Year: 2017

1,063 words and time ended 7:13 pm

Lynn

Today was better than yesterday and that’s good enough for me!

DAILY ACCOUNTABILITY

Session 1 : 234 words
Session 2 : 92 words
Session 3 : 174 words
Session 4 : 244 words
Session 5 : 46 words
Session 6 : 177 words
Session 7 : 7 words
Session 8 : 80 words
Session 9 : 8 words
Session 10 : 149 words
Session 11 : -320 words
Session 12 : 172 words

For 1,063 total words.

As with yesterday, all sessions were 20 minutes.

I’m not surprised it’s taking a while to relearn how to focus on writing. Focus in quantity has always been difficult for me. I do seem to have episodes of hyperfocus, but to be honest, they almost always accompany things like reorganizing my file system or troubleshooting a problem I want fixed right now.

One thing I have noticed: It’s funny how often I don’t notice my bladder problems until I sit down to write and end up with my sessions constantly interrupted.

Removed duplicate text

Lynn

I followed up on last night’s plan to do at least half of the minimum number of writing sessions before I allowed myself any internet access. I did six!

DAILY ACCOUNTABILITY

Session 1 (20 min): 119 words
Session 2 (20 min): 37 words
Session 3 (20 min): 103 words
Session 4 (20 min): 2 words
Session 5 (20 min): 98 words
Session 6 (20 min): -240 words
Session 7 (20 min): 71 words
Session 8 (20 min): 26 words
Session 9 (20 min): 128 words
Session 10 (20 min): 69 words
Session 11 (20 min): 96 words
Session 12 (20 min): 185 words — Of course this was my highest word count of the day. And I’m too tired to keep it up because it’s 11:58 pm and I need sleep!

My aim for all these is 250 words each. So yeah, I’m a little off the mark.

Today’s blog post title is from a note to myself on the last session I did before I broke for lunch.

The note refers to the fact that I found a 332 word chunk of text that I needed to delete, half of it a portion of a scene I copied instead of moved to an earlier place in the story. I must have forgotten to delete it after the fact, but I usually just move the text, so I’m not sure what I was thinking when I did it.

The exciting thing is that to end up at -24 words, I had to have written more than my 250 words in that last session so here’s hoping I can keep that up now that I’m back from my late (2 pm) lunch.

Well, that’s a bummer. I realized after the fact, once I’d finished session 7 that -24 was a misprint. I should have written -240!

It’s been proven a sad fact that four hours of writing takes me all day and I have no idea why or how that happens. Writing everything down doesn’t even seem to help. I can find the big things; it’s the little bits of time that just seem to disappear.

11:23 pm and too few words again today

Lynn

I’ve managed only 2 of my 12 sessions today (20 minutes each). Part of the blame goes to my panic at realizing I had ruined the opening of my book by overworking it. I had to pull up backup copy 9 to get the old opening back. I’m currently at backup copy 20, and backup copy 9 was made on 6/11 (today is 6/24).

This all came to my attention last night when I sent my document to my Fire and read through what I’d written. My first thought was uh oh. So I pulled up the old version that I just happened to have sent to my Fire a while back and read the opening of it.

The old version was much better than the new. Miles better. Leagues better.

I was not happy to realize this.

I got up this morning knowing I’d have to fix it.  I’ve obsessed over things I didn’t need to obsess over today in an effort to avoid thinking about this.

I did a “compare documents” in Word to see just how bad it was. It was bad. More red than black, and ouch, I didn’t really need to see that.

It’s 11:59 pm and I should really go to bed, but I think I’m going to try to do a few more sessions so I don’t have this hanging over my head tomorrow. Then again… it’s late and I just want to put this day behind me, so maybe I won’t.

As for tomorrow, I think I’m going to forbid the internet until I’ve done at least half my minimum sessions. That’s only 6 and at 20 minutes each, comes to only 2 hours. I can surely hold out that long!

Now, time to get out of my own way and write this damn book without agonizing over every word. :D

DAILY ACCOUNTABILITY

Session 1 (20 min): -25 words (meaning I deleted more than I wrote)
Session 2 (20 min): 8 words

June 23 session notes

Lynn

So today hasn’t been the kind of writing day I’d hoped.

