Kafka and Bots

Continuing to read a lot over this summer break thanks to having injured myself seriously enough to need therapy. I had to stop working in the yard, attempting to reclaim my beautiful wild space from the overgrowth of three years after I hurt myself the last time. And yes, that’s how I hurt myself. So, I had to pay someone to come and remake my outdoor space. The birds are horrified because my six foot tall hedges were their playgrounds. That six feet of privacy has become three feet now and I can see my neighbors.

In my forced rest, I’m reading five books at one time, alternatively reading a chapter or two of each every day while remembering the great books I was introduced to during my Literature studies. One of the best books that stuck with me unrelated to the Holocaust was Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I was first introduced to this short story in World Lit (this particular class focusing only on horror translated into English) my first semester at UTD. In my second semester, it was also included in Western Literary Traditions.

In Kafka’s story, Gregor who is working for a company his father owes a great amount of money to is turned into a cockroach or some related bug (the German word Kafka uses doesn’t exactly have a perfect translation) overnight. He wakes up to his family scrambling to understand why he hasn’t left for work and he is the only one in the house who brings in income for the five person family. He’s trying to save the situation, certain it’s only temporary, while his family are coming to the conclusion that Gregor abandoned them and doesn’t deserve their love and devotion any longer.

Kafka’s short story is a study of otherness in society, written before Hilter and the Holocaust. It’s interesting that this author wrote this story so many years before World War Two would even begin. The close reading of the story goes into the realm of those who are invalids, who’ve perhaps succumbed to a sudden, incapacitating disease that renders them unable to work again. It can also be interpreted as referring to those who just feel ostracized from society at large.

I found this short story to be very relevant even today, nearly a hundred years after it was written. Kafka’s easy prose and his descriptive abilities are so clever and the story is so simple and yet has so many undercurrents it’s easy to get caught up in all the messages Kafka might intended to the message of his story.

As I put all the books up from the Spring Semester at UTD, I also bought new books from my new favorite Barnes and Noble. Finding a bookstore is getting to be a challenge. I wanted to get away from Amazon, which seems almost impossible now. But B&N has a good sales membership which keeps my purchases within my budget. I went to pick up several that captivated me, among them, The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. Her books consist of two novellas published in one volume, a clever way to fashion quick stories together in a convenient purchase. I’ve heard there’s also a television adaptation on Apple TV.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with this. I love fantasy and my mother introduced me to science fiction. Not everyone can compete with the greats from the 1950s and 60s but I have to say this particular book really did capture my imagination. I enjoy her vision of the world in which her main character lives, a rogue security unit who manages to achieve freedom from ownership and live a life full of unwanted adventure. I’d definitely recommend this book if you’re interested in a book for a vacation or just an escape from today’s messiness.

I’ll need to spend more time studying how to work with the editor in WordPress. After I get to a certain point, I’m frozen out. If I try to update or apply any of the suggestions Grammerly gives me, I’m unable to edit the blocks at all. Sorry if it seems like it’s really clunky. After fighting with it for half an hour, I just gave up.

True Tales

I watched a movie today from 1999 that I’d heard about. Starring Kirsten Dunst before her Spiderman fame. She was a young Jewish woman who didn’t understand the traditions nor the reasons why she had to attend the ceremonial gatherings until she’s magically transported back to 1941 where she faces the Nazis and dies in a gas chamber only to wake up back in modern times. I thought it was well done. I’ll definitely say that much of the Nazi depictions were glossed over for the sake of audiences.

Someone who didn’t gloss anything over was Sara Nomberg-Przytyk. She’s the author of Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land. She doesn’t gloss anything over. She’s real, genuine, and lets the horror speak for itself. It’s very bold, just like the author, and states truly what living in Auschwitz was like and what dying in Auschwitz was like.

