Seeing Things, part 14; The Chime and the Clapping

Dear Blog Friends;

Thanks to everyone who has downloaded my novel since I posted it on Tuesday night. Double thanks to those of you who have read it or started to read it.  It’s weird, I have been talking about this book for a long time, but now that it’s out there in the real world, I feel oddly self-conscious.  Like, how are people going to judge me, now that they’ve seen my novel?  It’s not my only novel, of course, but it was the first one.  I haven’t had that feeling in a long time.

I was thinking today how I wish that life were like a game show. On a game show, if you get something right, there’s a chime, and people clap.  In real life, you don’t have the instant response to let you know if you made the right decision. Sometimes, you don’t find out for years, or at all.  It’s hard to know what decision is the right one.  How long should I keep SEEING THINGS free?  Forever?  Until a thousand downloads?  Until September first? Until I put it up on Kindle?  I’m not sure what the right answer is. I may never know. Nobody knows for sure. It’s a frontier out here in epub land.

At some point, I would like to consider a print version (besides just those of you who downloaded the pdf and then printed it out.) At some point, I would like to consider an audiobook version.  Right now, however, I am just working on TREEMAKER, the sequel.  Right now I am cleaning it up for formatting errors.  I have the background of the cover made up; I did it today.

I checked SEEING THINGS out on rtf today, and on my dad’s computer, the line indents were missing.  Smashwords style guide says that this is because I used a tab indent or five spaces instead of fixing it on the style guide.  This is not what I did. I read Smashwords style guide three or four times and followed it slavishly, so I don’t know what is going wrong. I also don’t know why epub is weird looking, or why I got those “Quot end” mistakes in the javascript version.  Not only did I nuclear format it (copy it into notepad, recopy it into word, re-add the formatting carefully, one click at a time) but I went through the entire manuscript, deleting superfluous paragraph breaks and spaces, just in the name of perfectionism.

What I have to keep remembering is that perfectionism has no place here.  The perfect is the enemy of the done. The perfect exists only on my hard drive, and can’t be read by, and hopefully enjoyed by, other people. So I’m sorry to those of you whose formatting errors make the manuscript hard to read. I will try to fix them, but if I can’t, I can’t.

Peace out.  And please keep informing me of the formatting errors, especially if you get one (or don’t get one) that someone else commented on.

Kater