At the end of session 5, I am sitting at 12 words for the day. It hardly seems possible but the problem is that I spent so much time reworking what I had for chapters 1 and 2 that I went through four sessions before I dug myself out of negative numbers (I deleted more than I wrote).

Then I left for a while. I stayed gone longer than I meant to but I needed to get away for a while, because I was starting to hate this story.

Prioritizing my daily writing is a commitment to myself I need to keep, so I can’t let this happen again tomorrow. But tomorrow I hope to be up and about earlier after a good night’s sleep. I definitely won’t be staying up until the early morning hours tonight.

1 hour and 40 minutes of writing today isn’t great, but it’s a start.

I’d stay up and do the rest of the sessions if I didn’t need so badly to get my sleep patterns back into some kind of order so I can start early each day.

As much as I hate to admit it, because I do like staying up late, I am a morning person. I wake up before 7 most mornings and staying up until 2 am just doesn’t give me the kind of sleep I need to be at my best the next day, even if I manage to go back to sleep. It’s never truly restful once I’ve woken up to the sun.

So that’s the update for today.

Sessions logs are below.

Session

Words

WPH

1

-87

-261

2

2

6

3

9

27

4

12

36

5

76

228

A plan for the future

Lynn

I’m tired of lowercase titles. And yet, I continue to use them. :)

Today I have a plan.

20 minute blocks x 12 of them @ ~750 words an hour = 3,000 words

Yep. That’s my plan.

In fact, it’s my plan for every day for the indefinite future. I’ve been giving some thought to the need for change and some direction for the rest of my year. Those thoughts led me to realize I need to expect more from myself; it’s the only way to grow. I don’t want to be stagnant. A moribund life is not the life I want, despite the fact that my brain is all about strolling down easy street.

I made a note to myself last night. It’s important.

Write for fun! Do more than that though. Make time for other stuff. Don’t drag it out.

I need to write with focus. I need to focus on writing. I need to meet my goals early so I can do other things. Then as a reward, if I want, I can write more later. But always, I need to remember that the only way to meet my goals is to actually prioritize writing and do it first. I get to do it first and save all the stuff in my life that I don’t really want to do for later.

What I’ve typically done, though, is dawdle until I feel pressured to do these other things at the expense of what little time I’ve left myself for writing, because there are immediate consequences if I don’t. (Bills! Dishes! Laundry! Talking to relatives and friends! All of these have consequences for me that I’m not willing to accept if I don’t do them.)

I’ve always felt as if writing daily is a priority, and therefore I feel all the guilt one feels when one doesn’t do that important thing one should have done, but when it comes down to it, I haven’t treated it that way at all.

That’s the big thing I need to change about myself. That’s what I’m going to be focused on changing.

Write in the morning

Reach my word count goal

Or at least do the number of sessions I’ve decided I should be doing at a minimum each day

Then worry about the rest of life and whatever I want to do with my time after that, even if it’s just more writing

Simple. :D

Too much time reading for clues

Lynn

The blog post titles are a lot easier to come up with now, and they aren’t any more obscure than they were before, so that’s a win. :)

Today’s word counts

Session # Words WPH
1 46 131
2 84 240
3 32 91
4 99 283
5 57 163
6 61 174
7 166 474
8 239 683
9  72 206
10 0

Today’s title comes from a note on my session log. In it, I’m laying the blame for my low word counts in my first three sessions on the fact that I spent a lot of time during them reading through my previous books looking for clues to characterization and plot.

Yes, that’s my handwriting. Could be better, but it is what it is! :)

Unfortunately, my word counts didn’t improve a lot after I stopped doing that.

I don’t record session logs in my spreadsheet—there’s really no room for it—so writing them down seems like a good way to start paying attention to just how often I’m meeting my goal number of sessions.

I could put them in OneNote, and I have in the past kept up with sessions in my journals, but I really don’t like that. Also, the logs get kind of lost in the midst of all my ramblings, so… this seemed like something I wanted to try.