She was arrested first because she was a member of the Nazi resistance and sent to jail. From jail, she was sent to Auschwitz but not until late in 1943-44. So she caught the last push of the Nazis to kill as many Jews as possible, overwhelming the crematoriums so much so that they resorted to just burning people alive in the trenches.

This class I took in the first semester of my Junior year transformed me. I had hoped to get pointers on how to do a really great memoir or diary. I’m not sure I realized what studying Holocaust memoirs would be like.

Another example of a chilling retelling of Holocaust survival is Elie Wiesel’s Night. I believe this one is just as horrific as Sara Nomberg’s but while Sara was in the women’s prison, closer to the trenches and the crematoriums, Elie Wiesel and his father were in the men’s area from 1944 – 45.

Both memoirs read like a collection of essays set in chronological order. They are honest and I could only imagine what writing them must have been like for both survivors. Because both Nomberg and Wiesel survived the Holocaust. I wondered if writing it down was like getting the dirty, gritty trauma out or if it was more like reliving a nightmare and putting it all on paper so others can live it too. However the authorship affected them, the testimony of what they went through is harrowing and each of them focuses on certain topics. Sara Nomberg focuses on mothers and children while Elie Wiesel focuses on the relationship to fathers and sons as well as how he was forced to literally told again and again to turn his back on his father so he could survive.

There are many, many memoirs and I’ve ready only a few but these are three, including one I mentioned in the previous post, that really stood out to me. I’m still trying to catch up on all I ignored to finish up my last semester and once I can catch up, I hope to start pursuing certificates and perhaps even playing around with another nation’s version of Adobe where I can afford to publish my next book in the Dorian series. It just feels like adulthood is a series of choices to delay enjoyment and gratification until I get all my work done. Nothing at all like I was promised when people would tell me I’d be so happy to be an adult.

Contexts

I fell when I was 13. When I tried to save myself, I landed on the ball of my right foot. Weak ankles should have been my middle name. The ball of my ankle actually popped out of the socket and then went back in. Yeah. That was the first week of summer break between sixth and seventh grade. I spent the whole summer laid up and barely able to move. So I finally got desperate enough at age 13 to read a book. My mom brought home a stack of books a few days after my accident and in desperation I picked one out.

It was 1983. There was no internet. We didn’t have cable. The 7 or 8 free tv channels we had didn’t have anything interesting on. There was no VCR or VHS tapes yet. I couldn’t walk on that leg for weeks! Never got an x-ray or anything. My parents wouldn’t pay for that. So I sat around and read this book I’d picked from my mother’s stack of books and loved it so much I realized that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life: write stories!

The book was Daughter of Witches by Patricia C. Wrede.

I worked for 36 years as a caregiver because that just happened and it didn’t require much from me – just my soul and all my time and whatever was left over at the end of the day, assuming my day didn’t just melt to the next day in a triple shift of caring for someone with mental illness or alzheimers.

My father was my last patient. I retired after him. I sat around for a while and rested. I really needed that rest. Then I decided after my contemplation to go back to college then to university and pursue that degree that would allow me to write which is all I ever wanted to do.

So this, my second semester at UTD, my first as a Junior, I had a class called Contexts. This class focuses on a type of literature. The Professor, Dr. Patterson, focuses on memoirs and diaries, specifically one type of memoir and diary: the Holocaust.

One thing I learned is that there are 4000 memoirs and diaries to come out of the Holocaust. People who were already threatened by death went on to document the crimes happening to them and around them even though if they got caught it would mean being shot. I got to read two diaries and three memoirs over the Spring Semester. To say they are depressing is a huge understatement.

One of those the professor mentioned but that I’ll never read is this one.

The Nazis had the Jews do all the hard work. This means that the gas chambers and to some extent burning the dead were all jobs which Jews themselves had to do to their own people, a method of completely dehumanizing someone. Those who were working in the crematoria were called Sonderkommandos. This person accepted the job not knowing what it was and spent months pulling his own countrymen out of the gas chambers. If you’re in any way into horror, this is it right here. Real. Horror.

