Glory unto Cthulhu! I am now in my postprandial state—filled with hot dogs (in my stomach, not up my ass) and salad and strawberry yogurt (carby—premade fruit yogurts are all bad for you; try making them yourself instead of doing what I did, i.e., buying one off the shelf).
I had originally thought not to work on my book today, to put it out of my mind entirely, but I followed my impulse to look up some AI-suggested YouTube tutorials on proper book formatting on MS Word for 6 × 9 books, and I'm glad I did because one video in particular was very educational. It pretty much helped me to unfuck my situation, and for the past few hours, I have been back on course and reworking my manuscript. As the psychobabble-prone people like to say, I'm in a much better place now.
This isn't to say that the task I'm involved with is a breeze. It's not. I had to downsize my text margins to an acceptable width for Amazon KDP; that took several iterations even after I'd watched that YouTube tutorial. There was a lot of trial and error, but I could tell that I was on the right track. When narrowing my margins increased the size of my book by over 100 pages, I knew I would have to drop my font size by a point, from 12 to 11. And once again, I have to comb through every damn chapter, searching out all of the widows, orphans, and runts to correct. In doing all of this, I've learned a lot more about some of MS Word's more esoteric features, and I'm almost cocky enough to think I should maybe advertise my manuscript-prep services, charging a few thousand dollars a pop, to help people design and populate their books' interiors—editing and formatting manuscripts, etc. Each such job would be a slog, but given everything I've learned over the past week or so, I'm feeling more capable now than I'd felt earlier today. I don't want to become overconfident, but figuring out the margins issue with the help of that tutorial was a game-changer; a lot is clearer to me now.
So I'm once again in the finalization stage, but slogging through the 122-chapter manuscript page by page is no picnic. At the same time, it's also no longer a random, mysterious process now that I've had it explained to me, and that's what feels so good. So my original promise to have both versions of the movie-review book ready by the end of June still stands. I think I might even be done before this coming Wednesday.
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