{"id":9397,"date":"2025-05-06T18:20:01","date_gmt":"2025-05-06T18:20:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/?p=9397"},"modified":"2025-05-07T20:41:56","modified_gmt":"2025-05-07T20:41:56","slug":"it-always-seems-impossible-until-its-done","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/it-always-seems-impossible-until-its-done\/","title":{"rendered":"It Always Seems Impossible Until It’s Done"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greetings, Dear Reader<\/strong><\/em>. I\u2019m dictating this blog entry while walking on my treadmill, so please excuse me if I ramble or my \u201csmart\u201d phone substitutes incorrect homophones (e.g., \u201cthere, their, they\u2019re\u201d). As you\u2019ll soon read, I have a lot going on and need to multitask.<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s been over a year since I last wrote on my blog, and I\u2019ve done so much work during this period that I can\u2019t enumerate everything I\u2019ve done. Here are the broad strokes:<\/p>\n

I finished the fourth draft of all nine episodes of my teen epic or episodic novel Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome<\/em> (it\u2019s one gigantic novel of 1.2 million words split into nine parts); I reread and made the final revisions to Episode I: Bad Boy<\/em>; I created and continually updated a detailed spreadsheet with checklists of all of the tasks to be accomplished for each book; with my wife and Muse\u2019s help, I launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the promotion and publication of the books; I hired and gave creative direction to a phenomenal graphic designer<\/a>, who has created all nine eBook covers and will be creating the covers for the hardcover books and the trade paperbacks as I complete the typesetting of each one; in the past 5 weeks, I taught myself Adobe InDesign (with some largely useless \u201chelp\u201d from AI), created a book template for all nine books, and typeset the first episode (which is looking friggin\u2019 money<\/em> by the way); contacted multiple publicity, marketing, and other book promotion and sales professionals, one of whom ghosted me and another who proved to be a mountebank selling a one-size-fits-all marketing formula that I discovered is not a secret at all but rather a very common marketing concept that anyone can glean from the internet; and I\u2019ve done all of the above, and much, much more on an average of 6 hours of sleep a night, working 12 hours a day, working out in the gym much less frequently than I\u2019m used to and comfortable with, stress eating at a level I never knew I was capable of, and not taking a real vacation in three or four years.<\/p>\n

\"\"I don\u2019t mean for there to be violins playing in the background while I tell you all of this; my aim is not to get pity from readers and future readers of Bodaciously<\/em>; I simply want to communicate just how indescribably hard<\/em><\/strong> writing and putting these nine books together has been. All of my other books have been like Wikipedia entries compared to this 9-book episodic novel. I realize now that everything I\u2019ve written before this has merely been training for this one\u2014the big one.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take typesetting or layout of the book in InDesign for example. Before I started the layout process, I read books on book design, typography, fonts, and a primer on basic principles of graphic design. Then, I had to teach myself the program, relying only on LinkedIn Learning videos which tend to be very good, or YouTube videos, many of which are produced by self-purported experts in these fields, and I\u2019m here to tell you that the ones who are good at this, that is the ones who are not just good with the applications but are also good teachers, are rare.<\/p>\n

I spent hours upon hours seeking out straightforward answers on how to do certain basic things in page layout using the program, and what I discovered is that if there are straightforward answers, for the most part the people in the know don\u2019t want to share their knowledge\u2014even if you offer to pay them for it. I couldn\u2019t even find resources on the Adobe website instructing me on how to do some of these layout functions, which brings up an entirely different topic, which is how the creators of computer applications have universally absolved themselves of teaching people how to use their products by sloughing them off to the software product\u2019s \u201ccommunity<\/a>\u201d and having them give unclear and self-aggrandizing answers, merely to show off their mastery of this ultimately recondite and meaningless little fiefdom that is Adobe InDesign or any other computer application.<\/p>\n

This all reminds me of a brief period some 20 years ago when I tried to participate in a \u201cwriter\u2019s forum\u201d\u2014think of it as a pre-Reddit online community where would-be writers got together ostensibly to share their knowledge. What I discovered back then (and was reminded of recently) was this: while there are a few very knowledgeable people on these forums, for the most part the forums are controlled by people who just like being the expert\u2014the lords of their little fiefdoms, the big fish in their own little ponds.\"\" Most of these people aren\u2019t actually writing books or at least books worth a damn, and I know they aren\u2019t because if they were, they wouldn\u2019t have the time to be seemingly ubiquitous on these forums, vociferously arguing the merits of InDesign vs. Quark Xpress, and whether to write on their MacBook or Freewrite Traveler \u201csmart typewriter\u201d when they\u2019re writing\/making performance art in their local Starbucks.<\/p>\n