We’re approaching 90 years since the Holocaust happened. There are people who completely deny that the Holocaust ever occurred. The fact there are 4000 diaries and memoirs suggest that it did.

I’m considering highlighting portions of the books I’ve read. I thought about doing it on Facebook but I’m not sure they’d be cool with the subject matter. WordPress might allow me the freedom to post some excerpts with the understanding that these excerpts aren’t about happy things. There’s not a happy thing that happened in regard to the Holocaust. Most of those who were rescued after Hitler was defeated didn’t believe being rescued was a happy thing. By the time they were rescued, their ability to feel happiness had been forever altered.

The author of the above memoir did not survive.

Ten Months Later

Ten months later, two semesters at UTD completed, I was reminded of my prior commitments when my WordPress account charged another year to my account. I’m definitely keeping this account. I’m reevaluating if I want to keep my merchandise at Amazon. I love the kindle and I have a lot of kindle books but their recent decisions with buying kindle books and ownership has changed some of my thoughts about using them for my own merchandise. I guess I’m just old but I believe when you buy a book, even if it’s digital, that content is always yours – not the intellectual property, of course. Copyright laws and all. But that copy belongs to me because I paid for it. Versus renting which I as a university student certainly have done on occasion. There are other options out there.

Just when it appears as if publishing and print material is taking it’s last gasp, as if the world has turned its face against print media, as if books and reading might be so antiquated that no one ever really cares, there comes a new wave of readers who jump into the realities that reading can do for us what nothing else can. Can’t afford a vacation? Read a book! It can calm my mind, take me places I’ll never go, and show me lives I’ll never live. Since starting my university journey, trying to obtain a B.A. in Literature, I’ve discovered loads of new authors who I really do enjoy. Oddly, I like Sophocles. Didn’t care for Homer. Didn’t mind Ibsen. Not a huge fan of James. Marquez was interesting and long. Really did learn a lot during this last semester, the first of my Junior year.

I haven’t forgotten my experiment. It’s still ongoing but I’m just not doing much with that right now and for those who were reading my books, I’m sorry I stopped in the middle of a volume like that. But the more I go along, the more I realize that if I rewrote a portion of Joanna, I could really make that into something. At the same time, I just really enjoyed putting the books out there and enjoyed holding the printed copy in my hands. When I started doing this experiment, publishing them was free for me. Now that they’ve upgraded to pdfs I need Adobe Acrobat or something similar and I just don’t have that $600 a year to pay for that. Not and I’m not earning that money back. I love hobbies and all but as a retired person, my hobbies need to bring in money and the crochet, quilting, and art can bring in money. When publishing these books was free, it was fine that I was only getting about ten dollars every few months. Now they want me to put in such an investment … It was one thing when I could just buy the software and use it as needed but Adobe doesn’t do that now. They want to pull as much money from my pocket as they can so I have to think outside the box and outside the box typically means getting away from picky Amazon where everything has to be just so and moving to another venue where it costs me less. Additionally, the movement to get away from U.S. tech has accomplished something I didn’t think anything could. The fear of being spied on is real with social media and now with various issues arising in the U.S. people are shopping outside the U.S. for social media and tech services. There is everything you need out there and I found an option for Adobe products which would cost less than a third of the price and offer up the exact same thing. So I’m seriously considering that but I am right now focused on my university journey because that is super expensive and takes a lot of effort and concentration.

Which is to say, I haven’t forgotten my books. I never forget them. I’m still writing! But I am working my next career and trying to become something else while always aware a literature degree may not pay the bills. So while I’m so in love with publishing and all the joy it brings me – I just really love creation and publishing like quilting is making something out of pieces – ultimately my responsibility toward myself is to make sure my tomorrows are going to be okay. That – that is a big job right now in this chaos which has erupted in the U.S. and abroad. Gotta have multiple income streams. More like flood plains in these days.

