LETHAL JOURNEY
Historical Fiction

Noir 1892 Thriller

Article: (Special to Publishing Industry News.) Copyright @ 2011 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

Introduction: Version Control.
Start: Final, Edited File.
Empowering You as Publisher.
Baseline: Saved, Read-Only Copy.
Organize in Folders.
Show, Don't Hide.
Use Preview Often.
Version Control.
Logical Work Flow.
Why Do All This?
Next: Nuts & Bolts Formatting POD

   Introduction: File Management & Version Control. The material in this section offers important background information to anyone doing their own file management as publishers (self-publishers). These are necessary working methods to maintain formatting sanity. Call it good work habits as well. In creating a guide for how to format your interior text files for both digital and POD publishing, I found it impossible to divorce the one from the other.

Good working habits create the proper environment in which to create reliable, trustworthy baselines along the path to a final product. It means avoiding a mess, having reliable files, and knowing where things are. We'll just touch on some highlights in this article. Much of this information involves general good word processing (WP) methodology used by technical and engineering writers throughout most industries. Some of this information is particular to iteratively formatting versions of a book for publication. This type of work process is called Version Control in all industries that involve WP, DTP, online help, and other text in support of a larger software or hardware development product.

   Starting Point: Final, Edited Document. We'll assume you have a Word file of your finished, edited work. The issues discussed in the rest of this article focus toward formatting. In fact, we'll tend to no longer speak of your manuscript as such, nor as your novel or book. We'll refer to it as your file, which is a more technical term. You're not an author now, but a technical worker in your own publishing house. Your 00 baseline (to be discussed) will contain the finished, final-edited file just mentioned. You must guard this baseline, for fear of losing version control, and having to re-read and re-edit your entire project to make sure you nail down a final, edited baseline copy. If you work systematically and methodically, as I emphasize, you'll have *Version Control* at all times.

   Empowering You as Publisher. We are working in Word because that is currently the upload format required by SmashWords for all digital formats. It is also a workable way to format your POD file. And it is a good portal to the PDF format currently required by both LightningSource International (LSI, wholly owned subsidiary of Ingram wholesalers) and Amazon CreateSpace.

Most other currently popular middlesites do not empower you as these two do. Most others pretend to be your publisher, so you can pretend to 'get published,' at great and unnecessary expense. Publishing Industry News (PIN) is about empowering you to be the best author you can be, and to be a self-reliant entrepreneur who understands this simple industry. When all the hype, smoke, and mirrors are lifted, publishing is just about selling a product. Think of your childhood lemonade stand. You make it, you display it, and people buy it.

   Baseline: Begin with a Saved, Read-Only Baseline Copy. Before you do anything, let's make sure your finished, finally edited file is safe. You want to baseline it, meaning keep a saved, read-only copy that you can authoritatively revert back to,no matter now many errors you make later in the process. You may make a good many errors, learning this process—don't let that discourage you. It's called 'the learning curve,' and we all go through it. You'll never need to pay anyone to format your book again. You'll be a self-reliant entrepreneur, with only the issue of graphics left to master. We'll deal with graphics in a future article soon.

There are many ways to organize your work. Here is just one suggested manner, based on my own experience and preferences.

   (1) Freely Use Separate Folders. Work with separate folders whose names instantly make sense. Use them freely (it's free) but make sure it's less confusing rather than more confusing. A trick I've used for decades is to number them so I can force the alphabetical order. Thus (e.g.): 01 Save Read-Only Master; 02 SmashWords Digital Work; 03 POD Work. Within those, have as many logical sub-folders as necessary. This is especially important so you can go back a year later, when you've forgotten everything, and instantly figure out what you did. The other thing that goes hand in hand with this: standardize your work methods. Don't reinvent the wheel on the fly each time. Be methodical, and have your own system that You+5years will instantly be able to step into. Contra that, the process also evolves a bit over time—don't worry. Just don't paint yourself into a corner, or out of the room by leaving yourself a mess or a maze you won't be able to figure out in the future.

   (2) Show, Don't Hide This is not an option or a suggestion, but a firm requirement: Work with Show/Hide on (that's a different black paragraph mark, not in the text itself, but as an icon on a toolbar. Alternatively in Word, do (in your version, as appropriate) Main Menu > Tools > Options > View Tab > Formatting Marks > (Show) All. There is still more formatting buried at lower levels, which you'll gradually learn to access, but this gives you the irreducible minimum of formatting marks that you must see to competently work with your file. The end user (reader) will never see these marks, and SmashWords will work with the underlying markup whether you see it or not. You should not insist on seeing your file as an end-user, with these 'pesky' markups, but you should be the compositor who creates a well-formed file. You must know what's going on under the hood—your reader will never need to, but will enjoy the results of your technological savvy.

