Progress report

Did five more chapters of the Tribulations large-print layout—it went quicker this time with less drama, because I realized that part of the problem is that Scribus doesn’t automatically put soft returns after em-dashes. That’s always been A Thing with Scribus layouts, but it is especially a thing when the text is 18 points! I just kept an eye out for that issue when I was laying the text out, and I wound up only having to fix one after the layout was done (which didn’t screw anything up).

I’m totally not the most-advanced Scribus user out there (or any layout software, to be honest), but I’m wondering if there’s some way to set the preferences so that an em-dash and a hyphen are treated the same way—it would probably save me some time to figure that one out.

Progress report

Got some decent sleep, and lo and behold, the things that were causing me such problems were fixed super-easily today! Sleep: An actual miracle cure!

I ordered a new proof of the trade paperback. I’m kind of thinking there will be another because it’s kind of hard to know if you put the chapter ornaments in the right place without an actual book to look at.

ETA: I decided to resume work on the large-print edition—whew! I finished laying out the first five chapters, and then basically on a whim I proofed them. And then I realized that, oh, yes, one must proof a layout every few chapters, especially with the large-print edition, because I very nearly lost a page—I managed to avoid having to lay out a couple of chapters again from scratch, but it was very close thing.

Progress report

I got the proof of the Tribulations trade paperback yesterday, and there’s the gazillion little things I want to noodle with on the cover, plus (and I feel very silly about this) I forgot to put chapter ornaments in the layout. It’s a funny thing, right? But the earlier books had little black-and-white portals to indicate breaks within the chapter, and without them—well, for starters, it’s just a bit sad, but also there were a number of places where I actually thought a new chapter was going to start on the next page, and then it didn’t, and that confused me. So I am sprinkling in the little portals anon.

Except that I didn’t really get enough sleep last night, and while I feel like I can and have done certain fixes, others are too hard when I’m tired. So I’m calling it quits for today.

Eyes Wide Shut

I finally saw Eyes Wide Shut last night, and wow, I have many thoughts. So many that I actually came over here to rant about it, and I haven’t done that for ages!

I would say that, overall, it’s not a very good movie—it’s slow (Kubrick!) and the characters aren’t especially engaging (more on that in a bit). However, there’s the glimmer of what could have been a good movie in it, which I guess is why I feel compelled to blather.

(And I shall blather in a highly spoilery fashion, so be warned.)

I’d say that this article sums up what Eyes Wide Shut does well: It is about class, money, and sexual exploitation. I feel like it’s strongest when it adheres to these themes—I particularly liked how it wound up, with the main character being told that, yeah, somebody died, but here’s a little story you can tell yourself to remain comfortable, and who cares even if we killed her, she was a nobody who was going to die anyway. It’s the essence of privilege served up on a platter, and I appreciated that he didn’t just swallow it whole. (Growth!)

Buuuut…. We’re gonna get into what it doesn’t do well.

It’s anachronistic, Part I. According to Wikipedia, the movie was based on a story written in the 1920s, set even earlier. “Kubrick obtained the filming rights for [the story] the 1960s, considering it a perfect text for a film adaptation about sexual relations.”

Unfortunately, the movie came out in 1999, and sexual knowledge, particularly in regard to women, had changed in the intervening decades. In the movie (and apparently the story) the main character is a man who is determined to cheat on his wife because he has learned that she had a sexual fantasy about leaving for another man. Once. Which she didn’t act on. Also, she had a sex dream.

OK? So, you’re an educated man—a medical doctor, even!—in 1999, you’ve been married for NINE YEARS, you have a kid, and…you lose your shit because your wife once had an escapist sexual fantasy and a sex dream.

I can see that in the 1920s or even the 1960s. I could maybe see it in 1999 if the man was very young and had been raised in a fundamentalist community or something. But there is literally no reason a 30-something man in 1999 should be shocked—shocked!—to discover that his wife has a fantasy life that is sexual in nature. Especially not a fucking doctor who has been married for a while—give me a break. (Did he get his M.D. from Liberty University or something?)

Setting the movie in 1999 made it very hard for me to get invested in the main character, because in that context he’s an idiot and a terrible husband, and I have trouble caring about The Adventures of an Immature Dipshit.

It’s anachronistic, Part II. Remember how they had a kid? Sometimes the movie forgets! It’s kind of like the DA’s family in Billions (only watched the first season, not watching the second) where the child magically vanishes after the witching hour, or maybe they put a padlock on the outside of the poor kid’s door. These people have a LOT more privacy in the bedroom than any parent I know, let’s put it that way.

The wife isn’t a very coherent character, either, which also feels dated—basically, she’s a collection of stereotyped female roles. She gets the action going in the first part of the movie by spending all her time drunk or stoned, because heaven forfend that a woman have meaningful agency. She magically sobers up for the second part of the movie so she can spend all her time piously being a Good Mom while her husband is out trying to cheat on her. (He almost never Dads, by the way, so add being a shitty father to the list of reasons why it’s hard for me to care about him.)

The sexual exploitation doesn’t stop with the characters. The last line in that movie? Oh, come on—you can practically see Kubrick rubbing one out.

There’s a lot of nudity in the movie, too, which is fine with me when it’s in the context of an orgy which (believe it or not) is actually really key to the plot and one of the better scenes. But can be jarringly gratuitous. Like, when the doctor’s patient gets topless for him to use a stethoscope? Seriously? I don’t remember ever being asked to do that. If that scene was supposed to be showing the main character as an inappropriate and shitty doctor, it should have been handled differently—the way it was shot was just: BOOBIES!!!

(The whole argument the doctor and his wife have about breast exams was just ridiculous, too. Clearly no one involved in the movie had ever actually gotten one. For the record, the doctor does not grope or grab your boobs—they use the fingers flat, thumb tucked away, and press around. The entire point is to make the exam as unlike an erotic experience as possible. The mammogram machine squeezes, hard, but the doctor does not.)

I find it really creepy and underhanded when a movie that is ostensibly about how bad X is indulges itself in X. It smacks of porn—but porn about how bad porn is! (Everyone who made this movie is a monster!!) Why bother? What’s the point, aside from letting us know that the Me Too movement didn’t come out of thin air?

Large-print prep

I prepped all the chapters in LibreOffice today so that they’ll be ready to lay out.

Just to give you an idea of what that entails:

  1. Copy the original LibreOffice file

  2. Make text flush left/ragged right

  3. Make text 18-pt san serif (I’m using Tahoma this time around, because I like it)

  4. In paragraph formatting, set all the indents & whatnot to 0”

  5. Except for space between paragraphs, which is 0.3”

  6. Set spacing to proportional 125%

That gets me near-enough to APH for my satisfaction, while still having the text blocks line up once it goes into layout.

Progress report

So, I figured I should go ahead and do the large-print layout for Tribulations—I haven’t done a layout in a while, so I’m not feeling burned out about it (yet). I set up the first 10 chapters in LibreOffice—the nice thing about not waiting five years or so between books is that I feel like I’m not having to start again at the very bottom of the learning curve.

After this I think I’m going to work on the romance series for a bit. I think it goes better if I take a break from the Trang series between books, just because each book is so long and complex.

And it's out! (and free!)

Whoo! The third book in the Trang series is finally OUT! Just on Amazon as an e-book for now, but yo, it’s FREE for the next five days! Get yourself a copy!

(Seeing it in really small thumbnails on Amazon…I think I’m gonna noodle with the cover a little more.)

ETA: Did that, and I also fiddled with the Trang series books in Kindle Create—I don’ t know if these are new features or if I just missed them before, but there’s now some decent presentation for your other books in the back matter, so I’m upgrading those.