With all of that said, I apologize. I’m doing some required certificates right now, one of them being Adobe, with the hope I can transfer that to the other product I found. Once that’s done, I’ll resume my publishing experiment/journey/adventure! After I get the nasty required courses out of the way, I’ll have some fun and a bit more time to enjoy the play side of publishing and hopefully I’ll have a little place where I can be gainfully employed but not trapped in a mire which is, sadly, so much of the work I was accustomed to doing during my 36 year career as a caregiver. I still care. I just spend all that on myself now.

1, 2, 3 … Breathe

Life has not been treating me very fair lately. I discovered during a recent appointment that a medication I’ve been on for just over a year to treat my diabetes may have damaged my heart. I’ve been feeling off, drained, unwell for over a year. This is the same year during which I’ve been dragging myself along, unable to accomplish much more than to just sit and dream of things I wanted to get done but can’t seem to make any progress in. Not to say this is the reason Dorian 2 isn’t published. There are many reasons for that lack of publication success.
In order to continue my experiment of publishing books such as Dorian 2 and then Rossyn 1, I’ll need to pay for then acquire Adobe Acrobat. My investigations state this is the program that Kindle is going with. And that’s a wise choice, really. It’s a well-established program which is easy to access if you have the yearly subscription fee which isn’t lightweight. But it has all the power and ability to be The Desktop Publishing Genius to get your book published.
I’m pooling money to start university in under 3 weeks, and life. So … when I get the money together to add Adobe Acrobat to my life, then I’ll get Dorian 2 out. I’ve already got the book to tell me how to do all of this. One thing is settled even if it’s not purchased.
As I’m sitting here on this Monday morning wondering why my 50s are so much more stark and confrontational than my 40s were, I’m staring at this bookcase which has set in my house for 50 years. It’s older than me by quite a bit and contains books my great-grandmother left behind as well as some that her daughter, my great aunt left. They all passed to their son and brother, my grandfather on my mother’s side. I found myself looking at this bookshelf yesterday and at a book I hadn’t read in the 50 years it’s sat there. I’d read the ancient copy of Jane Eyre several times, read the Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede, The Dairyman’s Daughter (some bit of religious drivel), and Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables. For whatever reason this brightly colored book hasn’t been read so I pulled it out of the small wooden shelf of ambiguous age and decided to read it as my mind is being pulled this way and that with the horrors of being 50 and facing extended ill health just as I’m trying to move into a new chapter in my life with university and following a dream I’ve had since I was 13.
The Amethyst Box written by Anna Katherine Green was printed in 1905 and has my great-grandmother’s name written in exquisite penmanship on the inside page. She wrote her married name because in 1905 women still only existed within a marriage. Her real name was Victoria. I know this because her Bible from 1897 is also on that shelf. Before God, she used her unmarried name.
Anna Katherine Green is still considered by many to be the mother of detective fiction despite the fact someone else published a detective novel slightly before her. But she went on to write many of these from the late 1800s to the early 1900s and was a legend in the detective novel world. And her book is fabulous. Like the chain on a roller coaster that snatches at the undercarriage and drags the coaster up to the top of the big drop, the first page grabbed me and I can’t believe I haven’t read this before! It’s been wonderful to have this little bit of a distraction in a month where I’m not really writing because my mind is churning as I’m facing appointments and tests and realities I’m not sure I’m ready to confront. But the reality is, more time is going by where I can’t keep on with my experiments. I can’t even send in other works to be copyrighted so I can immediately follow up Dorian 2 with Rossyn 1 and 2. My money is tied up with university and day-to-day expenses. I’m at a stopping place for the moment. I’m uncertain what my future holds but I want it to include me writing more and more and turning this experiment into something else. Something more. What is a dream if you fulfill it and then no one notices?
For anyone who would like to see what the first detective fiction looked like, many if not all of Anna Katherine Green’s books are available to read online at http://www.gutenberg.org.

