Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Formating My Novel, Habit of Despair

Formatting My Novel Habit of Despair

My first computer was a Vic-20….You had to write your own software. You wrote it in basic. That actually went on for a long time….writing your own software, of typing it in from a computer magazine. Files were saved on a cassette disk tape recorder.

Several years later in the military we were issued IBM laptops. In the box was the software….an operating system (MS DOS) and a copy of GW Basic. In the back of the GW Basic manual was an inventory program. I got some smart people together and we figured out how the example worked and adapted it to our needs.


Why I mention all this is because I have just been working with the latest copy of Microsoft Word 2010 and it is staggering how sophisticated that program has become. In the early days they talked about “Integrated Software.” Word 2010 takes integrated software to a whole new level.

When I got out of the service I want to technical school and studied for a couple of years to become a diesel and heavy equipment technician. While there I took a word course, a data base course and a spreadsheet course. They were each a semester in length and I marveled at the time how thick the books were to just introduce a student to the complexities of these programs.

Thus, in reading Word 2010 for Dummies I struggled this past week trying to figure out how to format my novel the way it was recommended in my Dummies Book on Romance Novel Writing. Finally I am close to figuring it all out. I actually got the first 5 chapters to print in the right format with headers and footers and page numbers. What an agony. I am not totally ignorant when it comes to computers but I am not all that adept either. I would like to say a large part of the problem is getting older but I have never really been that skilled at anything. Maybe having remedial writing skills precludes a weak mind from concurrently having remedial computer skills…. However without those Dummies Books I would be up the proverbial creek.

For me I just have to quit when the frustration reaches a certain point, get some sleep and then attack it again the next day. Persistence seems to be the key. It’s like my bio-processor chunks away when I’m asleep and upon awakening presents me with a few new options to try. As I plug away the light eventually comes on and progress builds on progress.

I have always been a lousy student because only well after the test on current material was taken did my brain eventually figure out what was going down. I wish they had had Dummies books when I was in school. They are just well written enough to get a moron like me into a subject enough to start getting the pieces to fall into place.