I’ve devoted one of my favorite notebooks to tracking them and I’m loving how accountable it makes me feel to write down the number of sessions I want to do. I can’t stand the idea of wasting that nice paper, so I’ve felt compelled to fill those slots today! Only two more to go before I call it a day.

Also, yesterday I didn’t find time to write a post because I actually got started writing really late and didn’t use timers. I wrote 813 words yesterday—on the wrong book.

Okay, so I’m planning to write that book next, so it’s not exactly wrong that I spent time on it, and I admit, I’ve needed a breakthrough for the opening of that book for a good long while and I had one last night, but I really need to finish this other book first so I do feel a little unhappy that I managed to write 813 words but that none of them were for the right book!

4:52 pm and a 2,800 word goal

Lynn

Today started off well enough. I finished organizing (cleaning out) my music directory. Doing that was a better use of my time than (re)organizing my email again, but that’s not possible any more because sometime last month I deleted all my email. I saved a few particular pieces of interest to a few relevant folders and I absolutely did delete thousands of emails. They’ll never be seen again. I kept only one backup, stored in an inaccessible location, with the intent to delete it at year’s end. I don’t doubt that I will too.

But that’s all beside the point. The point is that I need to write some real words today and I’m really getting tired of failing.

So I’m not going to fail anymore.

Missing a goal once in a while is no big deal and doesn’t feel anything like failure. Missing a goal every single time is not a good thing. There are repercussions to that kind of repetitive failure. I’m done with that. I just can’t be that person, that kind of writer, any longer.

So, despite the fact that it is now 4:59 pm, I’m going to sit my ass down and I’m going to write 2,800 words this evening.

To make it easy, I’m going to break it down into 21 minute sessions. I’ll do as many as it takes, but I’m planning for 10.

During at least one of those sessions, I want to reach the best word count per hour I’ve ever reached, and I’m going to reach it by having fun with this damn book. I love the characters. There’s no reason it should be so damn hard to have fun.

Now, I’m going to go trim my fingernails so I can get my first session started.

Session # Cumulative Words WPH
1 29 82.85714
2 54 77.14286
3 72 68.57143
4 82 58.57143
5 142 81.14286
6 251 119.5238
7 285 116.3265
8 0
9 0
10 0

Okay, so I’m calling it a night. It’s 12:29 am and I’m disappointed at my speeds tonight. I spent a lot of time redoing a chapter but I’m glad I did it, because I like what I’ve got now better than what I had.

I’m 3 sessions short of the 10 I wanted to do. I’m also short a ton of words. On the other hand, I totally don’t feel like a failure, because I literally did the best I could tonight. I took short breaks when I had to, and I focused hard when I wrote. I just can’t always predict what kind of writing day I’m going to have. This was one of those days.

So all in all, I’m satisfied. But one thing for sure: I’m going to do better tomorrow, because I’m going to start a lot earlier and I’m going to put in the extra sessions if I come up short on word counts like I did this evening.

But 12:33 pm is too late to keep going if I want to get some sleep tonight. The one thing I can count on is waking up at 7 in the morning and not being able to get back to sleep. I need to go to bed before it gets any later.

See you here again tomorrow.

F2 to BIOS: Save and Exit

Lynn

I have no idea how to craft blog post titles, so for the foreseeable future I’m going to input whatever I happen to be thinking or whatever I see on my notebook beside me as my title. No one reads these things anyway, so yeah. I get to do what I want. :D

The titles I was using before sucked anyway. I’ve only rarely been able to go back and find something I wrote in a post based on my recollection of the title. I have a few posts that make sense, most are just notes about my writing progress for the day and random thoughts that collected and found their way out of my head and onto the page as I made those updates.

So why “F2 to BIOS: Save and Exit?”

Simple really. I installed Lubuntu on a slow netbook and an old Pentium D desktop formerly running Vista. Gotta stay on top of those security issues since everything I do to make a living is stored on my computers. Vista was alright as far as I’m concerned, but Windows has stopped supporting it with security updates so it was time to move on. The computer still has a lot of life left in it for the kind of use I give it, though, so I decided Lubuntu would be just the ticket after having installed it on the netbook. It’ll run Libre Office, which is relatively compatible with Word. It’ll also run Sigil, GIMP, Jutoh, Calibre, Firefox, Thunderbird, and VLC, so I saw no reason to go with a heftier install since I actually quite liked the Lubuntu interface. (More than quite liked, to be honest. I think it’s great.)

