Not Quite There—CoronaLife Day 684

I had thought that I would be done with the genealogy book I am working on today. Yesterday I got the cover template from the publisher, and finished the cover. I uploaded it today. I had already uploaded the interior content. So all that remained was to run the final checks.

My files failed the final check.

I had uploaded regular PDF files. Apparently, these files did not have the correct color profiles and did not have all the fonts embedded. There was also a warning that one or more of the images was not 300 ppi.

The program told me to convert my file to a PDF-X to solve most of the problems. I had actually expected this, as this was the format needed for my last book with them. I had wanted to try a regular PDF, though, because I had a huge problem when I converted to PDF-X last time.

The conversion added errors to the text—either smashing words together by removing the space between, or adding excess spaces. I don’t mean just a few times, either—the PDF-X was littered with them. I cleaned it up as best I could, but I found even more once I got the printed proof.

You can understand my reluctance to convert it this time.

But there was no alternative, so I converted the PDF to PDF-X. Even though I already paid for a proofread, I am now in process of combing though the new file and cleaning up the text errors the conversion has inserted. Perhaps because I did the conversion differently this time, there are not nearly as many mistakes. Most of them are words smashed together, which is much easier to see than extra spaces.

So I am going to spend at least one more day going over the text to fix mistakes I didn’t make, on a text I have already had proofread. I’m not terribly happy about it, but it must be done, so I might as well buckle down and do it.

The conversion will not help the image under 300 ppi issue, but I am baffled as to which image(s) it might be. I knew from the start that 300 ppi was the standard, so I created everything at that resolution. I am going to re-export the cover as  JPEG rather than a PDF, since I can be certain of the JPEG resolution. I am hoping that the wonky image is in the cover, and that this will solve the issue. Otherwise, I will be spending another day combing through the 69 pages of images inserted in the book to try and find the culprit.

Hopefully by the end of the weekend, this will be uploaded and in the queue to be printed!

Ups & Downs – CoronaLife Day 677

As the saying goes, life has its ups and downs. This week my daughter tested positive for Covid. She’s doing okay, mostly just congested. She had one day she felt terrible, with a horrendous headache, but that was the second day of symptoms and has eased off considerably. Now my husband and I are waiting to see if we get it from her.

So that’s the down.

The up is that the genealogy book I am working on is nearing completion! Remember how I had thought I would need to cut a whole lot of pages to fit it into an affordable price range? The text of this book was clocking in at a whopping 290 pages, while the earlier book I did was only 180. Therefore, I spent a few days trying to cut it down, despairing of ever getting close.

Then I had a bright idea. I decided to look at the final PDF of the first book, to see what the final page count was after I added all the photos, trees, and title pages. I almost fainted, because it was 500 pages! I immediately knew that even with all the inserts added to the 290 pages of text, this book would not be 500 pages. Which meant I did not have to try to cut any text out!

What a relief!

I will finish compiling the PDF tomorrow, then I need to upload that to the printer so I can get a cover template for the book. The final large project will be designing the cover once I have the template. I already know what I would like to do for the cover, so it will just be a matter of getting it done. Then I can send it off to be printed!

Almost there.

How’s your January going?

Genealogical Proof—CoronaLife Day 670

Ask and you shall receive! I got my proofreading copy for my genealogy book back last weekend, so I have been diligently making or rejecting changes.

There’s a lot to look at.

Some are genuine mistakes. Some are things perfectly clear to me that confused readers who have not been immersed in this for 20+ years. Some are things I decided not to change because they weren’t actually mistakes.

One thing I should have explained to the proofreaders is that ages and spellings are elastic until after 1900, and even sometimes then. Many people were illiterate, so spellings were at the mercy of whoever was taking the dictation. I once had someone write an ancestor’s name as “Eva Murray”, leading to a long chase for an Irishman in early 19th century Germany. Turns out her name was Eva Marie, and her immigrant husband’s heavy German accent was misheard by the clerk.

Ages floated a lot, too. People lied to go to war, to get married, to appear younger than their husbands. Many people honestly didn’t know their exact birth year. Until Social Security, it really wasn’t necessary to know. So genealogist get accustomed to a certain amount of drift in ages. Ancestors are simultaneously 40 and 37 and 52—it all depends when you look.

Schrodinger’s relatives.

Still, the proofreaders did a fantastic job. I am inching my way through. I have 4 more chapters to do, then all the photo and graphic captions. I hope to have it completed by Monday.

