Month: February 2017

I’m stressed, so of course I decided to rename all my files

Lynn

I’ve been feeling stressed this week, after a book release that’s going nowhere fast. I expected this one to do better and it hasn’t. So as usual, when feeling stressed, I turned to my computer for solace.

I decided it was imperative that I rename all my files.

Yes, I know I just renamed them all barely more than a month ago, but at least I’m not reorganizing email again. :)

I spent most of yesterday and all of this morning and early afternoon renaming 12,000+ files. I used a bulk renamer where I could, and then went through every directory and tidied up where necessary.

Basically, I abandoned Pascal case and went back to dashes between words. I also stopped putting the full title of my books in most of my supporting files in my publishing folder.

I really wanted shorter file names, if only because I found myself annoyed at the long file names in the file tab in Adobe Photoshop Elements and GIMP when I was working on those paperbacks. I want (need!) to be able to see the differentiating parts of the file name when I’m working with similarly named files and I couldn’t, but I also still wanted my files named in a logical order.

So I went from files named like this: MyBookTitle-Cover-PaperbackBackText.psd to this: cover-mbt-pb-back.psd

pb = paperback (everywhere)
mbt = acronym for My Book Title

All lowercase and dashes for ease of reading.

And I use that acronym in my daily word count log and a few other places so I recognize most of my books right off the bat from those letters. :)

Then, of course, they’re in folders named for the title of the book so there’s really no reason not to use the acronyms to shorten those file names.

I tested a couple of folders side by side with files named in various formats, and it was obvious at a glance which one I found easier to read. Skimming is easier when the first part of every file name isn’t the same book title!

It seems kind of silly that wasting all this time on renaming my files has made me feel better, but it really has. I feel lighter and less stressed now and I’m about to get started on a story.

By tomorrow, I expect to be ready to get back to my challenge to write 6,000 words in a day. But today is out.

I have a few obligations to deal with that preclude me being able to put in the time I’d need to even come close this evening to a high word count, so I’m just going to work my way back into a story and enjoy that—and maybe click through my folders a few more times and enjoy the neat and orderly look of my files. ;)

Paperbacks are done

Lynn

I still need to proof them, order the print proofs, and proof them too, but I am done with formatting.

Tomorrow I start writing again, and I’m happy about that even if I still don’t know exactly what I’ll be writing.

I need another day before I restart my 6000 words in a day challenge, because I also need quite a bit of time free tomorrow to go over those digital proofs.

But yay for the fact that I’m finally caught up with that. :)

No time to ramble tonight so toodle-oo. Be back tomorrow.  :D

And that answers that question about my paperback covers at CreateSpace

Lynn

Got this just a short while ago:

Congratulations!

Your interior and cover files for xxxxxxxxxxxxx, #xxxxxxxx meet our technical requirements for printing.

The next step in the publishing process is to proof your book:

FOLLOW THIS LINK TO GET STARTED:

Which I assume means the embedded fonts in the paperback cover are A-okay.  There was no additional message about corrections made for me, on my behalf, or anything like that, so this answers the question of whether or not the PDF cover files would be accepted by CreateSpace with fonts embedded instead of being flattened into the image. Should’ve guessed, really, but I just wasn’t sure.

I’ll be ordering a proof to check this out and compare the quality of print to the covers I didn’t embed fonts for (sending only a flattened image PDF to CreateSpace), and scouring over the digital proof from CreateSpace. If the quality of the text appears better, I’ll definitely be doing this extra step from now on. If it isn’t any better, then I’ll just use GIMP, and only add Elements into the mix when I need to use a font that brings out that unfortunate GIMP text rendering (?) bug.

Also, I discovered something with this round of paperback creation. I’ve consistently had a problem with my PDF cover as exported from GIMP having a transparency that CreateSpace fixes for me. I’ve not had that problem this time. The difference? This time when GIMP popped up the little message during the PDF export, I unchecked all the little boxes for things GIMP was offering to do for me during the export. And now, no transparency warnings from CreateSpace for the three covers I exported directly to PDF from GIMP. Pretty happy to have figured that out. I was exporting a completely flattened image to PDF so there shouldn’t have ever been any transparency anyway, but obviously something GIMP was doing during the export on my behalf was creating it.