Of course, all that meant I needed to go into BIOS on the machine in question and update the boot order to get the new OS installed. Hence my note to myself on the tablet sitting beside me: F2 to BIOS: Save and Exit has Boot Override option.

The update went great. Both computers are running like new machines. Fast and responsive, and I’m really liking that. Next up: figure out how to get my new Lubuntu machines back on the network so I can make backups to them from my Windows 7 baby. :-)

Today’s challenge progress

Lynn

The writing isn’t going well today. I set out a challenge for myself this morning and I’ve fallen so far behind that I’m not seeing a way to catch up. On the other hand, I see no reason not to continue for as long as I can and see just where I do end up.

This chart is how I’m keep track of the challenge. The numbered columns (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) stand for the session number, and the numbers below are my word counts.

 Sessions ~To Go~ 1 2 3 4 5
5 1,272 3 55 84 86
5 1,500
5 1,500
5 1,500
5,772

Since I’m aiming for 300 words each, you can see I’m very far off the mark today. I’ve had to do a lot of reading of previous books to look up stuff and that’s really slowed me down. I’ve also done some editing of previously written stuff for this book and that has slowed me down. And then there’s the fact that I’ve just not been good at making myself sit and write the sessions like I should be doing today. The fact that I haven’t even finished the first block of sessions says that quite clearly.

Anyway, I’m not going to linger over this since I do want to keep the sessions going while I’m having a little success at that part at least. I’ll update again later. :)

ETA: I ended with 228 words. Seriously. I don’t know if I’m ever going to learn how to be a steady, consistent writer.

An experiment and a challenge: 6,000 words today

Lynn

I had a plan for today.

Aiming for 3, 7, 7, 3 x 21, 300 words every 21 m

Then I realized I was getting started much later than I needed to for my original plan to work the way I wanted. It’s 11:03 am.

I need a new plan.

I’m going to stick with the 4 blocks but swap up the number of sessions for each one.

5 1,500
5 1,500
5 1,500
5 1,500
 Aiming for: 6,000

This is both a challenge and an experiment. 21 minute sessions seem to be a good length for me and doing a few of them in a row doesn’t feel like a push I can’t handle. Doing four blocks of them might be, but I’m not going to know if I don’t try.  I really want to reach this 6,000 words in a day milestone.

In fact, it’s part of a bigger challenge I want to set to finish this book I’m working on in 9 days. Today is the test to see if I’m anywhere near ready to take on something like that.

I’d say I need to work up to it, but I binge write and take very long breaks between books, so it just isn’t realistic to expect me to work up to it by writing every day a little more than the day before. I’m ready to accept this about myself and try to make the most of my ability to dive into something wholeheartedly and become a little obsessed until I’m done. That’s my real strength and I’m ready to work with it instead of against it. :)

My next post will contain my updates on today’s challenge.

Poor little kitty

Lynn

A stray, starving cat showed up in my back yard yesterday.

She looks much better than she feels, because what she feels like is a half-pound bag of bones. (If she’s even a half-pound. I’ve had blocks of cheese that feel heavier than her.)

Anyway, I fed her, a little, and then a little more, and a little more. I was most worried that she would make herself sick eating too much too fast, and I was right. Mostly I succeeded, but she did get a tiny bit sick by the time evening came. Today she’s doing well, and I think she’ll probably hang around a while. She’s a friendly little cat. As long as she stays, I’ll feed her. But indoor animals are not for me, so she’s definitely staying outside. I’ve put a bed out for her and a box on its side up on my deck where she’ll be safest from the predators lurking in the woods. She seems to like it. :)

I’ll add a picture later.

I hope she improves–I’d love to see her fatten up a bit. I can feel what feels like every bone in her little body when I pet her.

So how is 2017’s “no goals, no timers, no schedules” plan going?

Lynn

I’ve taken a lot of time off writing lately. I don’t know what’s to blame, but I’m going to take a stab in the dark and say I might have set myself up for this.

