The First Leg of the Project is Finished



Clipart

 

OMG!  I have finally printed eight 324-page books.  I can hardly believe that I’ve finished that part of the family book.  All I can say is, don’t do it if you’re even thinking about undertaking something like this in the future.  The enormous task has cost a bundle in ink.

 I ran my printer out so went downstairs and started using my husband’s small laser printer.  It’s a lot faster than mine is, but it gets hot so I had to quit about every thirty minutes letting it cool off.  Because of that, it’s taken me several days to do all the printing.  I’ve also had to buy two toner cartridges for his printer.  In the meanwhile, we were playing musical chairs with the computers because I had to keep unplugging the printer and moving the laptop so he could use his computer in the cool-down times.  I’m glad that phase is finished.

 Now the next part is punching all the holes so I can put in the spiral binding.  I also expect that to take me the next two days or so because there are 2602 pages to punch and I can only do 18 at a time.  This doesn’t include the covers, which I have to punch separately.

 No one in town had the binding supplies so I ordered that from Amazon and they came today.  Now looking at all this I hope the spirals are big enough.  These are some hefty books and weigh over a pound each.  There is also a matter of time involved here, as I have to have this completed by next Monday at the latest.

 Yes, it most definitely would have been worth it to have the book printed by my publisher, but I really didn’t think it was a good idea to put this family book on Amazon.  I’ve written about a few of these stories in earlier blog posts, but I don’t see this as a book that the public would want to buy.  It’s mainly stories about growing up on a cotton farm and has many B/W photos that I’ve collected over the last ten years.  There are recipes in the back.  I’m actually very pleased with the way it’s turned out so far.

 Tomorrow the comb-binding machine comes out and I’ll try to figure it out, so I can get started on this next phase.

 I’m running around in circles here trying to finish this so I can take a couple of days to relax and chill out.  I’ll post again after I’m finished.  That’s why I’ve been absent from here for a bit.  I've also had cat helpers so that isn't helping speed things up.