Saturday, January 31, 2009

Oh Well!

Thanks to a lot of your prayers and good wishes, I'm feeling much better. Thank you!!!

Last Monday I made a list of 15 pressing things I needed to get done this week. The majority of these were big jobs, not the usual list of every-day to-do's. Thus far I have accomplished 13 1/2 of the tasks. The other 2 1/2 can wait until next week.

One of the greatest tasks I finished was prepping my book manuscript for uploading to the iUniverse computer. Simple, right? Well, no.

First of all, the file must be in single spacing and contain the entire book text, plus the stuff called Front Matter and Back Matter--the "half-title page" for example, the copyright page, the dedication, About the Author, acknowledgments, etc.

Second of all, my manuscript (ms) file got corrupted or something, which made Word ban it. I told it I wasn't happy with that decision, and it reluctantly let my baby out of prison, but it was scratched and bruised, missing all the italics and center formatting for vital things like Chapter Titles. Okay, I use numbers, but still!

I was able to compare my ms side-to-side with a recently saved version, and got all the italics (for direct thoughts--my characters think quite a bit--and some Spanish words) back in. Then I had to re-center all the chapter numbers and the three asterisks I use to denote scene breaks.

After agonizing for a while over whether or not I'd caught all the deleted italics, I inputted all the stuff iUniverse wanted, then finally uploaded the manuscript. It's in, folks!

Except for the photo image I bought today for the front cover. Yeah, #10 won. I bought it, downloaded it, converted it to TIFF format and CYMK (is that right? It's very late!) colorspace, then a couple of hours later, I wrangled with myself over whether to upload the original zipped file or the unzipped file. I opted for the zipped file, then when about 65% of it was uploaded, remembered that I had to send in the conversion!

Big sigh. I zipped the conversion from 17 MB to 14 MB, and started again. After two hours, at 100% uploaded, the site asked for me to sign in again. The nasty thing had timed out on me 'cause it took so long to upload!!!

Oh yeah!

If we didn't have the bitter, we wouldn't appreciate the sweet. Fortunately, the site saves what you've uploaded, so you don't have to start afresh. All I have to do is take my laptop and thumb drive to the library tomorrow and use the Wi-Fi to get that photo uploaded. I don't know what more the iUniverse site will ask of me, but I hope it's not much more. Then I can well and truly say, "The book is at my publisher's!"

1 comment:

I welcome your comments.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...