So how is 2017’s “no goals, no timers, no schedules” plan going?

Let’s keep this simple: Not well. At all.

What does that mean for the rest of 2017? I’m really not sure. I’ve spent months now at loose ends and I’m not liking it. My plan for no plan was supposed to take the pressure off and let me recapture my love for writing. What’s happened is that I’ve realized that without something behind the scenes pushing me I am very content to write only when I’m desperate to get something down.

Doesn’t happen as often as I had hoped. :o

Then again, I can look back at my history, when I was writing entirely for fun, and see that I didn’t write all that much or that often, and when I did, it was because something “fun” like NaNoWriMo was going on or I had fandom buddies egging me on. (I say egging, but around here, it sounds much more like agging which isn’t even a word, but that’s the south for you.)

Anyway, it’s time to end the break and do something to get started again. I guess that’s one experiment I can call done and done.

Might be time to take up the 6,000 words in a day challenge again. I’m going to think about it.

On vacation!

Lynn

Not that I’ve gone anywhere, but today I decided what I was going to call this unexpected break of mine—something without negative connotations, a name that’ll help me fight off the guilt I don’t need to feel for taking some time for myself without stressing over what I “should” be doing.

What I decided was that I was on vacation. :) I don’t take vacations often enough as it is, so instead of feeling guilty about not feeling like writing, I’m counting this time as vacation time.

Now, back to Midsomer Murders and the “Days of Misrule.” ;) As an introverted homebody, this is the best kind of vacation.

Building better writing habits

Lynn

I’ve had a slow start to the year and that’s not what I want, so now that I’ve caught up some publishing stuff I needed to get caught up, I’m turning my focus back to writing.

I want to write more this year. Write more words, write more books, write more often.

Unfortunately, my word counts this year aren’t that great.

1/1/17 1/31/17 3,507
2/1/17 2/28/17 22,886
3/1/17 3/31/17 689

It’s time to focus on writing more by writing more often. :)

I’m going to spend some time and energy trying to build some better writing habits.

Taking a break from the big challenge

Lynn

I’m just updating to mention that I’ve put the challenge to reach 6,000 words in a day on hold for a while. I might try it out on specific days, but as a daily thing, I’m putting the brakes on it. I need to concentrate on getting back into a daily writing habit and that takes a more relaxed attitude than I have when I’m chasing something like 6,000 words in a day. :)

Made it to the end with the web reading challenge

Lynn

February has come and gone, and I’m pretty happy with how I did with my web reading challenge. I cut out a lot of infotainment reading for more than a month.

Here’s what I think I learned. It might not be what I actually learned, but I don’t have any real way to distinguish. ;)

I didn’t write more fiction.

I didn’t read more fiction.

Not being able to read anything I wanted frustrated me.

I enjoyed writing more without all the other writers’ voices in my head telling me how I should run my career.

I got up earlier some days, but some days it didn’t seem to make any difference at all. I just found other things to read in bed.

I realized I mostly did the clicking and refreshing when I needed a break anyway. I didn’t concentrate better, or make better use of my time.

Habits take a ridiculously long time to break and if I want to break them I’m going to have to find an alternative behavior to cultivate into a habit instead of just trying to stop doing something.

That’s it, really. I don’t think it benefited me in the way I had hoped.

So come March 1, I ended the restrictions and I still managed to finish the work I needed to finish just fine. Some of it took a lot longer than I planned but clicking and refreshing articles, forums, blogs, and news sources had nothing to do with it at all.

In fact, I haven’t noticed anything different at all since I ended the restrictions, except a marked lowering of my frustration levels. (I was getting pretty frustrated there in the last few weeks of February.) Part of me wonders if this mindless reading is a coping mechanism for me, when stress starts to get to me. Possible, I think.

Here’s one other thing I learned but only after I let myself go back to clicking and refreshing: if I’m in a working mood, the clicking and refreshing stops. What this all means is that the clicking and refreshing is a symptom of whatever it is causing me not to want to write, not the cause.

That’s something worth knowing. :)

Anyway, consider this challenge done. It was a success, but not in the way I hoped.

 

 

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.