I will still have to go in and edit it severely to bring the page count down. I hate to lose so much fun historical stuff. So I am considering keeping the longer version and making it available as a PDF giveaway with purchase of the book. We shall see.

How is your new year kicking off?

Happy New Year 2022—CoronaLife Day 663

Happy New Year, everyone! I feel a bit like life is just on repeat: here in NJ we are in the middle of a COVID case spike that dwarfs the original wave in 2020. When the pandemic started, I began the counting of CoronaLife Days. I never thought I would still be counting the days almost two years later.

2021 was in many ways, a year of waiting for me. Waiting for illustrations for my YA book. Waiting for the proofread of my genealogy book. Waiting for this pandemic to end. Lots of waiting.

My hope for 2022 is that it will be a year of action as the waiting ends. I will get my illustrations. I will get my proofread. Both those books will be published. And I hope with all I have that we will also finally see this pandemic burn itself out, and life can return to normal—although with over 826,000 dead and hundreds of thousands more permanently disabled from COVID, life will never again be normal for many of our neighbors.

Living in the uncertain limbo of the last few years has been stressful for me. Many times I have just wanted to scream from sheer frustration. I am hoping this year I will find some relief, and that I will have the mental and emotional space to work creatively again.

I wish you and yours a safe and happy New Year, and hope 2022 will be healthy and productive for you!

December Already?!–CoronaLife Day 628

How is it December already? As often happens with me, October dragged, and November flew.

I have had a rather productive week. Since I am expecting the proofread of my genealogy book back soon, I put my shoulder to the wheel to get everything else I needed finished.

I completed all the title pages. I had already had the chapter tree charts done. And today I finished up the photo pages I will be including in the book.

I ended up with 26 pages of photos. Hopefully I will not need to cull them for page count.

Aside from any fixes I need to make from the proofread, the only other thing will be the cover. I can’t do that until I begin the publishing process, when I will be given a cover template to fit the page count. I know what I want to do for the cover, so once I have the template it should go quickly.

So here we are on the other side of Thanksgiving, with the end of the year barreling toward us. I have other projects I need to wrap up in the next couple of weeks, so I will be busy as an elf for a while.

I hope all of you had a warm and safe Thanksgiving. I enjoyed getting together with family once again.

What end-of-year projects are you working on?

Entitlement—CoronaLife Day 586

I have finally gotten around to working on the title pages for my mom’s genealogy book.

Working with the image I chose to use for my title pages proved a little more difficult than I had anticipated due to my own software limitations, but I figured it out and am now proceeding happily.

I had decided to use a basic outline map of the British Isles as my title page backdrops.* My mom’s lineages come mainly from Ireland and Scotland, so I divided the book into sections. The Country Title page has the appropriate country as the backdrop.

Then, with each section, I have the surname chapters. The appropriate county is still the backdrop, but in gray, with color highlighting where the family came from in that country.

I figured since I am paying for a full-color book, I should make the most of it! Using  this scheme is a great way to have the reader oriented without having to use a separate map page. Since many readers may not know where these places are, and are not familiar with the geography, I had wanted a way to provide this info.

Hopefully the title pages look nice as well as being informative.

*Thanks to Base map © maproom.net

Photo Finish—CoronaLife Day 565

I am continuing the progress on my mom’s genealogy book. I have completed all the photos pages with the pictures I have.

We are tracking down which of my aunt’s six kids has the “old” photo album with the intergenerational pictures in it. Once we locate it, I will borrow it and scan some of the relatives I am missing from there and add them.

That book hopefully will solve a mystery for us. We have a photo of my grandfather with his siblings. We know who they all are, but the two oldest girls were only a year apart, and we don’t know which is which. We have no other pictures of Caroline, but we think there is a photo of Annie in the album. If so, we should be able to determine which is which, as they look very different.

So what remains? The chapter title pages. I think the first one will be the hardest, as I figure out how to work with the multi-layered image I am using. Once I figure it out, the rest should be able to be tweaked easily. I also have the cover to do, but I can’t really do that until I know how many pages the book will be and get the template from the printer.

I have secured proofreaders for my book’s text, so that is set up. Hopefully by the end of November I will have all the parts together and I can do the final formatting and cover.

With luck, I can have it ready for order by Christmas. However, I know there are supply chain issues in publishing right now, so it may take a little longer. But my goal was to have it ready to order by the end of the year, so I’m hopefully on track for that.

I am moving forward on my project. How about you?

