Published!

"It's the last, long, mile..." (That's from a World War I song my mom has sung to me recently.)

This week has been crazy.

Sunday through Wednesday, I continued editing. I fixed the problems I had sticky-noted, then found that I had some serious comma problems and used "of course" too much. (Why did it take me this long to discover this?) I fixed the "of course" issue using the "find" command in Word and did end up removing about half. But the comma issue meant another read-through of the whole manuscript, fun, fun. That took through Wednesday.

Thursday, I thought I was done. I made a new PDF--four times! I kept finding problems, especially the fact that the conversion process occasionally caused those weird hyphenation problems: at the bottom of one page would be a hyphenated word like "Step-," and at the top of the next page it would say "Stepmama." Really odd but I did in the end fix all those (or I thought I had). There were also some extra blank pages put in near the end of the file and I had to change some section breaks to fix that. I also edited the cover file and made a new JPEG.

Friday morning I reviewed the file, fixed more hyphenation stuff, made a new PDF, and uploaded it. I also edited the cover slightly, made another JPEG, and uploaded it. Late that afternoon I got word that the files were printable!

(Does Friday sound a lot like Thursday? Yeah, it was. These final little changes are killers, but I had to keep reviewing the file because I didn't want to kick myself later.)

Saturday morning, I looked over the new file, hoping to find it fine. But argh, I found a spacing error (one measly extra space between words). Well, phooey. I could live with that. But then I found a verb tense error! Oh no, have to redo it and upload it again and go through the review process again!

So--I did. I used Word's grammar checker and found another spacing error and another verb tense error, too. (I also found out that when I grammar-checked the whole book at once, Word crashed and all the changes were lost. So then I had to do it again chapter by chapter! And since I was in there, I also slightly changed the last page, acknowledgments, and author page. Then I made a new PDF and uploaded it and submitted the whole book for review again. Remind me not to be a copy editor for a living.

This morning, the files were again deemed acceptable for printing. I went through the interior file again, and hit the "Approve" button. Because it's time. Yes, there are still errors in there. That's life.

And do you know what I found out when I looked up my title in Amazon? (Btw, it won't be available to purchase through Amazon.com for perhaps a week, but it's available right now here.) Anyway--four days ago, guess what was published for the Kindle? Just Like Magic: A Cross-Dressing Threesome Story of Male Domination and Bisexual Male Submission by Keri Carver. (31 pages.)

"If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane." Yeah, Jimmy Buffet, you got that right.