Last Thorns

I can actually feel the last days of this 9-month-long project ticking down. It’s refreshing and necessary and kind of sad. I can see the finish line, I just need to reach and claw a bit longer to get across it. Here is my first unofficial timeline estimate: 10 days until printer. Just 10 days until it is out of my hands and will magically become a finished thing. I am just sure I’ll miss working on the book once it is done. Of course, holding a copy in my hand should quell some of that, but the act of working on a project that is basically completely self governed is pretty amazing. I am not even using a self-publishing house. I am going straight from author to printer. (I am not a big fan of middlemen.)

The final thorns are mostly minor. I ordered an ISBN today (woot!). That was weird and made everything feel kind of official. Then I attempted a bit of the last formatting steps. I really thought I would be able to format this whole puppy in MS Word. I called my printer and got all the details on margins, bleeds and set everything up splendidly. Problem is, I have apparently maxed out MS Word’s margin, section and footer capabilities. I need about 5 sections to be full bleed (no footer, margins, header or any white space on the page) so I can cover it with photos. Word doesn’t like to do that more than once per document, apparently. In my version anyway. I guess you learn something every day.

So one of my final thorns will be finding a layout program that allows this sort of thing AND exports to PDF in the format that my printer needs.

But this is all small apples. After what it took to get this far, ain’t no formatting issue gonna stop this girl.