Finally
done Geez, I did it. The great e-book caper is now
underway. It only took about half a lifetime, but now the
real work can begin. First a little background:
BUFFALO
LIGHTSis a manuscript I've been working on for
some time. It consists of edited versions of a few
Applelinks Farr
Site columns from the last few years, some newer
self-published Farr Sites from 2001, a half-dozen or so "El
Emigrante" columns published in Horse Fly (a local Taos, New
Mexico literary and political monthly newspaper), and a big
chunk of previously unpublished material. [NOTE:
JHFarr.com
has links to everything mentioned here.]
The earlier work has in most cases been so rewritten as
to bear little resemblance to the orginal sources, so it
would be fair to say that 90 percent of the book is new.
This might not be quantifiable, but I'm sticking with it.The
chapters are arranged by theme and appear in chronological
order, so that anyone with the nerve to read them all can
follow the extraordinary twists and turns of my life over
the last several years. For anyone who doesn't know by now,
in 1999 my wife quit her job as promised and we sold
everything to high-tail it out to Taos, New Mexico. Since
then we've been trying like mad to invent new lives from
scratch, which would have happened even if we had had
a plan: New Mexico is like that.
Many of you may dream of doing something similar, in
which case trusted friends and family members may wish to
begin scheduling an "intervention" toot sweet. As for us, we
came cold, without anything more than a vague idea of what
to do about housing or finances, in the process creating an
extended crisis that is still largely unresolved. This is
not to say that yours truly is feeling anything but very
much alive and charging full speed ahead, however! But my
better half is still contemplating whether to leave me
chasing after espresso bar queens and flee back to humid,
boring, civilization -- and who could blame her? It only
took me three years to figure out how to put one foot in
front of the other and get serious, after all. Go
figure.
Commercial
break:
BUFFALO LIGHTS, a
true story of starting over in New Mexico, is
available now as a 136-page PDF e-book for only
$9.99. Click HERE
for reader comments and order info or buy
now!
Practical
(?) stuff I'm ashamed to confess that I did the PDF
formatting in Microsoft Word. Of all the things I had
available to me, the ability to (sort of) manage headers and
footers was what tipped me over the edge into this
particular Dark Side excursion. I wanted certain sections to
display the title at the top of every page, you see, and
still manage the page numbering, bleah. Looking back on it,
I could have done the whole thing in AppleWorks and probably
had more fun. One time Word actually ATE the whole
manuscript, simply refused to save it and froze up! (If I
hadn't made a copy only moments before. . .)
Basically, I totally hate Word. All the dialogue boxes
are ugly as sin, there are too many buttons in the toolbar
(I'm sure someone without a life can customize it), all the
formatting procedures are arcane, obtuse, non-intuitive, and
a pain in the butt. Making simple changes to the section
headers frequently caused blocks of text to shift, jump,
wobble, and end up where I never intended them to be.
Speaking as a writer, Word scared me to death. I never felt
confident that the document was "safe." Many times I would
do a little editing on page 115, say, and then find that
something had gone loosey-goosey back on page 10.
Experienced users no doubt have fixes for my complaints, but
please don't email me to advise me to use the auto-save
feature: I did!
Creating the PDF file is easy. Microsoft Word integrates
decently enough with the necessary Adobe widgets, though so
would anything else I might have used. I found I had no need
of Acrobat whatever. In fact, even with OS 9.1, there more
ways to crank out PDFs -- I have a lot of software -- than I
could figure out. Going directly from Word seemed to produce
the worst results, incidentally.
Administrative
slog So how do I sell this thing? That will be the
result of marketing, which I at least know how to spell. I
have an account with PayPal
that allows me to create "pay now" buttons like the one
you see above. Clicking on it takes you to a page where you
bleed your credit card a little and receive the Holy Url, or
access to a download page. At the present time, in other
words, I'm selling this thing entirely on my own. In a few
days, after I've done some more editing on the book, I'll
see if someone like Booklocker.com
will take it on. The next step will be a P.O.D. (print on
demand) paperback.
As of this writing at 12:42 p.m. MDT on Monday afternoon
-- yes, I'm late! -- I have sold two copies, and
nobody even knows about the damn thing yet. But at least the
sucker is launched now. No more "what ifs" or "gee, I coulda
had a V-8." I know I'm going to hear plenty from people
about typography, organization, editing, etc. and that's
good: the only way to learn really, really fast is to
make as many mistakes as possible. Feel free to extrapolate
from there and render judgement on the whole amazing,
insane, and ultimately life-affirming exercise of jumping
into the volcano.
When you've finished reading the book,
you'll know just what I mean.
"Grack!"
Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John
H. Farr still needs everyone to hit the FarrFeed link
and beat the amateur porno blogs.
That's right: GRACK! updates will now be included in the
all-new FARR SITE NEWS newslist, featuring items of
interest from all my online & print publishing projects.
To join up, just CLICK
HERE and send a blank email!
GRACK! 2001
archives are HERE. (Current
year's columns just
below)
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