Saturday 7 March 2009

Interred in the bowels

I have been interred in the bowels of Psychic Virgin, my first book for public viewing, for three solid days. Apart from domestic duties, which have not included vacuuming, washing or general camping duties (it has been raining anyway, which is not condusive weather for tidying up mostly due to the muddy feet which makes for wet and muddy floors, and the washing can't be dried so best not to do it even if one has a washing machine because hanging up washing to dry in the confines of a caravan makes one feel like one is living in a laundry) I have had my bottomly part firmly parked on my office chair, and my eyes firmly fixed on my PC screen. My bottom has now become unfetchingly distorted (pancaked is best to describe it) and my eyes have gone all cross eyed and gritty. My back is also making ' I'm going out on strike if you do not get me off this ******* chair'.

But I am writing my book. Is it worth it, I ask myself. I must be earning minus one euro per hour the time it has taken me to get it done: nearly three years in the brew. Frequently I have conveniently 'forgotten' about it, only to have it creep out of the cupboard, or rather out of the archives of my PC, saying "Oi! Don't forget about me..... you haven't finished me off yet! Don't leave me all undressed. Finish me off, for crikey's sake. I won't give you ANY peace until you do".

And so I have this slave driver of a book in my life, who will not let me rest until it is created. Over and over I have gone with it: first writing, deleting, writing some more, deleting even more, finally fetching up with more saved words rather than deleted ones. It totals just under 100,000 words.

I have decided to go down the self publishing route. I thought it a good idea until I looked at the Lulu web site, which is my preferred option for self publishing because of the excellence of their help files, and also because it doesn't cost anything to use their services if you do all the publishing formatting yourself. Anyway, full of confidence and in 'Yes, this is easy-peasy' after having spent the last three days doing the final formatting so Psychic Virgin can be uploaded to Lulu in preparation for printing, Lulu sent me a 'this is our monthly newsletter' email upon which there were loads of books all waiting for someone to buy them.

And I thought of my book sort of sinking out of sight once it got posted up on the Internet, and my spirits flagged. But I sat myself down on the PC this morning, told my rear end, eyes, and the rest of me to be patient, and I am now doing a PDF conversion, a re-read for paragraph contruction, page numbers, headers and footers, fonts, drop caps, chapter breaks, and all the other stuff one has to do to make a book look like a book, and then I am going to upload it to Lulu.

And because I have written it in this blog, I will have to do it now! So publishing this blog before I delete it and change my mind about posting up to Lulu, .....well , bye for now!



Sending you a smile!



PS. The 'double-chin' effect is only the camera angle! Yes, well, I am an erstwhile writer, and so I have the right to 'bend the truth' occassionally. Honestly, though, it really, really is only the camera angle!

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