Let's not tempt fate any more than I can bungle up things myself.)
I've been playing with the cover program in CreateSpace as well. That actually seems to be going well. I drew some sap buckets covered with snow on a maple tree and placed a cloth background with somewhat fantastical snowflakes to use as a cover. I'm going to use the "you-do-it-yourself" option for that as well. It rejected my author picture of myself, not a sharp enough image (I've thought that about myself for quite awhile), but Kate, once again my Irish fairy Godmother, sharpened that up for me as well. I'm going to have a white cover, with blue type and the pic of the maple tree and sap buckets as the cover, instead of the lovely winter scene I used for the e-version of the book.
So, here I sit, precariously in the midst of a rather bumpy and tumultuous adventure. The hole I'm digging is now deeper, but I have widened it (or perhaps I should admit to Kate widening it for me) so that it's a good deal less claustrophobic. Today I will try and finish the last half of the copying and pasting (matching the formatting, of course) and then work on transferring it to pdf. Then the cover will come next and finally taking it all through the step-by-step tutorial on CreateSpace. (That sounds far too easy, right?)
I will admit to truly wanting to get the first solid copy in my hands. I have 22 e-books at the Amazon Store at present (working on 23) and I enjoy them all...but it will be another hard fought major goal to hold a solid copy in my hands.
There are times I really wish that some clever and perceptive agent had picked me up as a client and that I had been spared going through all this digging to simply get my stories out into the world. But things are what they are, and I know that in the end, I will have more skills, I will be a more determined person and I will truly enjoy the day-to-day triumphs that come my way.
If you are going through what I am, take heart, it is doable. If you are a reader of my stories, take heart as well...hopefully they will be out there fairly soon in paperback! There really is a light at the top of the hole! Now if I could just be sure it's not a meteorite rushing down to bury me. I'll let you know how the hole progresses. May the dragons watch over you all...
No comments:
Post a Comment