Well technically it’s been more than a few days. If you remember I talked about writing a novel and all the trials I did to complete that little task in the space of nine months. To make it more real for me, I had to get it printed out. This is in preparation for “Phase 2″ of my plan. I wasn’t about to waste a ton of printer ink and paper to make that happen, so I choose Lulu.com to handle the task for me. All I had to do was upload a PDF of my work and I could put together a book project and make it a reality. Not to sell mind you. Just to print myself out a rough draft of the story.
So here it is in its plain glory:
Nine months worth of work split into 3 parts. I didn’t bother giving it a nice cover. It’s just supposed to be for my reference anyway. As you can read from the cover, the top one (first chunk) I called “The Stars Shine for Akako” and the last one is called “Akako Save the World.” The middle chunk is named “The World Is Burning, Akako.” It’s not really indicative of a trilogy. It just so happens I had 3 TXT files over the course of the writing process and I wanted to maintain that. Each chunk is double-spaced so I can annotate it later. It’s also spell-checked — at least spell-checked. I prepped everything using Pages. I didn’t even try to read over it. No editing. No worrying. Just print the damn thing out with all its nasty plot-holes, ill-conceived metaphors, and horrific word choice. I’ll sort it out later.
The biggest issue I had was with Lulu.com itself. It wants PDFs for book submissions and hey, Macintoshes natively handle PDFs. Guess which type of PDFs Lulu.com dislikes. Yeah, ones made natively on a Mac. After I finished editing, I couldn’t just have Pages print out a PDF and submit it to Lulu.com’s site. I had to download and install OpenOffice 3.0 and have it export to PDF. Turns out Lulu.com wants all of your font choices and such embedded into the PDF, that way they can print it one-to-one with what you specified. So, that’s definitely good that they care about things like that (it being their business, after all), but it wasn’t so fun when I had to jump through hoops to get what I wanted.
Another route you can take with Lulu is to upload a word DOC formated file. It’ll build a PDF for you. Hey, Pages can export to Word 2003. It would be perfect and for the first chunk of my rough draft, I did just that. The second chunk didn’t go through. I don’t know what kind of formatting I had but Lulu hated it and wouldn’t accept it as a legal format.
I love Pages. I’m alright with OpenOffice but it’s really glitchy graphically, but often I feel that this reinforces Word as the standard application of choice. Lulu’s happiest with that, even says so in their FAQ. I’m sure if I used Word for everything it would have worked just fine. But, I hate paying for Word. Oh, yes, and I know, they’re in the Cloud now. Who isn’t?
So why print this out? I’m going to build myself a care package to open in 6-9 months. More likely 9 months. So by then I can have forgotten everything about it and revise it with a fresh eye. It’s also a decent excuse to procrastinate on the novel for as long as I can. I’m taking this time to work on some other little projects and get some short fiction written. I feel like that’s something I can pursue with the intent of publishing whereas this novel will be an investment for the long run, and even if not, it’s a dream come true for me. I finished what I started. I’ve got something nobody in the world has. You can’t beat that.