They remind me of a favorite quote by Ernest Hemingway: \u201cBack when I was learning to write, the big debate was on the spelling of altogether\u2014should it be \u2018altogether\u2019 or \u2018all together,\u2019 one word or two? How\u2019d that turn out anyway?\u201d<\/p>\n

God, how I love that quote.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the deal: I\u2019m a guy who grew up with computers, at a time when computers were tools, and the function of a software application\u2014they were called business productivity applications, like word processing, databases, and spreadsheets\u2014was to get a job done. In other words, just friggin\u2019 work, bitch<\/strong><\/em>. What I\u2019ve learned, not just in the five weeks I\u2019ve been working with Adobe InDesign, but also in the 30-plus years that I have been a user of Microsoft Word, is that increasingly software companies are becoming like casinos; they just want to keep you at the table; because the longer you\u2019re in their casino\u2014this case their online universe, the greater their application\u2019s legitimacy, and the greater control they maintain over the product. I don\u2019t want to get too much into this, but the bottom line is, for a guy like me\u2014a writer who spends a decade writing a book first on typewriters and then in a word processing program\u2014I\u2019m not interested in the minutiae; I don\u2019t get my jollies from knowing the arcane nomenclature, syntax, functionality, keyboard shortcuts; I just want to get the thing done and done right<\/em>.<\/p>\n

These companies have made these products so insanely complicated when they really don\u2019t need to be, that I predict within 5 years AI is going to be doing 90% of all book layout functions. As I\u2019ve often said to my best friend Jason Scott<\/a>, who enticed me out of my writing cocoon about a year ago to introduce me to AI graphics and music, and eventually AI like ChatGPT and Claude, the day that these companies come out with a reasonably priced AI\/robot assistant (about the cost of an early Macintosh, let\u2019s say, which was about $2,500 in 1984)\u2014I will be among the first people in line for such a product.<\/p>\n

I would love to have my very own assistant who would not write anything for me, or edit anything for me, but to which I could give my finished manuscript and have it proofread the entire thing, give me a report on mistakes in spelling or punctuation, and not fix them for me but inform me of where they are in the text so I can do it. I would also like this robot \/ AI assistant to handle a number of the maddening aspects of producing books like, as I am discovering, typesetting and layout.<\/p>\n

\"\"I would love to be able to give my robot \/ AI assistant the completely finished manuscript and just say to it, \u201cAll right, Jeeves (how I address ChatGPT, as an homage to the Wodehouse novels and the long defunct search engine<\/a>), here\u2019s my finished book. It\u2019s going to be in a 6 by 9 trim size, I want it to have three-quarter-inch margins all around, it will have footnotes and running headers that alternate between my name and the title of the series, and my name and the title of the episode, and I want the copyright page to say such and such, and here are the ISBN numbers, and here is the text for the about the author page at the back, and just go friggin\u2019 typeset the book so that it\u2019s motherf-cking perfect<\/em>. I want you to do all of the calculations about hyphenation, justification, word spacing, tracking, glyphs, all of that maddening crap; I don\u2019t want to know how<\/em> you do it, I don\u2019t want to have to learn how to write GREP expressions; I just want you to churn and burn, Jeeves, and take my finished manuscript of gorgeous prose and turn it into a beautiful, eminently readable book.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sigh. Alas, maybe someday.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, I\u2019ve had to learn all of this stuff myself, and while I have enjoyed the challenge of it, in that it\u2019s like learning a new language\u2014something for which I\u2019ve discovered I have a natural aptitude\u2014it\u2019s been incredibly frustrating to have to ferret out the answers of how to do basic things in Adobe InDesign, relying on a lot of mediocre videos by so-called experts, and having to ask questions of ChatGPT because asking those same questions in a Google search prompt gives you literally a google of irrelevant and useless answers. But I\u2019ve discovered that with ChatGPT and other AI systems, they\u2019re wrong more than they\u2019re right.<\/p>\n

For example, I would ask one of these systems to give me a step-by-step process for transferring styles between InDesign documents, and time and again, even though I asked very precise, very clear questions (I studied philosophy in college, where clarity in writing is paramount), it would often send me down the incorrect path, forcing me to double-back and change everything to the correct way of doing it. I don\u2019t want to bore you with every detail of every example of every problem that I encountered; all I want to say is this: anybody who thinks AI is going to take over the world anytime soon is a 100% unmitigated moron. (These are probably the same people characterized in this bon mot<\/em> by my friend Jason: \u201cStephen Fry is a dumb person\u2019s idea of a smart person.\u201d) The only way I can see AI taking over is if there aren\u2019t adequate governing controls put in place to prevent a high-IQ toddler from wrecking the internet.<\/p>\n

