Catching Up

The last couple of days have been pretty rough on me from an “Indie” publisher’s perspective.  I’ve mentioned that the Davina’s Magical Radio proofs arrived the other day, and that seeing the material in a book allowed me/us (my wife and son) to spot some things that I needed to correct.  And I did that, albeit kicking and screaming a little bit.

It’s not that I’m okay with errors, because I most certainly am not.  It’s just that each correction includes additional formatting, which is a bear.  So, we spotted one consistent error where I had “to much” instead of “too much”.  I have no problem with the error, I often see whole scenes in my head while I’m writing, and so most of the time I’m typing as fast as I can just to get something/anything down that will help me fill in the blanks in the future.  So, writing-wise, using the wrong word is no biggie, but editing-wise, sigh, well that is unacceptable.  And the book's been edited several times now, by a number of talented people, but even with all the eyes, some little things got through.

But when you add up all the little things, it resulted in two days of pretty much non-stop teeth-grinding and frustration.  I’m also hampered because my disease doesn’t tolerate repetitive movements very well, and so my fingers and hands swell to the point I can’t physically type any longer.  The swelling only goes down with long periods of rest.  But I’m also stubborn and didn’t want to stop until I had the whole thing corrected, so when my hands got too swollen I  resorted to typing with one finger, and when that got too swollen I moved to awkwardly holding a pencil and pressing keys with the eraser.

Then, after the corrections were made, and I reformatted the whole document, I had to convert it into a PDF for CreateSpace.  I’m using an older computer, like old enough to be breaking longevity records.  And with the old computer I’m using old software, mostly because the computer is so old I can’t upgrade to the new stuff.  Hopefully, if enough books sell, I can upgrade the computer and solve a lot of my problems.  But in the meantime, converting from Word to PDF is a bit tricky for me.

However, after I got the document converted to PDF, and painstakingly went over every page to make sure it was still formatted correctly, I couldn’t upload the new file.  Each time I tried to upload the file I would get a message from CreateSpace telling me I needed a faster internet connection.  Well of all the things I have, my silly internet is the ONLY thing that’s fast, so phooey on you CreateSpace.

After fussing with it a couple of hours, including reformatting and a new PDF conversion, I finally filled out a request for customer assistance, and then fumed the 14 hours it took them to reply.  Now 14 hours isn’t too shabby in some ways, but it is when the only suggestion they had was to clear my internet cookies and try again.  Are you kidding me?  And to top it off, they said I should fill out another request for customer service if that didn’t work.  Did someone honestly think clearing my cookies would fix the problem?  Really?

What I did do was update my Firefox browser.  I’d been meaning to do it, but had been busy with the proofs, etc.  But, after I updated Firefox the document went through without a hitch.  I’m not going to dwell on it, I’m just glad it went through.  Now I wait until they approve the upload, then I reorder proofs, then in about 3 weeks I can take a look at the new proofs and see how I did. 

I wish I wasn’t so impatient.  My oldest son points out that I’ve talked about writing for 20 years, but didn’t do it because I was finding other ways to pay the bills.  He says that since now I am finally writing, I should be more patient.  I’m pretty sure comments like those will put him on Santa’s naughty list.

Now you know what I’ve been wrestling with the last couple of days.  I hope all of you had better luck than I did.  At least now I can start catching up on the other stuff.