I’ve learned the hard way that it’s one thing to prepare stories for publication in e-book format, but quite another to have those same documents ‘print-ready’. Humans and Other Creatures was successfully launched into cyberspace on Amazon and Smashwords. I won’t say that it was easy; putting together a collection of stories that were originally written in a variety of formats (including Word Perfect from the good old days) presents its own challenges, but it was finished with relatively little gnashing of teeth and cursing. (Okay, I’ve been instructed to confess that there was a little bit of cursing and a whole lot of moaning and groaning.)
Print format, however, presents an entirely different set of rules one must abide by – understandable, but I have cursed Word mightily along the way (silently of course as the pondering poodle is very sensitive to bad language). The problems are the ancient gremlins, or maybe the ‘other creatures’ embedded in the stories we’re dealing with. Word gremlins show up when you least expect them to. You innocently create a page number, only to find that Word has autocratically added a line underneath, with no solution that I can see, to eliminate said, unwanted line. It also adds other creepy little techno goblins when you’re not looking, or even when you are, for example, spaces just appear from nowhere, or from outer space perhaps! You check something and think ‘I didn’t put that there’, where the %#*&! did that come from. It’s very disconcerting to say the least. It has not made my life easy.
I often see recent ‘updates’ and ‘improvements’ that Word 2010 has supposedly developed, in which they purport that each little change has made the program ‘easier’ to use. THEY LIE. I have a theory that they just tweak the program a little here and there so they have jobs next week. Why can’t they leave it alone if it works – you know, the old adage – ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. Okay, enough venting; the poodle thinks I’m reacting just a tad too strongly. After all, we survived didn’t we?
Print format, however, presents an entirely different set of rules one must abide by – understandable, but I have cursed Word mightily along the way (silently of course as the pondering poodle is very sensitive to bad language). The problems are the ancient gremlins, or maybe the ‘other creatures’ embedded in the stories we’re dealing with. Word gremlins show up when you least expect them to. You innocently create a page number, only to find that Word has autocratically added a line underneath, with no solution that I can see, to eliminate said, unwanted line. It also adds other creepy little techno goblins when you’re not looking, or even when you are, for example, spaces just appear from nowhere, or from outer space perhaps! You check something and think ‘I didn’t put that there’, where the %#*&! did that come from. It’s very disconcerting to say the least. It has not made my life easy.
I often see recent ‘updates’ and ‘improvements’ that Word 2010 has supposedly developed, in which they purport that each little change has made the program ‘easier’ to use. THEY LIE. I have a theory that they just tweak the program a little here and there so they have jobs next week. Why can’t they leave it alone if it works – you know, the old adage – ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. Okay, enough venting; the poodle thinks I’m reacting just a tad too strongly. After all, we survived didn’t we?