Tag Archives: Formatting

Thesis Emesis

thesis-cover-imageWell, it’s official: I’ve submitted the first draft of my thesis for review, and the process was just as much of a pain in the ass as I’d heard it would be.

From a body of program work comprising more than thirty pieces, I needed to select a maximum of sixty pages. In preparation, I spent weeks revisiting all of them, trying to identify which pieces felt strongest, and ultimately narrowed it down to five.

I’d been contemplating doing a collection of linked stories, but initially, I worried that the five pieces I thought were my strongest didn’t have a readily apparent link. The more time I spent with them, however, the clearer their connection became. Once I understood that, the rest of the process suddenly seemed like a piece of cake:

cake_30

If my rough draft were a cake.

But you don’t sacrifice this much time, blood and sweat and tears and coffee addiction, working on something, only to stop at the finish line–even if you are ready to vomit.

Needless to say, after several days more of revising; six hours of formatting (Can we just all agree that the phrase “Should adhere to official university and program format and style” is code for “You are now entering the ninth circle of Hell”?); one wasted hour of tracking down ink for the new printer; one hour of printing; one hour of reprinting; one hour of obsessively line-checking each page; one hour of driving into D.C. to hand-deliver the draft; ten minutes of arguing with the parking garage attendant that yes, I LITERALLY* ONLY NEED TEN MINUTES BECAUSE I’M JUST DROPPING SOMETHING OFF SO PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LET ME PARK HERE AND I’LL GIVE YOU ALL THE CASH IN MY WALLET; five minutes of hyperventilating in front of the locked door to a clearly empty office; two minutes of grateful weeping on the shoulder of the office staffer who promised to get my thesis to my advisor; thirty seconds of sprinting back to the garage to make my ten-minute window; and one hour of driving home from D.C. (my sincerest apologies to all the motorists I passed on the way, who clearly did not appreciate the volume of my music), the job was done: I could finally relax…

Me, at every stoplight.

Me, at every stoplight.

…at least until the revision process with my faculty advisor begins.

*Acceptable usage in this case–and ONLY in this case.

Road Trip-Day Whatever

Who cares what day it is? I’ve been stuck in the ditch for a week now, so time is losing all relevance.

Can you tell it’s not going well? Writing this from a deep well of frustration. I went back and, I thought, fixed all of the formatting problems, followed KDP’s publishing guide step-by-step, went back to the beginning and uploaded my shiny, clean, sparklingly new file…and it STILL is telling me I don’t have a cover, I don’t have a TOC, I don’t have an NCX file (whatever the heck that is). I can see the cover thumbnail is there! I can see and use the TOC in the preview! What do you mean I don’t have them? Plus, it’s listing 47 pages of HTML errors, which is a foreign language to me (not one of the 3 I speak, unfortunately).

This is so disheartening, because I am so close, I can almost taste it, but technology is just dangling the tantalizing spoon in front of me, taunting me for my lack of technical skills.

Grrr!

All right. Veni, vidi, vented…Back to the drawing board. Getting very close to just saying screw it and turning it over to a pro…

But I want to do this myself! she wailed.

Send me some good mojo, folks, we’re heading for a bumpy landing!

Widow Woman Cover

Widow Woman

Road Trip, Day Six

Sorry about the lack of updates–weekends aren’t the best time for me to make any headway, so I’m spending some time playing catch-up now.

Day 6 finds me closing in on the formatting of Widow Woman, Chapter 17 . I would’ve been farther along, but upon closer inspection of the very earliest chapters I wrote, I discovered that I had been operating with what Smashwords’ style guide calls a “common bad habit of all authors.” Er…I used my space bar in the early chapters to indent, rather than setting up a paragraph style. Yeah, yeah, I can hear you all groaning, but Smashwords says it’s common, so cut me some slack. I have learned my lesson (after seeing dots floating in front of my eyes all weekend, it was inevitable.) I feel like a writers’ Bart Simpson: “I will not use my space bar to indent. I will not use my space bar to indent. I will not use my space bar to indent.”

At any rate, that set me back a bit of time to go back and address all of that. But the important thing is that it’s all cleaned up now and I’m back to chugging along at a good pace. If I keep this up, I might just be finished within the week. Finished. Was there ever a more satisfying word?

Also received some preliminary cover art from my designer–chose my favorite of 3 renditions, asked for a slight hue adjustment, and am so excited at how it has turned out. I haven’t signed off on it yet, however. I’m pretty cautious when it comes to weighty decisions, and I think the cover art falls precisely into that category, so while I’m relatively certain it’s a go, I’m not ready to push the button just yet. Mostly, I think it’s just that I want to look at the cover design some more, to roll it around in my mind, ponder it…savor it.

Keeping the countdown rolling.

Road Trip, Day Two

Short update today: I only made it through three chapters. I would have made it through more, but the chaos in my office was starting to distract me, so I sacrificed some time to clean it up. I hadn’t even unpacked the single box I carted home from work when I left–I’d just pulled out the things I needed and scattered the rest all over the place. Much happier and more focused now that everything’s squared away.

I am starting to enjoy the formatting process in a weird, twisted sort of way. It’s satisfyingly orderly and repetitive and appeals to the part of my soul that should be working on an assembly line (and may yet, if you don’t like the book when it comes out).

On a brief, and very sad note, I learned today that The Writer magazine will be going on hiatus this fall as it searches for a buyer. I hope they find one–the loss of that venerable old publication would be deeply felt by writers all over the world (including this one).

Somebody, please, buy it!

More updates to follow…