Finding Our Footing—CoronaLife Day 544

We have a few days of school under our belts now, and we are starting to find our footing. I am getting used to having time to myself again, after a full 18 months of remote learning/summer. So far I have not been using my time wisely, but that is typical for me at the beginning of the school year. It’s almost like having so much free time paralyzes me with choices. But I know that will settle down.

My daughter is also starting middle school, so that’s a big change for her. But she, too, is starting to find her footing in more ways than one. We are also transitioning from her walking boot to a walking brace starting today, and hopefully her ankle will be back to full strength October 1st, when the brace is due to come off.

Although I have been spending time doing a lot of “catch up” work (little things I never seemed to find time for while my daughter was home) and searching out last-minute school supplies that I didn’t realize we needed until we actually got there, I HAVE made progress on the genealogy book.

I should finish indexing the final chapter today. Whoo hoo! After that, the equally painstaking job of formatting the book properly, making sure the margins and page numbers are correct, and that page breaks do not fall at inopportune places, begins. Once that’s done, I will send it to my proofreader to catch all the mistakes I thought I caught but didn’t.

Finding our footing has been a bit harder this year, as we spent the last 18 months in a period where every day was much the same, and time seemed to stretch endlessly. Then, abruptly, on Friday, everything changed and we were back in the world. It is disconcerting and a bit overwhelming.

But we will get through it, as we do every September, and hopefully COVID will not hit our school and send us back to remote. Whatever happens, we will adjust.

We always find our footing.

A Wild Start to September—CoronaLife Day 537

Today (Wednesday), I awoke to an alarm for the first time since school ended in June. One of the perks of having an older child is that I don’t need to get up with her in the summer. She can get herself up and make herself breakfast. So I have not set my alarm for a couple of months.

This morning I did, and I didn’t care for it. Too dark out. But I dragged myself out of bed, got dressed, downed a fruit cup, and was off to the races.

Setting up for the teacher’s breakfast to welcome them back to school.

Running home to feed my broken-ankled child and myself breakfast.

Going back to school to clean up after breakfast.

Coming home and going for my 2.5 mile daily walk before the bad weather set in.

Vacuuming most of the house.

Running to the store for grocery pickup, then unpacking and putting it all away.

Finishing vacuuming the house.

Making and eating dinner.

I finally got to sit down and relax and…

Tornado warning! Tornado warning extended! Flash flood watch! Tornado-in-immediate-area-take-shelter-now-did-you-not-get-the-first-two-warnings?!

So, some time in our under-the-stairs closet, since we have no basement.

Lots of texting with my folks, who were alternately hiding in their crawlspace and sweeping water that was coming in from their patio out the garage.

The worst has passed, although it is still raining, so the flood watch is still in effect.

What a wild way to welcome in September!

In other news, I now only have 2 chapters of my genealogy book to proofread and index. My daughter hopefully will be off her crutches tomorrow. And Zippy the fish is still alive, but I am just waiting for him to pass, as he is not looking or acting well at all.

Busy Week – CoronaLife Day 530

Summertime is hard when you don’t have a 9 to 5 job, because it is so easy to lose track of what day it is. I forgot yesterday was Wednesday, and I hadn’t written this blog!

It’s been a crazy busy week for me: two meetings in my Board of Education capacity, plus a financial review with the local PTA. Lots of preparation time for those, plus the time for the meetings themselves. After so many months at home, these bursts of activity (especially in-person/social activity) exhaust me quickly.

Because of those other commitments, I have not gotten a ton of work done on my genealogy project, but I did make some progress. I now have three chapters to finish proofing and indexing. Then I will need to fix the formatting in the compiled book, and start working on the photos and other inserts. So I am edging closer to the finish line.

Going shopping for school supplies for my daughter tomorrow. We combed through her “art room” and found lots of things on the list, so it’s much shorter than it was originally. Biggest thing will be her backpack, which I waited far too long to order online and will now not arrive here until later in September. We will have to make do with the older backpack, which is still serviceable, but too small for everything she will need to carry.

In other news, Zippy the fish, although still with us, is probably not long for this world. He has been expanding with some sort of internal tumor for a couple of months (we had another fish that died of one), and although he still eats every day and swims, his behavior makes us think he is winding down. He rests a lot and “pastes” himself against the walls sometimes, as if for support. We thought he was dead yesterday, but he wasn’t—just hanging out at the bottom of the tank.

My crazy week is at an end, and hopefully I can push through those last (fairly long) chapters in the genealogy book this coming week.

I hope the last few weeks of summer are treating you all well!

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