My Computer Decided It Wants to Live! Plus a Publishing Update

      

Final version of the cover for
The Storm-Wing
(Watch for publication soon!)

       Wouldn't you know it?  I call for a computer repairman, he's coming out at 8:30 Monday morning -- and immediately my computer decides to begin behaving like it was brand-new!  I have not had a single hiccup since noon on Friday!  Oh, well, I'll go ahead and get it diagnosed.  I just hope the technician doesn't find any fatal flaw, because I really don't want to get a new computer.

 

       Therefore, my silence over the last two days had nothing to do with computer problems.  I've been completing the formatting of The Storm-Wing (v.2 of The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head) and I've uploaded it on CreateSpace.  I had a couple of dinky but pesky problems that took most of yesterday and part of today to solve.  One involved pagination (sigh -- the eternal flaw in Word).  There are quite a few preliminary pages and I wanted them paged a certain way, with small Roman numerals.  And I couldn't get "ii" off a blank page without causing the numbers to disappear from some of the subsequent pages.  Blank pages are not supposed to have numbers on them.  I finally solved the problem -- don't ask me how.
       Then CreateSpace told me my little title page drawing (shown below) didn't have enough DPI.  I was puzzled, because I thought that the t.p. drawings on The Termite Queen were simply copied over from Word and not even put in .jpg format.  It turned out that the problem was the eyes.  I have used a fill containing little dots for the eyes in my cover drawings, but the strange thing with the fill is that it won't change size if you change the size of the drawing.  After a couple of unsuccessful adjustments I just deleted the fill with the dots and made the eyes solid gray.  Then it took the plain drawing without a quibble.

Di'fa'kro'mi the Remembrancer,
narrator of the Labors series

       I'm waiting now for approval to publish.  But I think this time I'm going to order a printed proof copy.  I think that's a good idea, because it was hard to tell in the online mock-up whether the t.p. drawing is going to look right. I'm not in any hurry to publish, anyway, so I don't mind waiting 10 days or so.  In the meantime I can work on the Kindle and Smashwords editions -- I haven't even begun that formatting.  However, it's pretty easy once you've done it a few times.  The only time-consuming aspect is embedding the footnotes in the text.  Then, once all three are available, I'll put up some kind of celebratory special offer!  So stay tuned!