Bring on the Print!

I wrote the initial drafts in WordPad - it comes free with windows. It’s a rich text editor, so it has all the formatting I need. But it has no spell check. I was writing the book on a old stripped down computer. The reason? No internet, no games, no distractions. I put a few albums worth of music on it and left some old vacation photos on there - everything else went poof. So the file had to be moved to the main house computer to be put into Microsoft Word - for print formatting and the dreaded spell check.

The draft came in at over 100,000 words, so the process took quite some time. I did it in little chunks over a few weeks. I didn’t want the computer to lock up, Word to screw up, or me to hit a wrong button and lose a long period’s worth of spell checking. It was a very tedious thing and didn’t want to have to do any of it over.

I also added in a copyright note header on each page - and also page numbers - don’t want to get that mess out of order and try to put it back with no page numbers.

I shrunk the margins to fit everything into 182 letter sized pages - single side printing to allow long edits to be written on the back. After I had printed the first copy (of two) I saw that I could have dropped the text size down - but didn’t want to reprint the copy, nor change it on the second print. As I wanted both copies to be the same on every page.

One copy went to me - the other copy to my wife (my only comprehensive editor). Very early on I read somewhere that most self-published authors use family members for editing. They also said this was a mistake. Then they offered to edit my book - for a fee of course. I can’t afford that - my whole budget for this is a thousand dollars (that will probably go up a bit though). I figure my wife is a good substitute. She’s a great technical writer and was in the process of becoming and English teacher. She’s pretty objective - I’ve told her a few things about the book, but she’s not nearly as involved in the plot or the characters as I am. Thus she’s unable to make the mental leaps to fill voids that I am.

The last catch up post will be forthcoming.