I’ve finally taken the plunge and started working on a print (actual paper) version of my erotica. Stripper or Nurse is about 75% of the way to becoming a ~250-page print novel of erotic smut that fits perfectly in your bathroom library rack. I can’t guarantee that the pages won’t get stuck together but try and keep it wiped off.

As usual, I never do anything halfway and jumped into desktop publishing with a new copy of QuarkXPress. If you haven’t been in the layout or publishing business, you’ve probably never heard of QuarkXPress. It’s been around since the dark ages of computers and I learned it back in the mid-west before we moved to Sin City.

Quark is one of those programs that you can easily hate as you learn it, or re-learn it in my case. While I could have done the book in Word, what’s the fun in that and banging your head against the wall is so enlightening.

With Quark, you can do anything, publishing wise, that is. It started out about the same time as Adobe PageMaker and has endured while PageMaker was replaced by InDesign. I had considered InDesign but as Adobe is moving to a subscription based service like Office 365, I decided to use Quark as I like to own software rather than renting it.

Quark allows you to accurately position your text, images, whatever, exactly where you want them on the page. It supports all manner of style sheets, which can be used to setup formatting of your work easily, once you get them created.

Now that I’ve managed to make my way past most of the arcane features that the help files automatically skip, I’m making progress. I’ve had to reformat the entire book three times as I discover things I should have initially done and had to redo to include the corrections.

I was hoping to order a draft copy of my book tonight but still, have a fair amount of work to do. Hopefully, by next week, I can get it ordered to proof before releasing it to the world. “It’s Alive!”

Stay tuned!