Day 165: More self-publishing work, a little writing

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I think I can start writing today! Yay! I’m super excited to be trying out my Freewrite Traveler for the first time!

***

I got some writing done today, but I have to admit I’m a bit disappointed in the amount of lag time between typing and having the words appear on the screen. Since it’s eInk, I was expecting a lag, but the lag seems awfully long to me. Is that the price to pay for a type of screen that gives a longer battery life?

Although I suppose that if I’m truly doing no-edit writing, the lag time shouldn’t matter. The lag is annoying to me mostly because it takes a second before I see any typos I’ve done and then I have to backspace to correct them. Theoretically, I shouldn’t correct them and just keep going. Also sometimes, I write a sentence but then I want to reword it because it’s not quite clear.

The typos and fixing sentences would bother me more if I hadn’t already been experimenting with dictation for the past few months. With dictation, you get used to seeing wrong words on the screen because it transcribed in error. Also, instead of fixing a sentence you’ve just dictated, you just re-dictate it.

So I guess if I compare this to dictation, it’s pretty much the same. Maybe I just need to change my mindset a bit.

***

I got back proofreading edits I requested for The Spinster’s Christmas and spent a few hours inputting those. I also adjusted the back of the book reader letter to include my Reader Magnet, The Gentleman Thief.

But then I realized that Spinster’s Christmas and Gentleman Thief are both at 5.5” x 8.5”, while volume 1 is at 6” x 9” because it would have been too thick at 5.5” x 8.5”. I would prefer them all to be the same size, since I think that people who buy print books tend to like the shelf visuals.

So I emailed my graphic designer to ask her to redo the paperback cover for Gentleman Thief to be 6” x 9” (she’s probably cursing me right now!) and also the paperback covers for Spinster’s Christmas (I have two versions, one with a photo cover and one with an illustrated cover that also has illustrations inside).

I also decided to ask my graphic designer to slightly adjust the cover for Spinster’s Christmas so it matches The Gentleman Thief and volume 1 covers better.

My graphic designer needs the page numbers of the paperback books in order to do the covers, so I spent time compiling the .docx for Gentleman Thief and also Spinster’s Christmas. But I had to not only do the regular paperback version of Spinster, but I also had to create the illustrated version with the illustrations inserted. Luckily, this was WAY easier to do in Mac Pages than Microsoft Word (I had done it in Word when I first formatted the book). So I have print-ready PDFs of all three books, and I’m now just waiting on the full covers.

Blocking: time spent: 0
Editing: Time spent: 1 hour, 20 minutes
Writing: Time spent: 3 hours, 1 minute
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 4 hours, 59 minutes

My takeaway for today: I have to think of Freewrite more like dictation and keep going forward rather than wanting to fix typos.

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