Hmm, that sounds like a To Kill a Mockingbird fanfiction.

Adventures in Atticus?

Nope, that’s a time travel story in which the hero lands in ancient Greece. And it’s Attica, anyway.

And Adventures of Atticus is the biography of a Greco-Roman philosopher.

I may not be firing on all cylinders right now. I’d hoped to bring out The Root of All Evil this week, thus launching my foray into the cozy mystery genre, but there have been shenanigans as I try to learn the formatting software, which is called, you guessed it, Atticus.

Let’s talk about the good part first; so far, as much as I’ve struggled to get to grips with this program, it’s still easier than typesetting books manually. All the templates and tutorials for MS Word couldn’t show me how to get page numbers to show up consistently, and when they did show up, it was by accident, so I couldn’t recreate the process. And forget trying to do dropped capitals at the beginning of each chapter; it was a lost cause from the start. So far, there’s been none of that here.

However, all is not smooth sailing on the good ship Atticus. The first sign of danger was when I imported all the text, split into chapters, only to realize there were a lot more red lines under the words than I expected. Because somehow, the program removed random spaces from between words. Not every tenth word, or something predictable; just random. So I had to go through and manually re-enter all the missing spaces.

That wasn’t a total waste of time, at least, because I caught a few typos I’d missed, and realized I needed to add a couple of sentences near the end. So it was a final, though unexpected, editing pass.

The second sign of danger came when I started on the actual formatting part of the process and, oops, the program thinks I’m making an Apple-compliant book, which apparently uses a different template from Kindle-compliant books. And the ‘kindle’ option is unclickable. Uh, oh.

I still haven’t solved that one; once I’m done here, I’ll go back and see if there’s something I missed.

Which is pretty likely, because none of the buttons in the program have names. I can’t remember what it’s called- see above about not firing on all cylinders- but if you hover the mouse over most links, icons, and buttons, a little text box pops up to tell you what you’re hovering over; Atticus doesn’t do that. So there’s been a lot of clicking, seeing where it goes, and retracing my steps when it turns out that I went down the wrong way.

All of that can be countered by one phrase: mea culpa. Most of this is my fault. For one thing, I’m importing text from LibreOffice, which is probably confusing the heck out of the poor Atticus software. Also, on a more meta level, I tend to learn new tasks as I go, because the information sticks better in my mind when I have a practical use for it. This tendency has also gotten worse over the past few years, as a counter-balance to my other half, who’s the opposite.

But there’s some merit to researching a task beforehand and learning the basics before you go haring off into the wild blue yonder after a project. It might not have saved me from having to manually input spacing, but a little prior research would’ve help me get familiar with all the buttons, and not be surprised by some of the differences in the formatting styles.

Will I remember that the next time I take on a new task? Probably not.

Will I get mad at myself for not being instantly perfect at this new thing? Oh, definitely.

Am I mad at myself for yet another delay?- because let’s get real, this book should’ve been released six months ago. Yep, still mad.

Am I going to get over it? Yes.

Am I giggling to myself, because at least I got a blog post out of this little mess? Also yes.

Who else is in the middle of a frustrating project?- sing out, and we can all commiserate together.