So…the bright idea I had to post individual chapters of The Complete Writer here at the Plain & Simple Press blog and then consolidate them in a single web page dedicated to the book…how’d that go?
Fairly hilariously. As it develops, WordPress has its limits. One of them is book-length documents. About the time we got to chapter 19 — all told, only about 33,000 words, a mere third the length of a typical nonfiction book — WordPress set its digital heels in the sand and refused to proceed further. It would not accept any more links to chapters. And it slowed to the speed of a stampeding snail.
Being an experienced Cox customer, of course I assumed this was a connectivity issue. Cox does a number on you every time you turn around, unless you’re a multi-zillion-dollar corporation. Usually, in time these antics pass.
Not so, the Resistance. Finally I had recourse to our Web Guru, Grayson Bell. Aghast at what he found on the TCW page, he explained that there IS, after all, a limit.
So we had to dream up a workaround.
How’s about I post the stuff as a PDF? said I.
As one PDF? Not so much! said he.
Fortunately, the book falls into not one, not two, not three, but nine sections comprising 48 chapters. So, I proposed posting nine PDFs, one after another as each is completed, each PDF to contain one section of the magnum opus.
This seems to work. So far, anyhow. We now have three PDFs online at The Complete Writer‘s page, containing all the copy that had been published as 19 consecutive chapters. The page is un-choked, de-stalled, fully operative once again. Whether it will stay that way remains to be seen. But for the nonce: it works.
You could cause angels to sing, Dear Reader, if you would please go to the Complete Writer work-in-progress page, download one or more of the PDFs linked to the first three sections, and then let me know if they come over to you all right and if they look OK when you open them.
No doubt there are typos and weirdnesses in them. It took two and a half-hours to convert 48 chapters into nine PDFs, and of course during the process Word decided to get weird (as usual), adding still more hassle to a ditzy process of the type I truly hate doing. How any human being can make a living as a computer tech without being driven straight to the bourbon bottle or the meth pipe escapes me.
Presumably, the same thing will have to be done with If You’d Asked and Ella’s Story. But not now. Totally not now…