Swinger Stories Compilation #1 is three of my popular wife swapping stories bound together in a single 650-page paperback. This was my first experiment publishing a long print book and was yet another learning experience. Like when you touched a hot stove to see if it was really hot.
My experiment into creating print books is also getting expensive. The love-hate relationship with QuarkXPress continues unabated as I struggle to understand why Quark is an unforgiving and insidious bitch. Apparently, I’m the first one to discover this, as usual, because it seems that Quark also hates PhotoShop. Or maybe it’s the other way around, except it’s me with my finger on the hot stove.
I believe that Quark has a memory leak that Depends can’t solve. I’ve maxed out the memory in my desktop to 32 Gb, and that seemed to help. So, I decided to attempt to solve the problem with my typical last-ditch method, throwing money at the problem.
Being a computer nerd at heart, I’m replacing my computer with a Hewlett Packard workstation which can be expanded to 96 Gb of RAM to see if that helps. The 12-core Xeon processor will also allow me to watch more porn to wile away the unproductive hours.
The base model came with 32 Gb and has already seemed to improve Quark’s annoying habit of the display going blank. However, the Xeon E5-2697 v2 processor is designed to perform CAD drawings and rendering, which involve huge amounts of memory. That may be helping, but when my 64 Gb of additional RAM shows up next week, we’ll see.
My hope is that Quark and PhotoShop can coexist at the same time. Yesterday, while assembling my latest tome, I had Quark, PhotoShop, and CorelDRAW all running simultaneously without a problem. That was almost enough to make me stop and jerk off. I asked my wife to give me a blowjob to help me concentrate, but she says being under the desk makes her claustrophobic. Plus, she’s afraid that she’ll bang her head on the desk, which may knock some sense into her.
My conversion process for converting a single eBook into paperback is down to two hours or less, now that I’ve worked out the kinks in the process. Combining three stories into one paperback was a little more challenging. I realized that I could simply grab each paperback’s body files and insert them unchanged into the compilation.
Microsoft WORD used to have the ability to assemble document files into one large file, which was handy. This ability seems to have gone away with the newer versions. Quark has a “Book” feature that allows you to assemble multiple sections into one combined output file.
The cool part about this is that the formatting for each section can be completely different. For example, a typical story has forematter, body, and backmatter. The forematter is the title, copyright, TOC, and dedication (front part of the book). The body is the actual story, and the backmatter is the fluff added to the back of the story.
Breaking the story down into its individual parts makes it easier to format each section properly. Then it’s a simple matter of creating a Book project and adding the sections. Quark will then assemble them into one PDF ready for printing.
When you submit a paperback book to Amazon, one of the steps is a print review process. Amazon will process your book and create a final version of how it will look. During the Review process, you can check to ensure everything is within the printable boundaries of the paperback.
Naturally, Amazon complained about four pages that were outside the margins. I had to stop and look at the pages to see what the heck I had done wrong. I discovered it was an incorrect Master page. The Master page is the template for formatting how each page looks, and I had accidentally used the wrong template. I would have said that I fucked up, but as a sophisticated author of erotic stories, I’m above using four-letter words as a substitute for being inarticulate.
I’m waiting for Amazon to either bless me with their wholehearted approval or knee me in the gonads after reviewing Swinger Stories Compilation #1. Then I can hopefully order my author’s copy for final review or go back to the drawing board and fix their nitpicking.
I’m Larry Archer, just a simple writer of disgusting, filthy stories of people taking off their clothes and lying in a pile. It’s sort of like when South Park says their show is not suitable for viewing by anyone.
P.S. When I flipped over to post this on my blog, I got an email from Amazon, and they have sprinkled holy water on my story and approved it for general distribution to my loving fan base locked away in the basement. My very own copy is now on order, and you can get one also at https://kdp.amazon.com/amazon-dp-action/us/dualbookshelf.marketplacelink/B09TDW8451
Better yet, order from Kinky Literature, and you can give them some love too. Remember, you pay the same price at Kinky Literature for all the best smut around. The link to order from Kinky Literature is below:
https://www.kinkyliterature.com/book/735-swinger-stories-compilation-1/
Larry Archer's World (LarryArcher.blog) 
If the program has a memory leak, adding more memory just gives the program a bigger leak since you’ve given it more memory to mess up. A higher end processor might help since they handle memory allocations better and especially when you have multiple programs open. Sometimes, the way your computer boots up can be at fault and such issues can usually be cleared up by removing or stopping stuff you don’t need at startup which makes more memory addresses available to programs that needs them. But as a user, you shouldn’t be trying to debug Quark’s programming for them. There’s a disconnect when they try to fix stuff like this: Their system isn’t configured like your system is. So, when they test a fix, well, success! You get the update, run the program and… I thought you guys fixed this shit?
