The story’s written. It’s been beta read. Edits and minor re-writes done. I’ve proofread it to death (and still finding the odd blooper on the fifth read-through). I could almost recite the 66,000 words if asked. Now to turn my Word document into a mobi file for Kindle. ‘Simple’ you cry.

DSCN0476DSCN0477So where did my page breaks go? What happened to my line spacing? I need chapters to begin on new pages. I need dialogue not to have spaces.

Yes I know. There are dozens of ‘how to’ articles out there. A child could fix it in minutes. The thing is, my brain shuts down at any onset of tricky technology. Reading ‘how to’ articles bewilders me more than ever.

Which is odd really. I was there at the dawn of office technology. A former employer proudly trumpeted that our accounts department was now computerised, as a selling point. No more Kalamazoo cards. I took to desktop computing as a duck to water, happily backing up each night onto floppy disks (when they were really floppy).floppy disk

With my colleagues I watched in awe as our Mark 1 facsimile machine sent its first document to New York. It took ten minutes, and we marvelled that the recipients were able to read it right away.

fax macine

It was a bit like this one.

I was there when the boss gave the secretary a thick, ribbon-bound document with instructions to email it to another office – he’d heard we’d installed this wondrous new invention that could do it.

I was there when the boss excitedly showed me something new called a spreadsheet which could add a row of figures in an instant. (Whatever happened to Supercalc?)Dilbert spreadsheet

See, I can cope to a degree having worked in offices and seen technologies come and go. (I mean, does anyone use a fax machine any more?) I’ve used Word, Excel etc. every day of my working life – at least since they became commonplace. But at a basic level. Anything beyond basic and my brain shuts down.

So I’ll battle on with the formatting. I’ll get there eventually, by trial and error. You can expect to see Supply & Demand available in a week or two. In Kindle anyway. Formatting for print will be a further battle.