LIFE'S LITTLE FRUSTRATIONS

Life in this cyber-world can get awfully confusing sometimes, even to someone who is computer savvy. I was attacked full force this week as I tried to use a mail merge on Outlook. I won't go into details, but I spent a full day trying to get it right. Finally gave up and decided that when I'm ready, I will use a service. Of course, being the bulldog that I am I will try it one more time when my head is clear before doing that.

Thank goodness for my little Dylan. Holding him and petting him returns me to reality.

Okay, so that one was out of the way. Time to devote time to final corrections to the print proof of MURDER ON THE MENU, to be released November 26---but the Kindle and ePub editions are available for PreOrder. So, since my sister Phyllice and I write this series together, we edit and correct together. I received my print proof first and set to work. What I do is create a matrix table with all of my edits or suggestions and send it to her so we don't duplicate. If I've found it and fixed it, that let's her know. This applies to missing words, bad punctuation--things like that. Simple right.

Yep, simple if somewhere along the line the file with the table was not corrupted. I had no idea that was what happened, finished going through the whole book and had a complete table to send her, hit SAVE, and Word shut down without notice, dumping all of my entries. And, yes, I do have Autosave set for every 5 minutes. Those files did not go into Autosave or if they did, they are floating around in cyberspace somewhere.

Back to the drawing board as the saying goes. So, fortunately I use little stickies to indicate every place I find a glitch. Back through the book, but this time I only made a few entries before I tried SAVE. Nope. Word crashed again. And again.

Dumb me. Never thought about a corrupted file and kept trying to retrieve the missing complete one. By the way, that also meant that all the corrections on the manuscript were lost too. By the end of a very frustrating day I finally began from scratch with a new file, when through the book yet another time and  viola! The SAVE  worked and I sent the table to Phyllice.

The good news? We should still be on time.