Absentee Author

One of the best movies I ever watched was Mr. Holland’s Opus. The quote “Life is what happens to you when you’re making other plans” really stood out to me. The roller coaster ride I’ve been on for the last two years was precipitated by a massive flashback/memory recall that made me question everything about my life. It sent me into a spin that now, after having processed through this new information for two years, I’m only beginning to understand just how much it changed not only my own internal image of myself but also my ability to cope with life on life’s terms.

I basically took off months to go finish up at community college so I can begin pursuing my Bachelor’s at a four year school. I’ll begin my journey toward my Bachelor’s in the Fall. An accomplishment, finally, one that I wasn’t sure I could ever achieve. It would be so easy to just tell myself to forget it. My books never sold well. They sold a few copies. Some people read them. I didn’t get any feedback. Didn’t really succeed at anything by all the measurements currently being used. And all of that is true. But this began as an experiment during the pandemic. I wanted to be published and I am! Being a published author was one of my dreams and I made that come true.

Kindle changed the file format and requirements for formatting a manuscript. This new format they’re using is so much easier and faster! So much less processing time and mess to wade through. However, I’ll need to learn how to make it what it needs to be – page size and margins and fonts, oh my! – to meet their publication criteria. My hope was to get it published in May but a funeral took that possibility out of consideration. My new goal is June.

I’m learning so much about writing and publishing doing this and it’s been so much fun but my life has gotten busier post-pandemic. I was basically retired then after a 36 year career in caregiving. I had a steady income that was sufficient and life was decent. But retirement didn’t fulfill me. That prompted me to go back to school to pursue literature and art. I’m hoping to learn more and get better at all of this that I’m just playing with right now. In addition, life threw some hard hits at me and it took time and a lot of energy to process through all of that. Getting diagnosed with Osteoarthritis and another autoimmune disorder took away the time I had to push Dorian 2 off the 10 meter board and into the publication pool. The updates Amazon is making are really beneficial. Updating the platform they use allows authors to self-publish with the best quality and most ease. I can’t argue that most of their updates are spot on. But it takes time and initiative to learn how to use those new platforms to make changes that may seem too small to matter but will directly affect how the book looks when the finished product is done. It’s not a completely new type of document but rather one that’s existed for decades so finding this information shouldn’t be hard or cost money. It’ll just take time.

I don’t know how many dedicated readers I have after not publishing the follow-up to Dorian 1 in a timely manner. I appreciate all who have stuck around and come back to check on things. I love your dedication to story. Dorian’s growth in this coming book is important because he’s assuming a throne he doesn’t want with responsibilities he never desired. In order to be the person he wants to be, to make the impact he hopes to make, he’ll need to grow into his new role. Those decisions will help Rossyn and the rest of their royal friends to stave off the coming disaster as, across the Dragon Mountains, evil is just beginning to reach out the weapon that could change the future of Krel entirely.

I hope that a couple weeks with my internet connection, restored after recent storms went through my area, will get me the information I need to transform the manuscript in the required ways to meet publication standards and then I’ll be able to push publish and get Dorian’s big finish out into the world. That will complete volume two of That Girl From Crestival series. That would be three accomplishments that I can be proud of.

Work Day

Should be titled homework day but I hurt myself so I have to take breaks. It sounds like insanity to say I need to take a break from painting. I’ve been a caregiver. I know what work is. But with my knee healing from an injury, I just need to sit down more.

Taking advantage of that sitting down, I went back to editing and preparing the manuscript. I love KDP. I do. It’s been my best friend. But the updates have made it a bit more picky and I’m having issues with getting it just right. And I want it to be just right.

Changed the cover yet again. Got it to upload and it accepted it!

Now the text is messed up.

I want to do this for a living.

