Having publicly admitted my techno fear (https://wendysteele.com/2016/02/08/running-scared/) I’m facing it by attempting to format my e-book.

I read the first two parts of Catherine Ryan Howard’s book ‘Self-Printed’, and made notes in my ‘marketing’ notebook (a new one as I seem to have misplaced the original!) I read the third part ‘Publishing your e-book’ …well, most of it. The more I read, the more alarm bells flashed in my head so I stopped…I needed to take this one step at a time.

The first job on the new laptop was to load Open Office, which I did and then spent a whole afternoon trying to open it. It transpires I have Windows 8 on my laptop and a wonderful friend kindly walked me through the opening process…who would have known I needed to access Windows (x86), via OSC:) as opposed to Windows!

I spent a further day backing up my old laptop onto my separate hard drive, with a view to transferring it all to the new one…I changed my mind. As both Windows 8 and Open Office 4 are new to me, I decided to keep it simple and so, on another day, I transferred the two documents I needed to format over the next few months…and then couldn’t open them! Another kind friend helped me round the problem and sent me a link to change the computer to recognise my documents…and I managed to do it without a hitch.

My confidence was growing, I had everything there in front of me ready and the book open at the correct page. I changed my document into draft, as recommended, and then the problems started…Catherine Ryan Howard uses Word on a Mac while I am using Open Office on a Dell. My attempt to make notes of her instructions so I would have bullet points to follow when I come to do it again, became a scrawl. With a user guide for Open Office 4 running on the old laptop, I managed to remove all the paragraph indent arrows but all my single and double line break marks as well! Then I read a section I disagreed with and knew I was in trouble…beginnings of chapters should start blocked, shouldn’t they? I text my friend as I bit back the tears…he was proud of me, starting this process and confirmed I was correct, giving me an idea how to solve it. I did but gave up for the day, feeling worn out and frazzled.

I’m a writer, a storyteller, a wordsmith but have yet to be a formatter.

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