I spent all of yesterday–literally, the entire day, working until past 8PM–trying out new formatting on my books. In the past, I’ve tried to stick with super-simple, super-clean formatting. Nothing special, nothing complicated, just the words, with a working table of contents and the most basic of styles attached to chapter headings. I knew enough about html formatting and device compatibility to realize that trying to force design onto an ebook was likely to be more frustration than it was worth.
Yesterday, I fell into that frustration trap. I’m not sure whether it was worth it or not. I guess I’ll see. But I spent hours trying to embed fonts and that part is definitely a no-go. Anyway, my efforts were mostly because Amazon has been producing such pretty ebooks lately. It made me think it was time to try. I definitely managed to level up my skills–my CSS book stylesheet is quite lovely now and if I could embed fonts, the way I did some decorative elements would rock. And although I didn’t succeed in what I was trying to do, I do have nicer formatting on at least two books now, so that’s something.
Today I was determined to write and I definitely got some done. Not 1000 words, though. Maybe 400? I’m trying very hard to get into the rhythm, but I’m still at the drifting off to research interesting ideas stage & very definitely the “but I don’t know what happens next” stage. I’ve got some big ideas for this book, but they’re not translating into how I move the characters from the place they’re at to the next place, though. At any rate, I reminded myself tonight (it’s currently 10:26 and I should be going to sleep) that last year, working out my issues on this blog got me moving again–the write push, ha. So I’m going to be trying that again. And these words make another few hundred to add to my daily quota.
Tomorrow: Fen will take some sort of proactive action. Enough wheel spinning. It’s time to go places!