Out of the Blue it Feels Real

I finished the rewrite of my novel’s ending on Friday. I’m still in the midst of getting suggestions and edits from my critique partner, but with the new ending, I wanted to take a minute and read through the whole thing to see how it was flowing and if I’d missed any loose ends that needed tying, that kind of thing.

Now, I hate reading at my computer. I can read a blog post, maybe a few of them. I can catch up on email. But a book? I’m not going to read a book sitting at my computer. A large part of this is that my eyes start to hurt when I try – I suspect it’s the back lighting. This is one of the reasons I love my Kindle. “It would be so nice,” I said to myself, “if I could just read this on my Kindle.” Then I thought, “Well, why can’t I?”

So off to Google I ran to see how hard it would be to convert my Word document to Kindle format. Answer: Not all that hard.

I had thought to use Calibre. But it turns out they don’t convert straight from Word. I took a little while researching the conversions they do allow and started to get a little frustrated. Then I did a little looking to see how to convert Word to a .mobi and found Mobipocket Creator. Now, oddly enough, this doesn’t actually result in the creation of a .mobi – however, it does make a .prc file that your Kindle will quite happily read. And it’s a very simple process. I also made a copy for my friend to read on her Nook. If you’re doing a Nook conversion, the utility Aspose.Words Express was also incredibly easy to use.

So now I’m in the process of reading through on my Kindle. I have to say it gave me quite a little thrill to see the title and my name on the main screen of my reader. Even if it’s just there because I put it there. And I’m finding that making notes of things to fix is not as challenging as I was worried it would be. (Honestly, I thought I had gotten rid of the head shaking extravaganza already – my poor characters must be dizzy.) (Also also, I’m bummed that my friend is reading it now that I see some of the things I’ve missed…I really thought I’d fixed the low hanging fruit by now. Ah well.)

That said, it’s cool to hit a point where it feels like I actually have a real book under my belt.