It’s a Madhouse. Most people already know, but in case you live on the moon, or in Pakistan like a few of my faithful readers (I love you guys, did I ever mention that?), we had a baby. Catherine is now three weeks old, you can see more about her at her Wordpress instance. I’ve already said volumes to folks about this, so there’s no need in tying this space up with more of that.
I managed to pick up an Amazon Kindle during the American spending spree we call Christmas. Much credit to the device’s name, it has rekindled my love for reading. Reading always reminds me of my love for writing.
My predisposition to ADHD tendencies has led me at to an impass toward the sysadmin book however. I have been putting some major effort into it, but two things have me stuck at a not so traditional writer’s block:
- Putting it all together. Word processors are really not geared towards book or ebook publishing. Chaptering content, etc., is not a straight forward or intuitive thing. There is no intermediary program or format for the independent author/publisher. Everything I’ve run across is a two step at best. There are some editors popping up here and there, as well as the major incumbent application, but at least my mind has a hard time going from the thought process to the editor and publishing platform.
- I’ve never written a book. Admittedly, this is a pretty weak excuse. I’ve all but completely lost the ability of handwriting, and most of the tools I’ve seen so far aren’t really what I expected. I’m going to check out the list at Literature and Latte when I get a chance.
After having been through quite a bit of Kindle content, I have a veritible tome of How Not To Format eBooks. I’ve purchased content that’s COMPLETELY unreadable — embedded fonts that are impossible to see, horrendous formatting, and the worst one: words broken at the end of line that aren’t hyphenated.
Hopefully in the next few weeks I’ll have some free time to look at such things when I take some time off to bond with the daughter. Hopefully I’ll have some time to write it down here as well.
