Recently I was at a grocery store in our neighborhood that still does a lot of business in cash. As I was waiting, I watched the cashier ring up the customer in front of me. The cashier deftly took the customer’s bill—a $50, I think—and counted out change. When it was my turn, I said “It looks like you’ve been doing this for a while”. “Oh, yes”, she said. “35 years”. During my college years (1970s), I had a kind of gap year during which I worked for Sears, the once-huge department store. I was hired as a cashier, and the company put us through an extensive training program for the position. F ..read more

We’re staying in San Francisco for a few months, so we’re in a rental. It’s nice enough, but there are little things here and there that feel like they could be improved. (For example, no rental I’ve ever been in has had enough lighting.) One such thing in this rental is the kitchen faucet: I hand-wash dishes, so I like to have a sprayer attachment for the kitchen faucet. I reckoned that hey, they’re not expensive, I’ll just get one and attach it myself. Well, not quite. I took the aerator off the existing faucet and went to a plumbing supply place, where I explained my quest to the woman. Sh ..read more

After I published my book, I was chatting with fellow word enthusiast Tim Stewart, who was one of the first readers. At one point he noted that there are a lot of references to various religious texts, and he gently asked “Do you have a background in Christianity?” It was a keen observation. Per a casual count, I mention or cite the Bible about ten times, and I have references to the Lindisfarne Gospel, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. I also have a reference to the Quran. I can see why someone might conclude that I might have studied these texts in a religious context. Bu ..read more

Today is my first day of retirement. I’ve e-signed all the paperwork; there was a (virtual) going-away party; my computer no longer accepts my work login. I spent September “on vacation” with the idea that my last day would be at the beginning of October so as to extend my healthcare coverage another month.[1] And so it has come to pass. Grad school, 1980 I spent just over 41 years in the tech industry, which was sort of accidental. I had moved to Seattle in 1979 to go to grad school at UW. At the end of my first year, one of my fellow students asked “Hey, do you need a summer job?” And so I ..read more

Twenty years ago today, I posted the first entry on this blog. As I’ve recounted, I wrote some blog software as an outgrowth of a book project I’d been working on. The book purported to teach people how to program websites, and a blog seemed like a good exercise to test that. It’s hard today to remember how exciting the idea of blogs was 20 years ago. Before then I’d contributed some articles to a couple of specialized publications, and I was proud to see those in print. But dang, with blogging, you could sit at your desk and draft something, press a button, and presto, anyone in the (connecte ..read more

Part 4 of a series about what I did to self-publish an ebook and then a paperback version of it. Part 1: The original manuscript Part 2: Formatting the Kindle ebook Part 3: Publishing the ebook Part 4: Formatting and publishing the paperback (this entry) This is the final part, which is about creating a manuscript for print and then publishing the book on the Amazon site as a (print-on-demand) paperback. This entry covers a lot: About formatting for print The Kindle paperback template Paragraph formatting Body text Widow and orphan control Body text after headings Headings Page headers Pa ..read more

Part 3 of a series about what I did to self-publish an ebook and then a paperback version of it. Part 1: The original manuscript Part 2: Formatting the Kindle ebook Part 3: Publishing the ebook (this entry) Part 4: Formatting and publishing the paperback I mentioned earlier that I published using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). To do that, you create a KDP project in Kindle Create (KC), as I covered in Part 2. You create one project for your Kindle ebook. If you want, you can create additional projects for other formats, which I'll get to in Part 4. To get through the KDP publish process, yo ..read more

Part 2 of a series about what I did to self-publish an ebook and then a paperback version of it. reas Part 1: The original manuscript Part 2: Formatting the Kindle ebook (this entry) Part 3: Publishing the ebook Part 4: Formatting and publishing the paperback When I began working on creating a Kindle version of the book, I duplicated my manuscript—I had the original Word doc and then a Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) version of the Word doc, where I made all the Kindle-specific changes that I describe below. This meant that if I decided to make a content change, I had to make it in both docum ..read more

I self-published a book recently. (Crash Blossoms, Eggcorns, Mondegreens & Mountweazels: 101 Terms About Language That You Didn't Know You Needed) I used Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), which lets you set up and then publish Kindle ebooks, paperbacks, and hardbacks. The print versions are print-on-demand. I learned a few things about the process (by no means everything), so I thought I'd capture so that I have a reference for the next time I decide to do this. :) I've done this in a multi-part blog post series. Part 1: The original manuscript (this entry) Part 2: Formatting the Kindle ebo ..read more

Not long ago I had lunch with one of our technical writers, and she shared some thoughts about what she referred to as “sparkle” edits. We agreed (I believe) that technical documents benefit from developmental edits to help the writer with organization, purpose, and audience. We also agreed that it’s good to get edits for clarity. But in her view, there was a point of diminishing returns for editing. It’s certainly possible to comb through a document and make sure that every sentence conforms exactly to our style guide. We can scrutinize the text and see how many words we can squeeze out. We c ..read more