Sunday, March 03, 2013

how many times can i break til i shatter

I stayed up way, way too late, but I suppose that was to be expected given how much I wanted to get done today. I woke up sometime after nine, showered, dressed up in something relatively cute (in an effort to remember that I had work to do), and ate some leftover steak from last night's dinner. Then, I slogged for eight hours to create the print version of Marquess. Needless to say, this task was mindnumbingly tedious. I took a break sometime to run to the store and grab some gluten free bread so that I could make peanut butter toast, and cream so that I could make coffee (and I seemed to have perfected the French press, after reading a couple of articles that strongly recommended weighing the beans and going for a precise bean:water ratio - this was the best coffee I've made at home, even if I don't have an expensive burr grinder like they say I need). But the day was divided between creating the interior of the book in InDesign (which is not as simple as just copying and pasting from word, if you want everything to look great and you don't want to have page numbers on pages with chapter headings, etc.), and creating the cover image in Photoshop (my cover designer gave me a significant discount because I said I would do the fonts myself, but this meant I also had to figure out how to do the spine).

In some ways, my strong self-confidence in my ability to figure out anything is a curse; it makes me too likely to sign up for stuff, such as saying that I could do the back cover design when I barely know Photoshop. But I think it turned out okay - we'll find out when I get the proof in a couple of days. Then, I created another stupid cover for the book, based on the original red cover that my first cover artist did, so that a few staunch supporters of the original cover can get a covert copy of that book to match the first two, even though they're going to have to break the habit at some point since there will not be a matching cover for Prudence and Alex. But even though that other cover was designed already, the back cover copy changed significantly enough that I had to do a hacking type fix on the jpg (where hacking implies usage of an ax, not l33t programming skillz).

Needless to say, by 6:30 I was just as bored with myself as you are now. But I got all the files uploaded to CreateSpace, so that was a major task off my plate. Next up is redoing the print covers for Heiress and Scotsmen so everything matches and no one buys the old covers in the future...but that's a task that can wait until I see the proof for Marquess and know whether I created a gem or a travesty.

At 6:30, though, I threw in the towel, and Terry and I walked down to Chestnut Street (home of the biggest scene in this neighborhood) to grab dinner. I suggested Delarosa, so we put our names in there, were told it would be forty-five minutes, and decided to grab wine down the street while we waited. But we were only halfway through our first glasses (including an awesome zinfandel for me, since zin continues to have a moment with me) when Delarosa called and said our table was ready. Crazy. So we went back, had inferior second glasses of wine, but had excellent food - we split the eggplant burrata, the polenta, the meatballs, and an awesome pork dish. We'd also ordered a salad, but that was clearly too much, and they boxed it for us without either of us ever touching it. I also broke down and had some bread, which was amazingly good - not sure whether it was good because it was truly good or because I can't remember the last time I had real bread, but either way, it was worth the punishment I have surely earned. When we got home, I immediately abandoned Terry and read another book for the contest I'm judging - it was better than any I've read so far, by one of the authors I used to read pretty regularly, but I always thought her plots were kind of slow and this one was way slow for the number of pages she used. Still, at least I enjoyed it. And now I must go to bed - with the print book out of the way, I can devote all of tomorrow to another fun topic (organizing a year's worth of receipts for my taxes). Goodnight!

No comments: