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9:35 p.m. eastern time, Monday night

I just finished a 16-hour non-stop marathon of reformatting my EFAD Word doc to what they needed on Kindle, to not wind up with the scene line breaks mashed together in the finished product. I got a form email last week saying I have had formatting errors discovered, “do it again with filtered HTML for Word, etc.”

So I’ve redone it and reuploaded it several times since then. I actually downloaded it to the Kindle for PC app last night, thinking it would be perfect, (it looked fine in the Kindle upload preview pane) and all the scene change line-breaks were mashed together with no space at all! Just the bolded first line of the next scene, to tell you the scene changed. Unsat, not ready for prime time!

It’s been driving me crazy, it’s a long story, but I had to bite the bullet and redo it again before March 1. Manually, checking line by line. But I got her done. I’m so tired I can’t think or write tonight. I’ll push the FB and Twitter buttons for a few minutes, and then collapse.

What a waste of a “D-minus” day! Had to be done, though.

If you go to the Kindle store, it should show EFAD “under review” or something. When it comes back up “live” (for sale, ready, etc) in about 6-10 hours, it should be perfectly formatted for new readers.

Besides fixing the smashed-together line breaks, (I used **** in between scenes to be double sure) I also improved my use of hyphens, numbers (sixteen vs 16 etc in the text) and so on to give it a more polished look. It was my first, and in 2003, I was rather casual in my hypen use and other style book issues. EFAD is a 260K word novel, with about 20K of DETR now tacked onto the end of the Kindle version now as a preview. Yikes, what a day! But it’s done.

Sorry for not posting today. I did NOT plan to put 16 straight hours into this line-by-line review of EFAD and fixing process, but it will be a smoother, more polished book with correct “style book” hypen use, etc, in the Kindle version on Thursday, D-day.

Matt