After a lot of back and forth with Ingram Spark, the people who are providing the Print On Demand services for OT, with me close to yelling at them over how crappy the proof copies were coming out, someone finally went into the files I uploaded and found that one part of my PDF was saved as 6x9 instead of 5.5x8.5. That's what was screwing everything up. Seems the first 12 pages of the book -- the opening section with the title, copyright page, Table of Contents and such -- got saved as the larger size when I shifted it to PDF...even though, when I looked at the Word Document and printer settings, it was all the smaller size. Then I merged that with the text, which was the correct size...and it all got saved wrong.
I have no idea how this happened, but now have to upload a new PDF of the text and start over. Meaning I'll miss my deadline of April 30th for the paperback. Dammit. I had planned to submit the book to Writers' Digest's Self-Published book competition, but the deadline is May 2nd and you have to send them a hard copy of the book. They want to see it, feel it, check it out all over the place. No way I can make it in time.
Shit. I can't seem to do anything right, the first...or second...or tenth time through. There's always some fucking mistake, somewhere, that makes me look like an idiot. Doesn't matter what I do to try and make it work right, somewhere, someplace there's an error...and I won't find it till the worst possible moment. Typos are nothing; everybody's got those. I see them consistently in my co-workers' emails. Bad grammar, missing words -- those are not unique to me. I go deep.
Half the reason OT took so damned long to finish is I kept finding logical flaws in the story. Inconsistencies. Bits that raised more questions than were answered. There are still aspects of the story I don't answer, directly; I leave it to the reader to work them out, if they feel like it. But bits I think I have explained suddenly don't make any sense because they contradict other parts of the story or character. I got damn near paranoid about it...and still am, a bit.
Dammit, if there was anything my masochistic psychoses didn't need, it was another excuse to beat myself up.
I have no idea how this happened, but now have to upload a new PDF of the text and start over. Meaning I'll miss my deadline of April 30th for the paperback. Dammit. I had planned to submit the book to Writers' Digest's Self-Published book competition, but the deadline is May 2nd and you have to send them a hard copy of the book. They want to see it, feel it, check it out all over the place. No way I can make it in time.
Shit. I can't seem to do anything right, the first...or second...or tenth time through. There's always some fucking mistake, somewhere, that makes me look like an idiot. Doesn't matter what I do to try and make it work right, somewhere, someplace there's an error...and I won't find it till the worst possible moment. Typos are nothing; everybody's got those. I see them consistently in my co-workers' emails. Bad grammar, missing words -- those are not unique to me. I go deep.
Half the reason OT took so damned long to finish is I kept finding logical flaws in the story. Inconsistencies. Bits that raised more questions than were answered. There are still aspects of the story I don't answer, directly; I leave it to the reader to work them out, if they feel like it. But bits I think I have explained suddenly don't make any sense because they contradict other parts of the story or character. I got damn near paranoid about it...and still am, a bit.
Dammit, if there was anything my masochistic psychoses didn't need, it was another excuse to beat myself up.
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