I love writing and seeing it in print just makes me so happy. I could literally feel Dorian book 1 staring at me across the room this morning. Dorian is waiting for the rest of his story to be told! So, I knew I’d need to spend time working on it today. Things are looking up. It finally accepted the image which means I got everything, absolutely everything right in Illustrator. This will be the first image I one hundred percent created digitally. It’s my best work today. I hope tomorrow I’ll have better.

I’m going to school specifically to write better. The one thing I didn’t anticipate was enjoying the art classes more than I enjoy the writing. That could become a fun problem one day. ❤

Dorian 2 Update

I worked on it today. I finally have a weekend with nothing going on, either socially or educationally so I was able to open up all the programs and attempt to push Dorian 2 into publication.

As far as I can tell, the only thing they added to the formatting software update was frustration. So after five hours of uploading, waiting for it to process, and displaying the way it will print out – an important way to check for errors – there have always been errors. So I’ll take it up again tomorrow and see if I can finally edit the cover image to fit the criteria they require.

The funny part is, as I’m sitting there struggling with this thing, I’m asking myself “And I want to do this for a living!?” That’s just how it is. Typing it up in Word is for now but printing is forever! It has to be perfect.

So I am trying to get this sequel to Dorian One out. I am ready for Dorian 2: Old Friend to make its debut! I’m ready to own my author copy!

Where I Left Off

My last post was the 7th of August. It feels a little odd to be coming back to this blog all that time later. I can’t in all honesty hang my head or put my tail between my legs in shame. Life has a way of taking you down paths that are far and away from plans you made. My detour included College. Specifically, it included math. This whole year has been about the math I need to transfer to a four year university.

I went to a private school. My parents weren’t supremely religious except when they were talking to one of their church friends. “She goes to a private school,” sounded so nice!

It was not a good school. I was a B/C student but graduated with honors. That isn’t bragging. It certainly came a surprise to me!

As I suspected this summer, Amazon did update their publishing suite and I managed to get 97% done with uploading the manuscript. I make a rule that I need to go through it before I click publish. I’m glad I did. The map which is included with every book had always been a .jpeg. Straight from Illustrator, split across two pages, it worked just fine. Then they updated the software and now that same .jpeg takes up one one-inch slice of the two pages, compressed and unrecognizable. My chore then was to research what format I needed to use instead of the .jpeg.

It was at that moment Fall semester started. I went to a private school from K – 12. My foundations in math include a huge sink hole where actual education would have taken place if there had been any teachers who themselves understood the material. Years of trying to absorb it through osmosis didn’t work. So, it came down to a two semester set of developmental classes that goes from 1 +1 all the way through to

First class in the Spring was fine. A bit challenging with new material and all but a great teacher. Second class this Fall … The teacher makes all the difference. While she was a kind teacher who gave lots of extra credit (always take classes from the PhDs), it was a hugely challenging and stressful scenario for me. After working as a caregiver for over 30 years, my priority is always myself. If I need time to shut down, then I shut down, even if that means the writing has to be set aside, no matter where I am in that process, no matter what goals I’ve set for myself. It’s a level of self care I didn’t get to give myself as a caregiver but that I insist on now.

I’m hoping to get back to work next week, back to KDP where I will try to use a PDF to make the maps. I don’t have a timeline for this. It’s been a really hard year. This last four months included me sitting at a desk for hours every day pouring over homework to make sure I maintained a certain grade average which I was assured would save me. To be clear, the extra credit saved me.

I did get out of those classes with As and I’m thankful and grateful for that. I put in a lot of long hours but I’m ready to get back to my –

Actually, I’m not. To be absolutely candid, I have no desire whatsoever to go back to this and finish it out. The fervor with which I approached the experimentation of publishing fiction has waned quite a bit as I approach the day I’ll metamorphosize from a Community College student to a University student. It’s an unfortunate side effect of not being a full-time author. I have a life outside of writing I have to pay attention to. That means that my days are often taken up with things right in front of me and not with things I enjoy.

