What an unholy day!
For the past week or ten days, “Download Scrivener & figure out how to use it” has been at the top of the to-do list. And day after day after day, one quotidian thing after another has soaked up the hours.
Some of the were very nice quotidian things — frolicking with my friends, spending far more dollars than anyone in their right mind could afford — and others were survival tasks — shopping and cooking and cleaning and yard care and dog care and car care and student care and all that. But today, I thought, was the day.
Five a.m.: up and at ’em!
From: Associate Editor
Sent: Saturday, 11:59 p.m.
To: Editor
Subject: CLS Part I (Revisited) and Part II
Weird! I don’t see the DropBox folder. It [a new set of edits on an article I just returned to the client] was just minor formatting stuff. You probably caught it and if not I can fix it when the author returns the next version.
Uhm…minor formatting stuff? Uhhhmmmm…. Don’t see the Dropbox folder?
Really?
Seriously?
Call up DropBox. Yeah…the folder I uploaded is there. Why can’t she see it? Why, why, why…?
Explore around.
5:30 a.m.: Discover Drop-freaking-Box “is not running?”
Not. Running. NOT? RUNNING?
6:00 a.m.: “DropBox is not running” turns out to be a pretty common issue. There’s a fix: it’s complicated as hell and requires you to know how to write code for the Mac.
6:30 a.m.: Maybe the free space is about full. I’ve been using DB like a handy-dandy all-purpose hard drive. Haven’t backed up for a long time. And it’s kind of a mess. I need to clean this up and then figure out how to get the copy to the client and the kid but while we’re at it this means she hasn’t gotten any of the other stuff I’ve thought I was uploading to her.
Delete junk files. Move old stuff to “Documents” on Mac hard drive. Organize surviving files. Copy to flashdrives. Copy to hard disk. Clone to other computer’s hard disk. Back up to Time Machine.
Do battle with DropBox. Try a work-around that looks like a possibility and demands null coding skill. Takes for effing-ever. Doesn’t work.
Eventually, it develops that shutting down the computer and rebooting causes both terminals to reconnect with DropBox. Looks like the system is working.
E-mail the client and the side-kick to let them know all is well. Five minutes later, DropBox goes down again.
Nine and a half hours later, I got up from the computer. DB was still half-functional, the dogs hadn’t been walked, the pool needed to be cleaned, the duck was taunting the dogs, and I hadn’t had a thing to eat.
Scrivener was (once again) not downloaded. Nothing (once again) was learned about about how it works. Nary a document was loaded into this worthy program. Not a line was formatted for Kindle.
My career as a soft-core pornographer is doomed. {sigh}
Returned to the office after walking the dogs. An e-mail from “Mom” of Maybe Someone Should Write That Down awaited. A “like: from a Writers P&S post with a machine-generated “check out this post”recommend. And…well..
By golly! Check out this post!
Mom reports on a WordPress product called Pressbooks.com: This thing doesn’t just create e-book formats. It also does hard-copy layouts! The thing has got layout templates — some of them very nice templates.
It looks like you can go straight to the chore at hand — formatting something that’s already written, edited, and ready to go — rather than having to go through the process of learning how to learn Scrivener’s whole “writing” and organizing program and then figuring out how to export something written in all new code into .mobi et alii, and then hire someone to do the print-on-demand layout. Or figure out how to do that myself, too.
This has the look of a piece of cake. Maybe even a coconut cream pie!