   (3) Use Preview. Copiously use Word's Main Menu > File > Preview functionality. Become familiar with this Print Preview, which offers absolutely necessary power to your work. It displays your file in a view-only format that cannot be edited. It's a wonderful tool because it shows you how your entire file flows, at a glance, at various scales of magnification. The default magnification is 10%, which works really well for a high-level view. This tool helps you visualize how your document flows, not how it reads, although you can double-click on a page to raise it to a readably high magnitude of display.

   (4) Version Control. Version Control is critical to keeping control over your work process—and involves mnemonic aids (memory) to help you easily resume work on the project a year or five years later, when the details are long forgotten. We already discussed creating a baseline saved copy in its own unique folder. Maybe we'll call it 01 Save Read-Only Master, as above, or whatever makes sense to you. Never work in this folder. Be prepared to copy the baseline file as often as required to start over, if necessary. Don't be afraid to create separate folders for every little thing, and save your actual file in many iterations. There is plenty of room on your computer (if not, do a professional cleanup). I would leave that 01 master or baseline folder alone as a 'stashed file'—a common expression for what sometimes becomes your back pocket salvation in a crisis.

   It's called Version Control in the larger industry, by the way. Good thing to practice very systematically and rigorously if you are an author and publishing entrepreneur. Even with my firm standards, I blew it a few years ago and released a one-iteration back version, which contained a good 80 typos instead of the fixes I had made. I had to call back all my review copies, which was embarrassing, annoyed the reviewers, and I know for a fact hurt my credibility on that book. The business world is competitive and unforgiving—take my word for it, and get it right the first time.

   (5) Folders: Logical Flow. I might create two separate working folders, each of which contains a nested series of further logically named and sequential working folders: e.g., a digital working folder, 02 Digital Work or perhaps 02 SmashWords Work; and a POD working folder such as 03 POD Work.

   Why Do All This? Why do all this? Within my POD work folder, I would begin iterating my working documents for real. Each iteration becomes a new baseline to fall back on. Once in a great while, there is a situation (e.g., file corruption creeps in, making your file useless to work with). That's when you may need to revert far back to the original starting baseline. Otherwise, simply save as to a higher iteration often, at least once a day, so that you have a good work path. Your files could be something like work-00-new baseline. Immediately save as work-01-MFN (where MFN in this example=My Fair Novel). Start actually making changes in work-02-MFN, and save often to a higher power (pun intended, and hope for the best!).

   Next: Formatting POD, Part 2. The first real nuts and bolts article on formatting your POD file (actually, #2 in formatting POD) involves a template, and keeps things truly simple. In future articles, we'll investigate the particulars of Sections, Styles, and Header/Footers in Word to give you a little bit of added creative juice. But remember to Keep It Simple (Silly), and Less is More.

Sator Enigma: Ancient Roman Mystery Solved

The so-called Sator Square (also Sator Rebus, Puzzle) refers to a mysterious ancient text found on walls throughout ruins of the Roman Empire. Archeologists have found exemplars in such diverse ancient Roman locations as a government hall (aula) in Cirencester, Britannia; twice in Pompeii, pre-dating the city's volcanic destruction by Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE; and in the distant frontier fortress of Dura Europos on Rome's Mesopotamian border with Parthia. Something about this strange, cryptic writing must have been so important that the Romans would post it in their government halls, public squares, and top military headquarters.

   It is one of the most perfect palindromes ever created. A simple palindrome is a text that reads the same, backwards or forwards; e.g., "Madam I'm Adam" and ".madA m'I madaM". The Sator Square is a perfect four-way palindrome that reads the same left-right, right-left, up-down, and down-up. Nobody had a clue how to translate it, despite thousands of hours of research, hundreds of learned books and articles, and at least one Ph.D. thesis in Classics at Yale University.

   John T. Cullen solved the puzzle in the summer of 2007, almost coincidentally, while continuing eight years of scholarly research for his nonfiction/Ancient History virtual tour guide A Walk in Ancient Rome, Revised 2nd Edition (Clocktower Books, Summer 2011). He had been aware of this baffling cryptogram from long ago, which has since become an object of superstitious reverence in certain Christian and Neo-Pagan settings. Suddenly, while taking a break from his Rome research, he looked at the Sator Square in a new way—and was able, within a few weeks, to both translate it and plausibly explain it.

   Ironically, at the annual convention of International Thriller Writers, of which he is an Active Member, in New York City in July 2009, he was the only author present who had actually deciphered and explained a cryptic, ancient epigram of world importance—and lived to tell about it.