I’m still getting the bugs out of my book. As I read through it aloud, I’m finding places where there’s too much exposition, where the words overwhelm the images, where the images need cleaning up. It’s not that I’m a perfectionist — it’s just that I don’t want to see obvious errors and inconsistencies. The book is 110% finished, and now to get it right, I’m editing out the extraneous 10%.
I’m hearkening back to Mark Twain again: When in doubt, leave it out.
I completed two pages today. The images happened to be, accidentally, almost square. I had minimal editing to do — increasing the canvas size by 200 pixels to create a bleed area. I can see that some of the text boxes are cutting awkwardly into the characters. I’ll have to adjust them.
Getting close to the end means, getting ready to move on to the actual publishing of the book. When that time comes, I’ll go back to figuring out what kind of PDF will be acceptable to Ingramspark.
When I started this blog I made a commitment to posting something every day. I called it my “daily inch”, as in a daily inch of progress. I usually have about one hour, sometimes less, to work on my book. To give myself a push, when I started in December, 2018, I set the publishing deadline of March 31. I thought that I would be able to complete the entire 32-page book with 32 images in 120 days. But that didn’t work out. I’ve reset the publish date several times since. Today, June 26, 2019, I’m working without a deadline, which leaves me feeling like I’m drifting.
So, I’m setting a new publish date of September 1. I feel better already.
Here’s the last page of the book. I’ve widened it so that the image will provide a background for the text. This is a screenshot of the image in inDesign — the guidelines will be removed in the final version.
