More staggering along on the trail of the publisher…

So…I didn’t get much accomplished yesterday, because I spent a lot of the day beating my head against the wall trying to figure out why my logo ideas just weren’t working. It wasn’t even a case of having a vague idea what I wanted to do and not being able to implement it. I didn’t even have a vague idea of what I really wanted…just an idea of the sense I wanted to convey. I was in a state of semi-paralysis because I felt so stymied. Some days are like that, *sigh*.

Finally, late in the evening, I decided to get out Book Design and Production and Adobe InDesign and get the whole book into the typesetter and see what that involved and what the page count was going to turn into, and so on. I opened up InDesign, which I really hadn’t done since I installed it (because it’s a $699 piece of software and it scared me! 🙁 Not any more, I’m pleased to say!). I was sitting there watching Adobe’s little intro box that comes up while the software loads, with the name of the software and the pretty little InDesign logo/icon, which is a very nice butterfly in shaded colors…

…and suddenly it hit me–what I was doing wrong with my logo and what I needed to do instead. Bing! The lightbulb went on!

Man, that InDesign is one potent piece of software. *wry grin*

It was then too late to go back to Paint Shop Pro and start all over from scratch, and anyway InDesign, being opened for the first time, saw fit to go get itself a whacking pile of “updates” in the course of which it made me reboot the whole computer. I got the dishes done while that finished, and then I spent the rest of the time until I went to bed going through the basics of setting up a document template. I removed the last undesirable (for typesetting) bits from my novel file (forced page breaks and paragraph formatting), saved it as an rtf file as Pete Masterson recommends (although Adobe says it will import right from Word, Pete’s arguments for converting to rtf are good ones, and still preserves your simple text formatting like italics, which would be a BEAR to lose and have to go all through and re-do), and finally imported it. Then I went all through applying the paragraph formatting I’d designed. That’s as far as I got, and I’m probably going to do it several more times with various fonts and sizes to adjust the paging. Once I’m happy with that, it literally has to be proofed line-by-line, if not character-by-character.

Sheesh…if you think editing and proofreading are nitty, just learn typesetting! Ok, it IS fun, watching your ms turn into a book right in front of you. But the flip side of having so much power to control your options is…you have to control your options. There’s a lot of fundamentals I remember from Publish It and Pagemaker, and other things that InDesign does are similar to graphics editing functions in Paint Shop Pro. I’m really glad I do already know so much, because anyone starting out cold with all this would have a very daunting learning curve.

There’s 12 points in a pica. There’s 6 picas in an inch. There’s 72 points in a inch. I need to remember this. Good thing I can think in non-decimal number systems so well!

I heard back from someone at IPNE, thanking me for letting them know about their website bug and saying I can bring the application with me when I come to the meeting on Saturday (or mail it, but by now, I’ll be there in person first). Oh, and Net1plus got back to me about my web hosting that same night! They must work 24/7 over there! I got my honking big info e-mail and basically, I’m ready to go. I just need to log in, do some set-up, and upload my website. Which needs to be done ASAP, because now I’m paying for it!

Today should be a much more productive day. 🙂