I am back to writing posts, after taking a brief sabbatical to organize my 100 posts into a book for family and friends — an interesting journey.  I spent the last few weeks, organizing, revising and formatting them.  It took longer than I had expected.  It always does!

Initially, I had to decide whether to run the posts chronologically or categorically; the latter requiring identifying viable and somewhat balanced categories.   Obviously, arranging them by date would be the easiest approach, as it would permit division into sections by year.  Nevertheless, I chose to categorize them, which increased my time and difficulty, as many of the pieces did not fit easily into any recognizable category.  

I identified three obvious categories: Writing, Words and Quotes — my original focus, but over time my posts wandered all over the landscape, as I wrote most of them on what occurred to me at the moment.  I hoped to divide them into balanced sections, finally determining nine categories.  In addition to the three above, I added Senses, Everyday Living, Traits, By the Numbers, Special Days and Patchwork — the category for the leftovers. 

I molded the posts to fit together reasonably, though I frequently switched pieces from section to section, and in different order within the section, as some would fit more than one category.  It equated to solving a jigsaw puzzle, with pieces all over and some segments coming together. After much juggling, and fretful indecision, the book came together.

The categories and order established, I moved to formatting — a frustrating experience, if you have never done it.  I carefully set the margins, typestyle, text size, etc., and then wrote category introductions, revised several lead-ins, cross-referenced cited pieces and proofread the manuscript at least five times.  After all that work, I realized that I had formatted the manuscript in a 8 1/2” X 11” size, when the book size would be 5 1/2 X 8 1/2.”   Changing the size is quite easy to do, but the end result never works out correctly, as the number of lines increase, with fewer words per line, so spacing becomes a problem, and the number of pages increase — sometimes with just one or two lines on the last page, referred to as “widows and orphans.”  As a result, I needed to do still more proof reading edits.

Finally, my printer suggests that I block the manuscript, with both left and right margins justified, and automatically hyphenated.  This process makes the page look uniform, but often introduces large spacing between the words.  For example, in one instance, I had a two-word line that depicted the words on opposite margin ends, with a 95% space gap in between. A further line spacing audit did the trick.

Completing a book provides much satisfaction, but it takes a lot of work.