New text justification bug in GIMP is bugging me

Lynn

I think I’ve found a bug in GIMP’s text justification feature. I thought about reporting the bug, but I do not have an account and don’t want an account and don’t have a spare email address where I’d enjoy getting spammed even if I did. The create a new account page warns of that possibility and I chose to take that warning seriously. (Updates below.)

So I’m just putting it out here because I’m frustrated. I spent all day yesterday trying to fix an issue with an installed font that I used for a book cover that turns out isn’t usable in Word for my title page headings because of some bug. If I’d known at the time, I’d have never used the font in GIMP for the book cover.

Lesson learned: when using a new font I haven’t used in Word before, test it in Word. Save the file. Reopen. Is the font still there? If it isn’t, delete the font, because I don’t want to run into this problem again.

I’ve been buying more font licenses lately,  but I still have a pretty big selection of fonts from fontsquirrel and Google fonts on my system that had the right kind of licenses for what I do and I guess I should have expected to run into a problem like this eventually, but I didn’t. I honestly thought fonts just worked or they didn’t. I didn’t realize they could actually be buggy with only certain software. :o

But back to the GIMP bug. Here’s what’s happened. (Update: Definitely a bug. I’ve figured out why it’s happening and I am sure it’s a bug.)

Yesterday I noticed that some of my back cover copy was getting cut off on the right side when I justified the text. I scaled it down a bit from 12 pt to 11.7 pt and it fixed it. This was with Adobe Garamond Pro. Today I have a different book cover in the works and I’m using Adobe Caslon Pro. I tried the same trick when I noticed it was also getting cut off on the right side but scaling it down hasn’t worked to fix this one. I’ve tried every pixel/point size I can in the range I’d be comfortable having this text and it just won’t stop cutting off the very right edge of the fonts.

It’s very frustrating! I definitely haven’t noticed this previously and I updated a few weeks ago to the 2.8.20 version of GIMP. I’d go back to the older version but I truly don’t know if it would fix it, because I’m so behind on putting out my paperback books and I haven’t created one in more than a year until I started doing these.

I don’t know what version of GIMP this issue started in or if it’s been there all along and I just didn’t notice because I wasn’t using these fonts. :(

Maybe I should be doing my paperback covers in Scribus or Inkscape but I do a lot of tweaking of stuff and I don’t want to learn another program with a steep learning curve.

So I guess I’m going to be using a different font for this book cover’s back cover copy.

UGH!

FYI: I’d still recommend GIMP but this kind of thing does make me rethink whether or not it’s worth it to keep putting off converting to Photoshop. I just HATE subscription services. I’ll almost certainly deal and just find a way to work around this problem, but I have to ask myself why I’m being so damn stubborn about it. I do not know.

Update: I figured out why GIMP is cutting off a bit of the right edge of the fonts. It has to do with fonts that have edges that are supposed to fall outside of the margin, in the same way some punctuation is supposed to fall outside of the margins. For example, in my specific case for this text block I was trying to use, the first letter of the paragraph is a “J”. The scoop that makes the bottom of the letter should hang over the edge just a teeny tiny bit (it does in Word and in Scribus and in Photoshop elements. It doesn’t in GIMP. In GIMP, that little effect causes the entire block of text to shift a minute amount to the right, making all the edges of those final letters susceptible to being trimmed by that same minute amount because they’re falling outside the bounds of the text box. And because this is happening no matter the size of the text or the text box, there’s no way to counter it, other than using a different font.

For me, what it meant was that I created my cover in GIMP as usual, saved as a tiff file, opened it in Photoshop Elements 14 (which I had honestly nearly forgotten I had), and added the text for the back cover there. Saved as a PDF, and realized at that point that Elements saves the text as embedded instead of flattened, and decided I’d try that out.

(Scribus did the same. I did get it to work, finally, but it was a PITA, and I don’t like using it. That was when I remembered I had bought Elements last year when it was on sale and that it was on my computer, ready to be used if I wanted to.)

If embedding the fonts produces crisper text on the cover, I might do all future books this way even though it adds another program/step to my workflow.

On the other hand, I don’t know if Createspace will even accept this, because I’ve never submitted a completely non-flattened PDF before. I flatten everything in GIMP, text and all.

But the reason I decided to give this a shot was because I read a paragraph of a page today on the Createspace website that says to make sure your fonts are embedded in the pdf file for the cover. So obviously it’s an expected thing, right?

We shall see.

I am not going to finish those paperbacks today

Lynn

Dang it. I’m not going to finish those paperbacks today. I got caught up with tweaking the look of the interior and spent too much time on the cover of one of them today (perfectionism is a trap), and here it is just about bedtime for me (oh, my tired eyes!) and I’ve submitted the files for only one paperback today.

So 2 down and 5 to go. Except I’ve realized that I still need to correct a book I found an error in a few weeks ago, so that means 6 to go. But that one doesn’t need a cover, just a few changes to the interior.

I’m very close to finishing a second tonight, and I think I’ll try to get it submitted before I call it a night. The other paperbacks are just going to have to wait. I want to do some writing tomorrow before I come back to them, maybe in the later afternoon. We’ll see.

I definitely want to wrap these up ASAP, because they’re one of the few things left that I need to do sooner rather than later, and when I’m done with them, I can truly focus for a while on just writing my books.

I’m going to finish those paperbacks today

Lynn

I’m going to finish those paperbacks today. All of them.

I’m not going to batch process them the way I’d planned either. I’m just going to start one and work it all the way to the end. Format the book, then make the wraparound cover.

Since I’m not worrying about creating the perfect paperback style set in Word, things are going much more smoothly now, and faster. I swear, that perfectionism bug is hard to get over. I’m going to quit looking for the perfect system (in anything I do) and just concentrate on finding one that works, something that makes my work easier, even if it’s not the easiest it could possibly be, because setting things up to be the easiest it can be is fraught with trouble. One little thing breaks and I’m right back where I started (example: the paperback style set for yesterday’s book).

What happened, you ask?Ah. Let me tell you. :)

Since I use a slightly different paperback interior look for every series, I had to create a generic set of styles and then modify the set for each series. So I ended up with six sets. It was a lot of work. And I’m not sure I finished it, because as I said yesterday, when I went to use the style sheet for the paperback I was creating, the set for that particular series didn’t work right. My copyright page styles were all messed up, my paragraphs indenting where they weren’t supposed to, things like that.

I’ve decided it just isn’t worth the trouble to maintain these style sheets. My ebook style set works great and I’ll just modify those styles on a per book basis going forward. It’s just easier that way. Sure I do a bit more hands on adjustments, but sometimes easier doesn’t turn out to be faster when you look at the entire picture.

So I’m moving on. I’ve got a system now that is working and I’m just going to keep doing it this way for the foreseeable future.

Paperbacks are taking longer than I had hoped

Lynn

I finished one paperback today.

Meaning I have 6 to go.

:o

Here’s what went wrong. My paperback style set didn’t work. I’m not sure if I didn’t finish it, or what, but when I applied it to the document, only a few basic styles changed and the rest just kind of … broke. I don’t really know of a better way to explain it.

So instead of getting frustrated and trying to create a new style set (which was my first inclination), I just made manual adjustments to the styles, got everything the way I wanted it, and then saved over the old style set with the new ones.

It’ll either work or it won’t, but I got one paperback done today and that’s all I care about.

While I was doing all that, I used OneNote to create step-by-step list of what I need to do to make sure I don’t forget anything during the formatting.

Now, I’m calling it a night. I got up way to early again today and I’m too tired to stay up. :)

Nope, one more day

Lynn

I got up too early this morning and I don’t want to write. I want to finish the project I sort of started yesterday but bailed on because it felt too damn tedious to continue. :D

Today I’m feeling much more up to finishing it, so that’s what I’m going to do.

Paperbacks, here I come.

I had planned to reduce the font size on my future paperbacks to 11.5 pt to make them less expensive, but I’m just not feeling it. I really think I’ll stick with the 12 pt. I like the 12 pt and I can’t imagine a reduced price of $1 is enough to make that much of a difference in sales.

I’d have to make some drastic adjustments to margins, leading, and font size to reduce the price more than that, or move to the larger 5.5 x 8.5 trim size, and I don’t like those ideas at all. In fact, I considered it a while back and decided I just didn’t want to change trim size. My pen name book has a 5.5 x 8.5 paperback that’s priced $3 less than my average for the books under my main pen name, and sales of it haven’t been notable at all.