That being said, I’ve been trying to get this book published for close to two years! I don’t know why this one has been so difficult! Two years later, I hate the cover art but don’t want to wait to create another and get it copyrighted. I don’t want to go through the book for a final edit either. I just want to move on. Why this second half of book two has been such an enormous challenge to get to print I may never understand. All I know is that I don’t leave things unfnished. Except dishes. Dishes in the sink never bothered me. But this I want to complete before I move onto the next book. I’m ready to own my own copy! I’m ready to move on with things and I believe I’m ready to be a university student.

I’m not done. Certainly not. There are two more books in the series, each one broken into two halves. I won’t abandon the characters. Publishing books I’ve written has been a dream of mine since I was 13. It’s the whole reason I started going to college in the first place! It was my chance to pursue my passion! I’ll pursue it, even if my motivation has crept away to hide behind my College Algebra textbook.

Amazon KDP

Today is the day I start the formatting and upload of the new book into Amazon’s self-publishing portal. It’s not a terribly technical process but it involves a lot of steps so a lot of people will hire someone to do it for them.

First, you have to have the text. Unless it’s only a picture book, which you can produce with KDP, it’ll need some words. It’s just so much easier to use Word for this because KDP gets along with Word and imports it directly. Any other word processing program would need to be saved in Word format which it may do but not have it be to the same exact document specifications as just using Word. When importing text from one word processer to another, some types of formatting can be lost. Since KDP requires very specific formatting for the text to import over to the Kindle Create formatter, losing that kind of data can just make extra work later. And editing in Kindle Create is not the best experience.

Kindle Create is a useful and necessary tool but it’s not as user friendly as Word or Open Office. The primary use for Kindle Create is to upload the text into a format which will immediately port over to the printer Amazon uses to print the books or publish the ebooks. Amazon encourages users to create all formatting and editing tasks in Word prior to importing to Kindle Create. What you see on Kindle Create is what you’ll see when you open the cover of the printed book or open the ebook on your ereader.

The primary goals for me in Kindle Create to ensure there were no editing mistakes made in Word which will push text into an unusual or strange configuration once it’s in Kindle Create. I can always tell those authors who paged through their books prior to publication and those who didn’t. Some part of the book will skip a page or text will suddenly break, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, for no obvious reason. There is a reason, of course. The reason is that there is a hard break or paragraph break symbol which wasn’t discovered until it was published. This makes the reading experience a difficult one. It’s so odd and disturbing

when the text just suddenly does something weird in the middle of a paragraph or sentence.

I personally choose to page through every single page of my book to make sure I spot those. I take that opportunity to also make certain that my page layout is what I want it to be. Create wants to set the book layout to the most paper and space saving format possible. It can be hard at first to see in your mind what a book layout is. It took me a while to learn how to do it best. This will be book five I’ve published so I’m kind of getting it down now.

Another task to complete is chapters. We all love our chapter breaks. It’s a chance to stop the story because we have to do something else which is not usually as much fun as reading. You can insert images into the text, but I personally have not done this yet. There is a huge amount of support offered from Amazon and experience is the best teacher. They continue to keep it updated and add new features. The best thing about is, what you see is what the book will look like when you get it done.

Another thing I’ve come to realize is that point of view shifts, moving the narration from one character to another, needs to be very clear and obvious. I’m sure when I’m done there will still be mistakes. In publishing as in crochet, I can never produce a whole project without a couple of oopsies. The ideal is to make it so the reader can still enjoy the product, whether it’s a crochet throw, a hand-made quilt, or a book, in spite of whatever mistakes I haven’t found or corrected.

Hoping to get the publication finished this week. I’m running out of time. I’ve done home renovations during this summer break, changed the university I’m destined to attend for my Bachelor’s, and tried my best to prepare for the Fall. Being able to hold Dorian 2 in my hands in a few weeks will be the best way to start the coming semester!