Or, sometimes, they fix that one thing… and mess something else up. In my opinion, Word went from being one of the best programs ever… to something less than that. Microsoft tends to lean more toward business applications and integration so data can be shared easily… but that doesn’t help writers so much unless a savvy user can create a specific template for their writings. I know how to do it… and I wouldn’t want to. Ideally, you should be able to use the same program that Amazon uses to format paperbacks… and good luck with that.
There’s just a lot of shit about this that I not only know about but has always driven me insane trying to deal with. Quirky software issues is one thing but having to deal with Amazon’s crap is, at this time, something I just wouldn’t want to be bothered with – I like my BP staying in the normal range!
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kDaddy, I’m just assuming it’s a memory leak as that’s what it looks like. My assumption is that there is a block of memory for Quark to display the content (pages) not the menus as the menus are all fine, it’s just that the section where you would see your pages properly formatted will get screwed up or zoom down to a tiny window. I’ve noticed that my new 12-core CPU may have something to do with it getting better as Quark seems a lot more stable now. I’ve used Quark for years and it’s always been kind of flaky. It was originally designed for the Mac and I’ve resisted trying to run it on my Mac as my Windows machines have dual 32-inch monitors running at 2560×1440. I could let Amazon just format it for me but what would be the fun in that? I did one as a trial and it basically just did a PDF print of the document. I’m trying to do the fancy stuff as special headers/footers, starting a chapter on the right side, and making the first paragraph with a drop cap. The production cost for a paperback makes each copy considerably more expensive and I don’t want people to think they are just getting a PDF conversion. PhotoShop soaks up memory and during the conversion process, I run at least 3 memory hogs which pushed me into buying a workstation. While it could be just a waste of time and money, the HP workstations look really cool and if we ever have a tornado in Sin City I’ll be able to hold onto one to not get blown away!
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“Microsoft WORD used to have the ability to assemble document files into one large file, which was handy. This ability seems to have gone away with the newer versions. Quark has a “Book” feature that allows you to assemble multiple sections into one combined output file.
The cool part about this is that the formatting for each section can be completely different.”
What version of Word are you using?
According to Microsquish, subdocuments were still there in the 2019 version.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-to-create-and-work-with-subdocuments-in/ecfc96fc-1fe4-4309-86b7-2cfff59cad2f
regarding formatting, if you do a section break in Word, you can change the formatting as well.
for font and other types of things, simply use different styles.
i know you have found your mojo with the other programs, but you can still do a lot of these things in Word.
regarding your performance issue, have you tried assigning different programs to different threads on the processor?
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Sorry forgot to say thank you for the link to subdocuments. I’m copying that link and verbiage to OneNote for future reference.
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Mark, I’m using a mixture of Office 2019 and 365. I’m sure assembling documents is still in there but hidden in some corner that I’m too lazy to search for. With the 64bit version there’s not a lot of reason to use multiple documents anymore. Yeah I know that I could probably get the job done with Word but once I’ve learned the idiosyncrasies of Quark, it’s actually easier to use. Once you setup a template for the way the pages should look, it’s simple to just copy the template and pour in the doc file. It’s like me using CorelDRAW. Once I’ve learned how to make things with Corel, there’s no real incentive to learn something else if what I’ve got works fine.
My workstation has a 12-core CPU and if I knew how to assign different threats to different cores that would be kewl. Right now my immediate goal is to transfer my programs over to the two new workstations and get them all running properly. I’m just hoping that Foxy will think the credit card bill is due to her shoe fetish.
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As I said, you’ve found your mojo with the other programs, just wanted to let you know subdocuments was still there in 2019. not sure about 365. that’s what i have on my work PC. I’ll have to take a look at that tomorrow.
Regarding assigning programs to specific cores, it’s done in Task Manager. See here.
https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-manually-allocate-cpu-cores-windows-10/
I’ve done this for our computer based NDE product, basically pushing it off of CPU0, and limiting it to the other cores.
most programs will stay on CPU0, by default, so I’ve seen substantial performance improvement this way.
I’ve never figured out if this is “remembered” when you reboot, or close and restart the application, so you may need to do this every time you launch the program.
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I’ll give that a try as it’s bound to help. Thanks a lot.
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“My hope is that Quark and PhotoShop can coexist at the same time. Yesterday, while assembling my latest tome, I had Quark, PhotoShop, and CorelDRAW all running simultaneously without a problem. That was almost enough to make me stop and jerk off. ”
Spoken like a true engineer!
All in all, you sound like you’re having fun!
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Geek Squad eat your heart out! So far I’m impressed with the workstation. It’s neat that you can completely disassemble it without tools. Everything snaps together. My additional 18666 MHz RAM modules should be here in a couple of days. I’m pumping it up to 96 or 128 Gb and what’s leftover will go in the second workstation I’ve bought. Transferring the software licenses hasn’t been too much of a hassle so far.
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