Tuesday, December 28, 2010

The attack of the Edit headache

As some of you may know, I published a new story on smashwords a couple of weeks ago called The Set'la. After waiting only a few days I received notice that my hyperlinks were not behaving the way should and my paragraphs were not properly aligned.
I didn't have this problem last time and it seems as if I did everything correctly except for a few capitalized words. That one was an easy fix. Looking through my document I figured this would be a real easy fix.
It took me only a few minutes to fix the hyperlinks and then I began paragraph adjustment procedures. I made the change needed, and then saved it and closed it. No biggy, fixed and ready to go out again. But a little voice whispered in my head, "You sure you don't want to check.it?" In my mind I saw Gollum staring at me rubbing his hands together as he licked his cracked lips.
Giving into the fish smelling voice, I clicked on the open office program and waited for it patiently...
...
...
Once it was up and running I checked the formatting and it held. "There you go smelly voice! It worked!
Before it could change back I quickly uploaded it.....
....
....
....
...and got the message, "This is wrong idiot, try it again."

I heard the evil laughter echoing through my head as I fixed it again, saved it and closed it one more time. When I opened it back up the changes were not saved. I realized that the last book I sent to Smashwords was on the actual Microsoft Word, not the barebones version in OpenOffice.
Please don't misunderstand me. I like the fact that Openoffice is free, even with all the problems I have had with it over the years. To be honest the only reason I was using it is because it was free and I was rebelling against Bill Gates Corporate Opulence. Why should I pay extra for a program that always came with the computer only a few years ago,...off track,..sorry.

Anyway, after an hour of internet searches and queries sent out over cyberspace I tried one more little trick.

I copied and pasted it into a brand new notepad and then saved it. Here is where I messed up. I don't know how I did it but when I opened it back up in an OpenOffice Doc it had Chinese Characters almost every sentence. I cursed so much that the wife thought her daughter was home and suddenly developed a very deep voice.

Okay, I thought to myself, I can fix this. I copied and pasted the unwanted symbols into the 'FIND AND REPLACE' function and hit the replace all button.
Now, every apostrophe and quotation mark has been replaced with a question mark.
After two hours of trying to figure this out I gave into Mr. Gates and bought Microsoft Word.
The paragraphs behaved, but the question marks were still there and now I have to reedit, rework, redo. It will be back up. I can fix this, make it stronger, faster, better than it was before.
Hopefully by the end of January.
Wish me luck.

4 comments:

  1. I can relate to your pain. Good luck!

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  2. bad luck - good luck on the publication - i too cursed and struggled the night through getting my offerings up - the sense of acheivement greater for the toil!!!

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  3. So true Alberta, and welcome to my blog. I still havent finished the edit, just time consuming with all the mixed up letters my switch did. Half way through, will work on it more tomorrow since I am off.

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