Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Frustrated



Uploading my book onto Kindle is proving to be a headache. I've finally given up and sent the file to a webmaster I used to work with for a fresh look at my html file. It's beginning to stress me out and I don't need that in my life right now.

So, I thought I'd share a little bit of Maine with you all.

October in Maine begins hunting season. And with hunting season, Mainers of all ages and status don their blaze orange. They wear it to the mailbox, to the grocery store, collecting seaweed, or just for a ride about town to enjoy the fall colors.

It's curious to me that 99% of these people never go into the woods where all the wild beasts hiding from hunters live. Perhaps I have it all wrong. Perhaps it's just an excuse to wear the color of Autumn and not feel foolish in clothes that rival the color of pumpkins.

Do I wear the official color of fall in Maine? Nope. Not even when I used to go into the woods. Why do I take my life in my hands when it's so easy to throw on an orange sweatshirt, you might ask? Because there is only 1% of the population who venture into the woods for a turkey in the center of my little town. It might save me from getting hit by a car crossing the street, but other than that, I believe it's just a fashion statement. And I've never been a slave to fashion.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Progress With Kindle

Thursday afternoon, after my husband returned from the post office, he plopped a little brown box onto my lap that had the Amazon logo on it. I tore into it to find the Snow Leopard system software for my Mac. I promptly retired to my office and proceeded to upgrade my system, which took about an hour.

Then I was onto Kindle.

It's never as easy as you imagine it will be. Inconsistencies in Word have decided to not indent any paragraph beginning with a quotation mark. This sucks big time. Do you know how much dialog there is in my books? A lot! So I sought the advice of the system people at Amazon. They told me I need to work in HTML and manually correct the code at the beginning of all paragraphs that start with quotation marks.

Great! What I thought would take a day to do has stretched into three and I'm not done yet.

And now that I'm working in HTML, I can't figure out how to view it in Word again, even though I've saved it that way.

I'm certain I'll figure it out, and the other three books will be a breeze. Have patience I keep telling myself. And have fun. Well, easier said than done, on both accounts!

I'll update you when I've figured it out and it looks perfect in Kindle. Hopefully, that will be very soon...