Ditz

God i hate it when i sit down to the computer and it won’t come on and then i have to fiddle with it to make it work. It’s just another manifestation of the DITZ that is my life.

I am so tired of ditz I could barf. Wonder-Accountant laughs when she reviews my labors, and then she remarks that what I do is the English-major’s answer to bookkeeping. Mind-numbing.

Have spent the last…what? Two weeks? Three weeks, off and on?…reformatting the forthcoming book on writing & publishing.

Formatting a manuscript for print publication is ditz on steroids. I labored and labored and labored and finally got the thing into the template for a 7-x-10-inch paperback. This, because the standard paperback trade-book trim size, about 5.5 x 8.5 inches, produces an ungodly length of 445 pages.

Printing costs for a 445-page paperback are, shall we say, bracing. There is NO effing way I can sell this thing for a profit. So I ordered up a larger template, which yields a mere 316 pages.

Unfortunately, I neglected one small detail before I sent away for that template and before I formatted 77,351 words in the fvcker. I failed to ask the PoD supplier just what he would charge to print  a 7-x-10-inch book.

You wanna talk “ungodly”? Lemme tell you about “ungodly.”

So…after I’d done all the formatting and went to upload the PDF to the PoD guy’s site, that’s when I noticed that the cost of one book, though the larger trim size was more than 100 pages shorter, would pass beyond prohibitive.

The upshot of that was, I realized, that I would have to redo the entire book, again, in the smaller size.

This entails a staggering amount of mind-numbing, brain-banging, head-slamming ditzy layout work, because when you reduce the size you change the page breaks. When you change the page breaks, you change the chapter lengths. When you change the chapter lengths you screw up the opening pages. When you reset the opening pages, you screw up every single page and every goddamn image that comes afterward. When you manage, finally, to get all those things fixed (and it takes hour after hour after hour after hour after hour of horrible ditzy frustrating hateful work to make them right and you have to do quite a lot of it over and over and OVER), when you finally have all those things fixed, then you have to rebuild the table of contents (upon which you stupidly did a custom job) and the index (nine pages of double columns).

Meanwhile, I’d sent the MS over to the e-book formatter, where it was to be converted to Kindle and ePub versions. Pretty quick he starts e-mailing: did you really mean to write?… is this what you intended?… is this an error?…

Wayyyy too many queries are coming over from this guy, whose job is not to proofread. So I get into the file and start reading and realize HOLY SH!T. The thing is swimming in typos and bêtises.

Now I realize I need to go through the entire thing from beginning to end a-fvcking-gain, once I get it poured back into its original 5.5 x 8.5 size and formatted sorta right.

I run Word’s spell-checker on the content, and I fvckin’ cannot believe it. Wyrd finds dozens of errors, many of them very obvious. How the HELL did this stuff get through?

I have no idea. All I know is that I now have to go through 445 pages, after entering Wyrd’s corrects, and proofread line by line by ditzy line, searching out the remaining errors.

There are, it develops, a lot of them. I’ve lost track of how much time it’s taken to plod through this thing.

Meanwhile, mind you: I have paying work. The stupid-stuff has to get done around that.

And I’ll tellya: the stupid-stuff gives me serious pause. If I’m making this many errors in my own golden words, how many errors am I making in my clients’ dross?

I certainly seem to be instilling a lot of stupid mistakes in these blog posts of late. So…it’s reasonable to suspect the same high quality of perfection applies to my customers’ work.

Shee-ut.

All of this fun is on the side, of course.

Just now we have 475 pages of academic educationese flowing in-house. It will take all three of us working full-out to get this thing ready to go to the designer by the deadline, January 15.

As a practical matter, we have about a snowball’s chance. That won’t stop us from trying, though.

This thing is a compendium of contributions from a couple dozen authors. Though (as usual), they’ve been told to use a specific style manual, some have submitted their stuff in APA style, some in Chicago, and some even in (incredibly) MLA. Some, probably, have engaged their own idea of what oughta look nice on the printed page.

Untangling this incredible mess entails…? You got it: DITZ.

Oh, god is it a ditzy job.

I’ve done two of the four articles that came in and could have handled another one today. But we have a whole weekend and two other people working on the damn things, so I thought…what th’hell…I’ll try to make some more progress on the book layout.

Made progress, all right: toward pulling all my hair out.

Sometimes I ask myself why am i doing this? I hate this sh!t.

But then there’s the question of what else would I be doing?

Stocking shelves at WalMart? Yeah: I’d get paid better. Probably put my back out, though.

Walking the dogs? How many hours per day can you walk the dogs?

So far I’ve made no money on this enterprise. But hope springs eternal: with the current project, I’m hoping I can sell my services to continuing ed programs and community colleges to advise similarly deluded souls on how to become Writers with a Capital W. To whatever seminars, classes, and online hoo-ha’s I can wangle, I will bring these books. And thereby I hope, at last, to sell a few of my self-published efforts.

Sounds almost like a viable idea, doesn’t it? We must bear in mind, though, that if an idea is viable, I can kill it with a glance. I’m like Medusa. All the idea has to do is look at my head and it keels over in its tracks.

 Really. I should be spending my son’s patrimony driving around the country in an RV.

Image: I, Sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11814743