The thing is, the paperbacks are a different market, but POD doesn’t compete well in that market anyway. So they’re mostly for people who like the books and want paper copies. Agonizing over formatting to get the lowest price at the sacrifice of what I want my books to look like just doesn’t feel like a good use of my time. :)

So I’m moving on, using the fonts, margins, leading, and trim sizes I like best, and not worrying about the price. Heck, half the time, Amazon reduces the price anyway. :D

One more day

Lynn

I’m delaying the resumption of my challenge one more day in favor of catching up some stuff I’ve been putting off for months. 

It’ll feel good to get that stuff off my back. 

Plus, I have two stories to choose from for my next project and I just haven’t decided which one to do. One’s a short story and one is a novel. I’d thought about going right to the novel, but decided to do the short story first as a break, but now I really don’t want to do either. After I catch up some stuff today, I’m going to read what I’ve written for both stories already and hope it helps me decide. If that doesn’t work I’ll give myself permission to work on multiple stories until something clicks with one. :D That should do it.

Eh. Scratch that last post

Lynn

I said last night I’d begin the challenge to reach 6000 words in a day again today, but I’ve decided to hold off one more day. I need to get rid of this headache I’ve got, so I think I’m just going to fiddle around with those paperbacks I never finished up. I’ll probably try to write something today at some point, but maybe later, and probably not much.

So, tomorrow, then. See you around. :)

Tomorrow I resume the challenge to reach 6000 words in a day

Lynn

Today I haven’t written any fiction. I have a daily writing streak I could keep alive by writing something now, but I don’t think I’m going to. I might, when I finish writing this post, go write a little something, but I might not. I’m tired and I’m not really seeing the need.

Tomorrow I resume the challenge to write 6000 words in a day. I was SO close a few days ago but I just couldn’t get those last 200 words. I’ve been staying up too late and when you’re falling asleep at the computer, it’s time to put the computer up. ;)

I’m just about there now.

There’s a caveat to the resumption of the challenge for tomorrow though. I have to start working my way back into good sleep habits. I’m paying for the lack of them in so many ways. Increased appetite, cravings for sweets, tired eyes, that kind of thing.

Anyway, the point is that I’m still very interested in reaching 6000 words in a day but I also want to not have to work so hard at it. :D

First thing: I need to make sure I’m in a place in my head where I can write freely. I just can’t do this without a better pace. 10 hours and 33 minutes is how long it took me to write the 5,816 words that broke my previous record of 5,758 words in a day. That’s just too much time.

I don’t want to have another 10 hour day anytime in the near future. Seriously, it was rough and I felt very much like all I did was get up Sunday, start writing, and write all day long until I gave up at about 10:30 that night. I know I had times when I was away from the computer, because I only clocked 10 hours and 33 minutes, but I sure can’t remember any of them. It was write, write, write, all day.

Anyway, enough of this ramble. The TL;DR for this is I’m still chasing 6000 words a day, but I’m setting some limits. :)

Goodnight!

Would you believe I’ve written almost 5000 words today?

Lynn

Believe it, because it’s true. I’ve written almost 5000 words today, on the first day that I’ve taken a break from my 6000-words-in-a-day challenge since I started it twelve days ago.

Oh, the irony.

ETA: Scratch that. I have written 5000 words today. 5,100 to be exact.

ETA2: And I came in at 5,816 words for the day which is a new record for me. I also created a personal record for time spent writing: 10 hours and 33 minutes.

Two-thirds of 6000 is 4000 (challenge update)

Lynn

I made it past 4000 words again. But I am done. More than nine hours of writing went into those words and I’m finally just pooped. I need to get on a better pace for this to happen. I’m taking a day off the challenge tomorrow and the next day, then I will try again.

I am still planning to write every day though so don’t go thinking I’ve given that up already. :p

Two-thirds of 6,000 is still not 6,000, especially when you have to delete (challenge update)

Lynn

Well, I’d made it less than two digits away from 4,000 words when it came time to delete some more random pieces of writing at the end of my document. I’m now back down to 3,575 words, after a possible record breaking 8 hours and 39 minutes of writing.

