Finished!

I spent the entire day finishing The Glen Valley Compact paperback.  I kept going back and forth trying to get the page numbers right.  In the end I finally deleted some page numbers.  There was one page number that appears at the top of the page, not on the bottom.

But those were not problems that should hurt the reader's enjoyment of the story so I finally left them alone.

In 48 hours the book should be available at amazon.com.

So that is done and now I need some days without maniacal writing. I have been obsessing about my books for over a month now. Time to focus on something else. Exercise, catching up on e-mail, talking to friends.

Gary and I will be in Illinois in a week and other than this blog, I intend to spend that week reading books.

E-books and Editing

After a week of struggling with the paperback publication of The Glen Valley Compact, I got up this morning all fresh and enthusiastic.  In only and hour and a half I was able to publish the e-book version. Four hours later it was available at amazon.com:   http://www.amazon.com/Glen-Valley-Compact-Colleen-Sutherland-ebook/dp/B00GOXROCY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1384563431&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Glen+Valley+Compact

No problems whatsoever. Anyone with a Kindle can order it. I'm really proud of that book.  I seen to have found my genre.  I can't see more Mary Beth O'Malley mysteries in my future.

I'm having a little trouble re-doing the e-book Decades of Love and Other Disasters.  The corrected version has been reviewing for publication since 1:00 pm.  I won't know until tomorrow if I was successful.

Tomorrow, it's back to The Glen Valley Compact paperback.  I think I can correct the page number problem, but it will likely take all morning.

Meanwhile, so far I've sold three of our recently released Black Coffee Fiction, Volume 3.  Five of my copies are at Sissy's on the local author shelf.  That leaves me with two copies, so I will be placing an order for ten more copies before the book signing on December 7.

The Christmas short stories I am beginning to work on would be easier to put into an e-book if I didn't need a table of contents.  Wade Peterson always did that in the Black Coffee Fiction books so I will need his expertise on that.

***
Wade has just published another story about a paranormal lawman and his talking knife, Balance.

http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-balanced-approach.html

Balance showed up in a story Wade wrote a year ago.  He thinks the pair will eventually be a book.  But first he has to finish the novel he's working on now.

***
This morning at the fitness center, a concerned citizen urged me to run for city council again.

Then this afternoon at the grocery story, another concerned citizen urged me to run for the county board of supervisors.

What is that about?  At this point in my life, I have no intention of returning to politics.

More Frustrations

Every time I tried to publish The Glen Valley Compact, not only did the upload fail, it seemed to do weird things to my original document.

This morning, I finally figured out the header with my name and the name of the book (that's the part on the top of each page) was causing the problem.  I managed to get rid of both header and footer and once again, did the page numbers manually.  Because of the difference in spacing, each page had to be re-done.

After another morning of work, I tried uploading again and once again, the whole thing was wrong again with pages appearing not in the bottom of the pages, but sometimes on the top, sometimes in the middle of the pages.

AAARRRRGGGHHHH!

I took a breather and went down to the library to pick up a book.  Colette was there and suggested another way of going at it, by creating a new file.  I tried.  That didn't work either. The problem continued to be the page numbers. I thought about going without page numbers but that would annoy any reader I know.

I wanted to get that book together so I could have copies before I leave for Illinois in a week, but that can't happen, so I am putting the paperback on hold.

Instead, I am going ahead with the e-book.  Tonight I made a copy of the paperback file.  In the new copy I removed all page numbers because e-books don't work that way.  Number removal took about an hour. Working through the e-book publication will probably take through the weekend.  My grandson says I am woefully ignorant when it comes to computers and he is right.

That is why, when I work through this e-book, I will do two more right away.  I've done e-books before but every time it's been months before I do another.  It's a steep learning curve for someone like me each and every time.  It will be easier to do one right after another.  So it will be done in this order:

The Glen Valley Compact
Decades of Love and Other Disasters (re-doing this one)
Incredibly Depressing Christmas Stories.  

When those are done, I'll go back and attack the Glen Valley Compact paperback.  

Frustration

I finished the re-write on the proof of The Glen Valley Compact this morning.  Absolutely every thing was in place, I thought.  I had the headers and footers in place, corrected anything and everything.

I uploaded the file to Create Space.  The publishing program reviewed it and found only one minor thing wrong.  There was an extra blank page.  But I wanted a perfect book so I went back and removed the page from my document.  Suddenly both headers and footers disappeared.  I was able to find the header, but the footer disappeared along with all the page numbers.

I spent the afternoon trying to correct the footer but couldn't so decided to manually number all the pages. That took another hour.

I then uploaded the manuscript to Create Space again.  The publishing program now said the book was perfect.  Except it wasn't.  The page numbers were entirely wrong, showing up in the middle of the page instead of at the bottom.

So tomorrow is another day.  I'm sure that sooner or later I'll get it right. 

Proofs

I'm on the twelfth chapter of the proof copy of The Glen Valley Compact.  I'm amazed at how many typos there are. I always think I am so careful yet those little errors keep popping up.  It was the big things that were driving me crazy.  My heroine found a cell phone in Chapter 12 which she picked up and put in her purse in Chapter 10.  Obviously, I had switched the two passages.

Names are always a problem.  The name of the murder victim was Bastien,  yet I spelled it three different way in the proof.  I had to straighten that out.  The problems go on and on.

After World II, General Dwight David Eisenhower wrote a memoir about the campaign in Europe. Eisenhower hated typos so when he received his proof copies he gave them to friends to read and asked them to read them.  Each one read the book and marked each problem. When one finished a proof copy, Eisenhower handed it off to another. Finally, he was satisfied the book was perfect.

The book came out. There was a typo on the very first page.

Today I got my first ten copies of Black Coffee Fiction, Now with 33% More Caffeine, which contains short stories by Wade Peterson, Bettyann Moore and me.  We all proofed that book.  We are all literate people who know errors when we see them.  Betty edited two magazines so is an expert.

When I got the book I opened it at random and there it was:  an error.

So though I check over The Glen Valley Compact over and over, I probably will not wind up with errors.

Tomorrow, I will send to be published.  I will have one more chance to go through the on screen version before it goes to print.   And it still will not be perfect.  

Writing Update

For a few days, I tried to work on several different projects, but I couldn't manage the confusion. I had to sort them out  and make a decision about their order.

I've decided to finish The Glen Valley Compact first.  I've been going over the proof copy, marking each error with a red pencil then transferring the corrections to the master copy. I'm on chapter eight, with seven more chapters to go.  I expect to be finished by Wednesday.  Then I can go ahead and publish.

Next, I will do the e-books for both The Glen Valley Compact and Decades of Love and Other Disasters.  I did Decades last spring, but I want a better copy.  I figure it will take a week or so.

Following those books, I want to put all my Christmas stories into an e-book collection. My next story for Black Coffee Fiction http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com  is due on November 22 which will complete the book.  I'll be interrupted because we leave the next day for Illinois.  On my return, I figure on finishing the Christmas book, probably around December 7.

It will be late in December before I can finish Going Down from Gairloch.

That is quite enough writing to finish the year.

Meanwhile, I am waiting for my copies of Black Coffee Fiction, Volume 2; Now With 33% More Caffeine. Any day now.

What a year 2013 has been!

Old People

I asked Gary just now what I should write about today and he said, "Living with an old guy."

It's not bad.

Gary and I are almost the same age.  I can't imagine living with someone younger than I am, nor can he. We have lived through the same periods of history, the same music, the same films, the same trends in literature. We can discuss politics knowing how the parties have evolved over the years.  We both are liberals though it took Gary longer to get there than me.  He even wrote a letter of encouragement to Richard Nixon during the Watergate hearings! He is now more liberal than I am but that just makes our discussions more interesting.

We have similar health issues with the same aches and pains, though his problems revolve more around blood pressure and cholesterol and mine around arthritis.  We both work on our health issues.  We discuss our diets. These days we eat more fruits and vegetables than meat.  We work out at the fitness center.  I use the aquatic center.

We both have problems with memory though I always have been absent-minded so I don't notice it as much.With anything important, we ask the other to write reminders.  We have a calendar on the refrigerator and that helps.  I now remind Gary about bills he has to pay and in the New Year, he thinks I should pay all the bills because my system is more workable.

So far, we both drive well, I think, but there is some discussion about where we are going. GPS helps with that though in fact I like getting lost once in a while.

I think that the older we get, the longer we live together, the better our lives become.

In another year, we expect to leave Seymour and find our next little love nest. I have no fear of that as long as I have Gary.