(By the way, to any would-be snarky troll\/hater\/jealous wannabe writer out there who attempts to insinuate that a single word of Bodaciously<\/em> was written by AI, I have three things to say. 1. I wrote 95 percent of this book before AI was publicly available or even viable. 2. If you libel me in any way, I will sue you so hard, your great-grandchildren will have to sell their hair<\/a> in order to eat.\u00a0 3. AI couldn’t do what I’ve done; Bodaciously<\/em>\u2019s 1.2-million words would motherf-cking BREAK<\/strong><\/span> AI.)<\/p>\n

\"\"I appreciate your bearing with me as I unload myself of these frustrations that have been weighing on me for the past year. I guess what I\u2019m trying to say is this: I love writing\u2014creating drafts, revising them at my drawing board, proofing them, consulting thesauri, dictionaries, visual dictionaries, copy editor\u2019s handbooks, Fowler\u2019s Usage<\/em>, The Chicago Manual of Style<\/em>, and other reference works, just doing everything to get the words right\u2014that is what I love. What I don\u2019t love are all of these things that have nothing to do with getting the words right, like trying to condense your 1.2 million word, 9-episode epic novel into 150 words so it fits on the back inside jacket of a hardcover or the back cover of a trade paperback, or having to parse marketing gobbledygook from another marketing mountebank, or listening to hyped-up bullcrap from a publicity person who talks a big game but then doesn\u2019t have the decency to get back to you with a quote.<\/p>\n

As I dictate this blog entry while walking on my treadmill, I realize that I\u2019m going to have to let this other stuff go and just focus on the words, and making these nine books the absolute best I can make them. Years ago, when Leonardo DiCaprio was coming out with his labor of love movie The Revenant<\/em>, the morning after its release I was reading the newspaper in the Millbrook Diner and came upon a quote by DiCaprio about the movie. I\u2019ve since been unable to find the exact quote, but it made such an impression on me that I wrote it down in one of my notebooks. He said, \u201cAll you can do is produce the best work you can. All the rest of it [awards, sales, etc.] is out of your control.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lately, I haven\u2019t been sleeping very well because of worries about all of the aspects of book production; the fact that I have eight more episodes to finish after this one; the fact that I need to send out advance reading copies (ARCs) to reviewers this summer; the fact that as a result of my Operation Bodacious Bestseller fundraising campaign I have received tens of thousands of dollars from people who believe in me and whom I do not want to let down; and the myriad other details that go hand in hand with being a maverick, an auteur with incredibly high standards. It\u2019s a lot.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019m not ashamed to admit, that I haven\u2019t done it by myself; call it God, the Universe, Spirit, the Force, or Bob\u2019s Big Boy, but I\u2019ve prayed every morning for the past 10 years, especially in the past 2 years, for answers on how to do such and such related to the book, and whether or not you believe in Bob\u2019s Big Boy or the Force or God, or whether or not any of these entities exist, when I\u2019ve asked, the answers have come.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not trying to proselytize anyone here; I’m merely pointing out that I have not done this by myself; indeed, had I had to do it all myself, I would have kept drinking and not gotten sober as I did seven years ago.<\/p>\n

So, what\u2019s next? Well, the photo shoot for my author photo is in two weeks. I need to find a credible, accomplished publicity firm, a digital marketer, a booker, and a social media person and get them lined up. (If you are such a professional, and not another fast-talking flimflam man, please Contact Me<\/a>.) I need to finalize Episode I and send it to the printers to produce ARCs to get advance reviews. I need to send my backers a report. So \u2026 I can\u2019t back out now. There have been some mornings when I\u2019ve wanted to throw the entire book into a 50-gallon drum and burn it. There have been other mornings when I\u2019ve thought that I want to simply finish it, put it in a footlocker, lock it up, and leave it for my heirs to publish and deal with (these have traditionally been referred to as \u201ctrunk writers\u201d).<\/p>\n

