I've spent hours trying to use Adobe Acrobat to remove the ICC Color Profile from my PDF of The Alice '65, and all I get back from Ingram is -- it's till there. I worked with Adobe Tech Support -- who was the slowest MoFo in the world and who finally dumped me on the Color Conversion link in the program...which doesn't do what I want it to. Didn't help he was in India or something so was using generic phrases to respond.
This comes as Word was messing with me on margins and spacing. I got the text as exact as I can then found the even and odd pages weren't lining up right. After a lot of checking and rechecking my paragraphs and spacing, it turned out a space in the header was in a 12 point font instead of an 8 point, thus throwing everything off. One friggin' space!
Needless to say, I've missed my publishing date. But I'm not putting the book up till it's right...and if that takes another week, so be it.
It's still 206 pages long -- 190 of it actual text and the rest title and such. And going through it, again, I found more typos...but also came up with a couple more spots where I was able to tell the circumstances better. And near the end I found a sort-of inconsistency that no one else mentioned and probably wasn't all that important, but which I went ahead and reworked to make clearer and give two other characters a sort of closure.
Something I've grown to understand about myself is, I'm not that good a writer. I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite until it starts to work, and I use all kinds of excuses as to why I have to and want to and need to do it that way...but the reality is, I suck. All I'm achieving in this method of work is the slow excising of superfluous parts that I put into the story and which I finally get sick of and recognize as needing to be edited out.
If I was any good, I wouldn't have to go through a couple dozen rewrites to get to the story. I can't think of another writer out there who works this way. I've heard of writers who will agonize over a single word for days...but this isn't like that. I slam words in and then agonize over removing them in little bits at a time.
Why do I even think I can do this shit?
This comes as Word was messing with me on margins and spacing. I got the text as exact as I can then found the even and odd pages weren't lining up right. After a lot of checking and rechecking my paragraphs and spacing, it turned out a space in the header was in a 12 point font instead of an 8 point, thus throwing everything off. One friggin' space!
Needless to say, I've missed my publishing date. But I'm not putting the book up till it's right...and if that takes another week, so be it.
It's still 206 pages long -- 190 of it actual text and the rest title and such. And going through it, again, I found more typos...but also came up with a couple more spots where I was able to tell the circumstances better. And near the end I found a sort-of inconsistency that no one else mentioned and probably wasn't all that important, but which I went ahead and reworked to make clearer and give two other characters a sort of closure.
Something I've grown to understand about myself is, I'm not that good a writer. I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite until it starts to work, and I use all kinds of excuses as to why I have to and want to and need to do it that way...but the reality is, I suck. All I'm achieving in this method of work is the slow excising of superfluous parts that I put into the story and which I finally get sick of and recognize as needing to be edited out.
If I was any good, I wouldn't have to go through a couple dozen rewrites to get to the story. I can't think of another writer out there who works this way. I've heard of writers who will agonize over a single word for days...but this isn't like that. I slam words in and then agonize over removing them in little bits at a time.
Why do I even think I can do this shit?
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