It’s possible I’ve spent that much time in a day writing before, but without records I can’t know for sure. I find it difficult to exceed 50% efficiency when it comes to actual writing time versus time in general and since a full day is 16 hours, more than 8 hours of writing time is actually pretty damn fantastic.

And I have definitely been writing all day, with Gleeo to prove it.

I lose little bits of time here and there to breaks and interruptions. Mostly because I actually can’t sit still for too long before I go stir crazy, and all those five, ten, and twenty minute breaks really add up.

I am not a person who can sit and start typing and look up three hours later and realize it’s been, hey, three hours since I moved.

Frankly, I don’t actually envy the people who can. Too damaging to a person’s health. I’ve managed to get through life writing without suffering any writing or typing related injuries at all. No back troubles, no finger pains, and no butt sores. Life is good. :D

Now, back to work for me. I’m not ready to give up on this today, even though reason tells me I should. :D

Challenge day eleven (some books do not write themselves)

Lynn

This has been a difficult book to write. I’m not sure why. At the moment my brain is trying to resolve a plotting issue that’s driving me crazy.

Time to get up and get started. If things continue as they have I need a good 14 hours of writing to reach 6000 words today.

Yeah. Hahahaha.

Let’s just try for 7.5 hours again but 800 words per hour this time, why don’t we?

Halfway there (challenge update)

Lynn

Before I crashed last night I made it past the halfway point, to just over 3000 words. It took over 7.5 hours of writing to do it. Or, you know, all freaking day in my time. :)

Not sure what the deal is but my pace on this book has been insanely slow.

Still, halfway there is an improvement!

(Seriously, considering how long it took to get 7.5 hours of writing done, I don’t even know if it’s possible for me to reach 10 hours of writing in a day. And if I did, at my current pace, I’d still be 2000 words short!)

Challenge day ten (double digits!)

Lynn

I’ve been writing today, a lot, except it doesn’t really feel that way, because of the afternoon hour and my word count for the day.

I really shouldn’t have gotten up so late.

Task

Start-Date

Start-Time

End-Date

End-Time

Duration

Decimal Duration

Writing

2/10/17

0:00

2/10/17

0:01

0:01

0.016667

Writing

2/10/17

10:00

2/10/17

11:25

1:25

1.416667

Writing

2/10/17

11:30

2/10/17

11:57

0:27

0.45

Writing

2/10/17

11:59

2/10/17

12:20

0:21

0.35

Writing

2/10/17

13:32

2/10/17

14:14

0:42

0.7

Totals

2:56

2.933333

My word count is 1,230.

Meaning my pace is off and it’s going to take a lot of hours today to reach 6,000 words.

I’d better get back to it quick then.

Challenge day nine (yes, I’m still trying)

Lynn

I got up ready to get started writing, but of course I was still having issues with the thing that stopped me last night. It took me hours to get past it this morning.

HOURS.

But I did. Finally.

It’s 7:10 pm and I’ve written 1,093 words today.

Here are my Gleeo time tracker entries. (Super easy to export from my phone to .csv and Dropbox so I can access the file quickly here on the computer, delete a few excess columns, and copy/paste it here.)

Task

Start-Date

Start-Time

End-Date

End-Time

Duration

Decimal Duration

Writing

2/9/17

11:45

2/9/17

12:26

0:41

0.683333

Writing

2/9/17

13:18

2/9/17

13:46

0:28

0.466667

Writing

2/9/17

17:29

2/9/17

18:15

0:46

0.766667

Writing

2/9/17

18:20

2/9/17

18:56

0:36

0.6

Total

2:31

2.516667

Not great, as you can see, but I’ve done worse.

Anyway, the day’s not over and I don’t have to get up early tomorrow, so I’m going to keep going for as long as I can tonight. :D

And as for the thing, well, I can say honestly that I am finally over it and the writing is going pretty well all things considered.

I’m not going to have to scrap the 4000+ words of material I was afraid I’d have to scrap if the pieces of the story didn’t join up where I’d gone back and taken things in a bit of a different direction. I just need to make a few changes to account for that change of direction for the parts that happen afterward that I had already written, and I think it’ll be okay. It’s shouldn’t require much adjustment, just a timing issue mostly.

If not, there’s always the delete key. I refuse to get bogged down at this late date in the story. ;)