Getting started today

Alrighty! Time to get busy today. I have some writing I want to do, and I’m racing to see how much I can get done before I break for dinner. :) I’d like that to be 2,000, but I’ll settle for whatever I get. I want to finish that pesky novella today.

Update: Considering how much messing around I did with other stuff today, I feel lucky I made it to a few words under 400.

I spent 6 hours on WHAT?

I finally finished that new ebook style set—6 hours after I started at 9 a.m. OMG. I must have been in flow, or the zone, or something, because I’m telling you, it felt like an hour, two tops.

But no. 6 hours. 6 whole hours. I finished at a few minutes before 3, and I know that because I responded to an email from my daughter and then started my exercise. Had lunch. Now I’m feeling all nap-ish, so I think I’ll rest for a few minutes before I start on the writing I want to do today.

It wasn’t all wasted time, despite the fact that obviously I let my inner perfectionist run rampant this morning. I now have a reformatted novella (first in the series) ready to be turned into a fabulous ebook by Jutoh.

I’ve recently started uploading a properly formatted mobi to KDP instead of my docx files, just because it seems to make a nicer ebook. The docx conversion always looks nice, but quite often, the NCX doesn’t work.

The NCX is what gives me the working Go To button on my Kindle Fire and in Aldiko* that will let me choose from any chapter or section of my book that’s linked in the table of contents. I use this for fiction more than I thought I did, something I discovered when I started trying to read more fiction books. I read the same book on different devices, and the Go To menu is the quickest way to get to the right spot in a book when I’m switching to my smartphone to read while I exercise. :D

Anyway, I’ve dragged this post out long enough! I need to either nap, or write, or nap and then write. Whichever. See ya!

*Aldiko has directions on how to install Aldiko on a Kindle Fire. No longer available. However, the Aldiko Book Reader Premium app is now compatible with most Kindle Fires and Fire tablets so you can just get it from the Amazon app store.

Microsoft Word is annoying me today

Not that the fault belongs to Microsoft Word. No, the fault is mine.

I meant to get started writing about an hour ago, but I started messing with the former book in the novella series so I could update the back matter (my list of books, my bio, blah blah), and I realized my styles are not matching up, which made me want to create a new style set (again, not like I don’t already have a ton of them), and then I ended up looking up the Microsoft Office help pages so I could see if I’m missing something in my understanding of styles and style sets and templates (oh, I definitely am, even though I know enough to have created about 10 style sets of my own).

This is all for Word 2007. I toy with the idea of upgrading, but  I haven’t because I’m pretty happy with this version.

In the meantime, I’ve wasted a lot of good writing time on something that would take very little time to do, if I could figure out where I need to start to combine the quick styles I definitely need into one new style set, so I can just delete most of the rest of them.

Let’s see, it’s 9:58 a.m. and I’m going to see if I can get this done within 10 minutes before I drive myself crazy with it.

And later…

10:31 a.m. to be exact. I’ve got a new style set for my ebooks and I think it’s going to work. I’ve made a note to delete the old style sets (not the print style sets yet) once I’m sure I’m happy with this new set.

Not 10 minutes but close enough! :D