\"&But \u2026 fortunately there have been more mornings when I\u2019ve woken up and felt I was on a mission, a mission to bring my generation (idiotically dubbed \u201cGeneration X\u201d from this obscure book<\/a> on the class system in America), an authentic, detailed, fearless story about what it was to be a suburban teen in the 1980s, filling the pages with the music, the fashion, the lingo, the TV, the movies, and the cultural and historical events so that that time that we all experienced is not forgotten. I genuinely believe it was the best time in the history of America to be a teenager. What\u2019s more is, while the books were never going to be as great and as pitch perfect as my initial vision was for them, they\u2019re pretty damn close. They\u2019re fun, dramatic, adventurous, spicy, factually correct, emotionally true, and no holds barred\u2014in the areas of sexual awakening, family dynamics, and teen romantic relationships.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like readers to know up front here, and by readers<\/em> I\u2019m also referring to potential reviewers of Bodaciously<\/em>, that because this is one giant novel split into nine parts, they need to reserve full judgment of Bodaciously<\/em> for when the 9th installment is published in November of 2027. The point is, that there are a lot of long, long, long on-ramps\u2014with characters, with situations, with plot points, with foreshadowed elements\u2014things that do not get resolved immediately, and instead carry into later episodes before they\u2019re resolved. What I\u2019m attempting here has not been done since Proust\u2019s Remembrance of Things Past<\/em>; although, having read some of Remembrance<\/em> I can say that Bodaciously<\/em> is profoundly more readable and entertaining.<\/p>\n

(By the way, my wife calls Bodaciously \u2026 Remembrance of Things Past <\/em>meets Ferris Bueller\u2019s Day Off<\/em>. I call\u00a0Bodaciously<\/em> what you get when you put\u00a0War and Peace,<\/em>\u00a0The Odyssey, and<\/em>\u00a0Fast Times at Ridgemont High <\/em>into a supercollider and smash them together.)<\/p>\n

\"\"It\u2019s almost May 20, which puts me 8 months away from publication of Episode I. Let me tell you, having been through these self-imposed deadlines before (I actually have a countdown clock that I reset each time I finish an aspect of the project), those months are going to fly by.<\/p>\n

Over the past decade, most of the time I\u2019ve felt insane to even be trying to do this. It has felt utterly impossible\u2014so much so that three or four years ago I wrote a quote on my whiteboard in my office, a quote by Nelson Mandela:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt always seems impossible until it\u2019s done.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I cannot tell you how much I\u2019m looking forward to December 2027 when Bodaciously <\/em>is done<\/em>, and I can read Mandela\u2019s quote and know that I did it\u2014I saw it through to the end and accomplished the impossible.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*\u00a0 \u00a0*\u00a0 \u00a0*<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Postscript<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A cryptic Post-It note on my computer reads, \u201cH.W.R.M.D.T.?\u201d It\u2019s an acronym for “How Would Reinhold Messner Do This?” In 1980, Reinhold Messner<\/a> was the first man to climb Mount Everest solo and without using bottled oxygen. Anytime I get stuck or frustrated with the book, I look at that Post-It note and ask myself that question, and the answer that invariably comes back to me is that whatever problem he faced, he\u2019d look at it as a challenge, and he’d meet the challenge with joy and enthusiasm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greetings, Dear Reader. I\u2019m dictating this blog entry while walking on my treadmill, so please excuse me if I ramble or my \u201csmart\u201d phone substitutes incorrect homophones (e.g., \u201cthere, their, they\u2019re\u201d). As you\u2019ll soon read, I have a lot going on and need to multitask. I think it\u2019s been over a year since I last … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":9410,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[366,30,17,3,19,77,7,76,68,14,233,15],"tags":[637,654,657,649,659,655,94,656,609,651,122,660,339,340,96,155,156,650,652,641,636,653,381,92,355,392,658,144],"class_list":["post-9397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-promotion","category-chris-orcutt-books","category-computersandsoftware","category-craft","category-fiction","category-novels","category-personal","category-process","category-rewriting","category-writingexperiences","category-writing-life","category-writingtools","tag-1980s","tag-adobe-indesign","tag-ai","tag-bodaciously-true-and-totally-awesome","tag-book-layout","tag-chatgpt","tag-chris-orcutt","tag-claude","tag-epic-novel","tag-episodic-novel","tag-hemingway","tag-nelson-mandela","tag-novel-writing","tag-novel-writing-process","tag-novelist","tag-orcutt","tag-process","tag-teen-epic","tag-teen-life","tag-teen-romance","tag-teens","tag-typesetting","tag-typewriters","tag-writers-2","tag-writing-life","tag-writing-process","tag-writing-software","tag-writing-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9397"}],"version-history":[{"count":39,"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9456,"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9397\/revisions\/9456"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}