Well, well, well, what have we here?

It seems that my strategy of procrastinating for over a year has finally paid off: I began laying out Lichtenbergianism for Kids yesterday and today can offer you the first chapter for your perusal.

My struggles with Adobe InDesign have been mighty — why, for example, if you select an item in the Layers window, does InDesign not show that item as selected on the page? — but I am slowly getting back to my former mastery of the program.

And you might think that adding a chapter heading to the right-hand page throughout the book would be as simple as it is in Affinity Publisher: just define the page range of the chapter and define the header to be the chapter title. But no. The workaround I came up with is easy, but why should I have to work around the failure of InDesign to recognize that a chapter might begin on the left-hand page?

Perhaps all of that is buried deep in the menus, Microsoft-Word-wise, but we all know how I feel about that bloated program.

Anyway, yesterday I deleted all my ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS from the mockup I made at the Retreat and started laying out the text of the book in earnest. (Pro tip: Use Literature & Latte’s Scrivener for all your writing needs. Do not question me. Go buy it now.)

This process included revamping all the illustrations to accommodate my new vision of a background dot-grid visible through everything but the body text. Easy to do, but time-consuming.

As of 9:00 a.m. this morning, I have printed out the chapter three times (again, quirks in InDesign’s dialog boxes and my non-understanding of them in my rush to See The Thing) and saved the PDF four times as I updated/corrected issues I saw in the printed copy.

“I have a present for you. Keep going, page after page. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on. But wait.” [Samuel Beckett]