Bookends

 Trouble is nearly here, again.

I set a deadline for myself for getting the eBook out the door, hoping to force myself to remember all the lessons I'd learned while formatting The Fall and Rise of @TheRealyJoyG and to take advantage of the code setup I'd done for that. (Caution: nerd link.) Learning how to make tradeoffs has been a great lesson for me--how much time do I want to spend tweaking formatting, and how much am I willing to surrender to a predefined template? What's my budget for art (answer: low to no) and how willing am I to push myself to learn a new tool to adhere to that budget (answer: very willing, with no timeline.) I learned a lot of lessons with @JoyG and getting the .epub out the door and the paperback prepared for Trouble have locked them in. The paperback lands June 30th.

True to form, I'm back in first-draft mode for another story, and also resurrecting One Last Quest into a whole new edition. Looking at where I've come in the past few months with formatting is the kind of boost I need when I'm stuck pushing the shitty-first-draft words around. First drafting feels like having my brains scooped out and replaced by lukewarm oatmeal. I want wonder! excitement! mystery! but that's a ways off from the first draft.

So, I look at the shelf, at the printed proofs, and at the old first-edition proofs of Quest and think about closure, growth, and completion. Bookending the process from the beginning spark and the slog through the draft, carrying it across the swamps of revisions and edits, and finally getting it to the point where I export a file, run make paperback* and see the output happen. 

Nearly done. Nearly there. One more for the shelf.

🧩🦏

* Nerd aside: scarred by academics, I use LaTeX to format the print editions, running them through a markdown → pandoc  → LaTeX → PDF pipeline. This, too, is one of the tradeoffs I've learned to make--lovingly handcrafted page layout, or good-enough turnkey production? Given the rate of typos, turnkey production was the clear winner. Learning to tune the output even more is a future-me task.

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