August 11, 2023

Finished and uploaded Dandy and the Dognappers!

Daily Diary, Day 1076: Ta da! Just uploaded the final version of Dandy and the Dognappers to Kindle, Kobo, GooglePLay, AppleBooks, Barnes and Noble, and assorted other retailers. Done well before the date where the final versions for pre-orders needed to be complete.

So, having gotten the proof back yesterday, I spent rest of yesterday and some of this morning making the changes. Then I formatted in Scrivener to create a word document to upload to Vellum (which I use to format into nice version with special glyphs, etc. Then I went very carefully through the Vellum version, making sure everything was ok, tweaking a few things and adding some links to the Author's Notes section. Then I generated files compatible with the different retailers. When I uploaded to Kindle, I used their preview function to double check it, again, make sure all the links worked, seeing what it looked like on phone, tablet and Kindle ereader.

And I did this in between an hour and a quarter of giving the upstairs a thorough cleaning.

And now it is near lunch time, and I have a phone call scheduled afterwards, and then I will see, after such a good day's work, how I want to spend the rest of the day!

I might just spend the day watching the birds at the bird feeder that is right outside our dining room window and that I can see sitting on the couch where I usually sit on when working.

I think I mentioned that there seem to be a new crop of baby house finches. They are round balls of feathers instead of the sleek bodies of the adults. They tend to sit down in the tray, while the adults do a quick feed then fly away. We also have song sparrows, California Towhees, who have a tendency to scratch and send seeds and chaff scattering. There are also Lesser Goldfinches, the smallest, and interestingly they are tolerated by the adult house finches when they want to feed at the same time. Finally, I have seen some white crowned sparrows, and what I think is a Lark Sparrow.

In my walk after dinner yesterday, and here are photos from that walk of the sun streaming through clouds and a pink bloom that was particularly vibrant in this evening light.