I hate it when the first draft is done

[Micah]

First draft done means the hard work has to begin.

Just finished the first draft of what was going to be a short story. Then it turned into a novelette. Now it's only 200 words shy of a novella. And now comes the endless cycle of revisions and editing: the hard work.

**sigh**

;(

[J.A.]

I feel your pain.

[[deleted user]]

Yeah... I have a trampoline positioned beneath my bedroom window for such occasions.

[Micah]

I've got it triple bad right now...not only do I have this nearly-novela to do, but a novelette and a full novel.

[[deleted user]]

A.) Stop avoiding it by being on Goodreads. B.) Put trampolines beneath all your first floor windows :).

[Micah]

A.) I'm not avoiding it by being on Goodreads. I'm avoiding it by being on Goodreads while at work avoiding doing my paying job. B.) I can barely open the old windows in my house...and the trampolines won't fit over the many bushes and trees down there...AND...I live in America where the first floor of a building is the ground floor!

];P

[[deleted user]]

Well there's not much I can say to that Micah other than A.) Keep up the good work and B.) I can you are see you've already taken all the necessary precautions by planting bushes and allowing your windows to get jammed :).

[Micah]

he he

Safety first.

[K.P.]

Put it away for a month.

[[deleted user]]

I agree with K. P. Let it rest for a while.

[Micah]

Have I waited long enough?

Since finishing the rough draft in June I've worked on learning formatting for smashwords.com and published two short stories there. The I did one editing pass at another novelette, and started working on formatting the smashwords.com short stories for Kindle.

I'll be getting back to this one after I polish up the other novelette. But I gotta get this one done in time to publish a collection...and then get on with the editing/rewriting/polishing of the novel I've been sitting on since the rough draft was completed early this year.

[Richard]

Formatting with Smashwords is a nightmare. I can see it would be reasonable for normal linear books, but mine have illustrations and a hyperlinked glossary at the back. Last book took two days and a dozen tries before it worked. I'd use an offline epub builder if there was one which worked properly, but the few I've tried were even worse than bookmangler or whatever they call it.

[K.]

Sorry to hear about your difficulties with Smashwords Richard 2060. Granted, the first attempt I made as sending my book of text through bounced a couple of times, once I started from a nuked copy, it went through just fine.

Only issue I have left now, is that I've got a bunch of italicized words that I will have to go back and hunt up again to reset the formatting on. (And, a few bolded words as well.) Missed a few in the first book, so when I update for the new sale links, I'm going to get those corrected as well. (I hope.)

Just caught the important phrase "Has illustrations". They do admit that their conversion program has trouble handling those. The linked glossary, however should work fine, so long as you are using in document hyperlinks.

[G.G.]

Richard 2060 wrote: "Formatting with Smashwords is a nightmare. I can see it would be reasonable for normal linear books, but mine have illustrations and a hyperlinked glossary at the back. Last book took two days and ..."

Have you tried Sigil?