I’m also re-uploading A Dislocated World minus the drop caps at the beginnings of the chapter. This is SUCH a case of Amazon’s 90/10 issue, but drop caps never rendered properly in the “Look Inside!” feature, even though I just used the regular settings in Amazons’s own software. Of course having it look like it was made wrong is just the worst thing with nonfiction, because you’re trying to present yourself as some kind of authority & not an idiot nut job. I made various attempts to get this fixed, but no—they couldn’t do a thing, they were so very, very sorry. So the drop caps will be gone, and hopefully the “Look Inside!’ feature won’t find something else that was done right to totally fuck up. (EATA: It did exactly that. JFC.)

Progress report

I read through a little more than half the layout—I haven’t read it in a while, so I caught some typos.

I don’t want to jinx anything, but really I don’t think it will be more than a few weeks before Tribulations comes out. I have some family stuff coming up, but really not anything that should drastically slow down production. It will be nice to have the third book out!

Progress report

Note to self: It’s ragweed season, and your allergy shots didn’t cover ragweed because there’s none in the Seattle area. You’re not going to get a night of actual restorative sleep without the use of antihistamines, so use them.

Anyway, luckily it turned out that the work I did on the Dislocated World LibreOffice file to clean up the .epub file also resulted in a pretty darned clean .doc file, so I was able to upload that without much drama today.

And I got to work on the copy edits of Tribulations, finishing the first seven chapters! Whoo!

Done!

I’ve uploaded Dislocated World to Smashwords, yay. They act like you should convert it to .doc instead of .epub, but dear God I am not going through that again….

ETA: At least not right away. I’ll get to it eventually.

Let me convert you!

Since I’m getting ready to put Dislocated World on Smashwords, I needed to convert it into an ePub file. I know in the back of my mind that at some point I was planning on figuring out some new, fancier way to do this, but I’m not up to making the effort today, so I used Calibre.

Wow. The book didn’t have the MASSIVE formatting problems that happened when I converted it into a DOC file, but there was a lot of random underlining, mostly in specific sections of the book, plus some random strike-thrus. I have no idea how to edit an ePub file, so I had to go back and forth editing in LibreOffice—which at least did work.

The thing is, I could not figure out some searchable formatting mark causing the issue—it wasn’t the “underline” mark, that’s for sure. So it would look like this in LibreOffice (note that the paragraph marks are visible, and there’s nothing weird):

Screen Shot 2021-08-16 at 11.39.57 AM.png

And like this in ePub:

Screen Shot 2021-08-16 at 11.40.16 AM.png

And no clue as to why. Sometimes it did seem like there was an invisible character in there, but other times it didn’t.

Screen Shot 2021-08-16 at 12.33.14 PM.png

The above, which you would think would cause difficulties? No problem whatsoever.

Anyway, I was able to fix it by deleting the paragraph marks and everything around them, and then replacing them. Who knows why this happened, or why that worked? LibreOffice still beats the shit out of Word, but the conversion issues are definitely an irritating phenomenon.

Ugh, I'm a hot mess

I had family visit for the first time in a year-and-a-half, which was wonderful, but then of course I get a sinus infection and now have to wait for the results of a COVID test. I will be VERY surprised if the test is positive (get vaccinated!), but obviously it’s better to be safe than sorry, especially because I have to think about my mom. The visiting family is all testing, too, just because of time spent traveling and being around so many people.

(Just to PSA for a moment: In my extended family, four people got COVID pre-vaccine, and one of them died from it. At least sixteen have been vaccinated with no deaths or serious illness.)

Obviously I haven’t been too focused on book stuff. Today I started to look over the copy edits of Tribulations, but I quickly decided that (although I am feeling better) I was still a bit too sick to deal with it.

Instead I went on Amazon to double-check that A Dislocated World was leaving KDP Select. (I need to prep the e-book for Smashwords, but that’s also not going to happen today.) It was supposed to do that three months ago, but apparently re-enrollment is automatic, and they don’t bother to alert you or anything, so I missed it.

The book is supposed to leave KDP Select on the 19th, but then I realized that, since I hadn’t expected the book to re-enroll, I hadn’t thought to use the free days from the second enrollment! So I’m going to do the lazy & bad thing and just make it free without any marketing from the 16th to the 19th. Go get it if you want it!