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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012. Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing the drug and gang related violence in Mexico. Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has dominated Mexico for six years.

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The threat of civil war hangs over an isolated ficticious southeastern Oklahoma town.

Rantburg.com and Borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents Newtonville, his first, epic novel of love and betrayal set in the turbulent late 1960s. Click here to buy

Transcribing the next book
2012-11-24
Posted by: badanov

On the eve of the last sales campaign for "Newtonville", I got a notification that "The Sunday War" was rejected because of a lack of a proper table of contents.

The problem was that The Sunday War has footnotes, which Smashword's conversion program rejected. Originally I used the automatic footnote generating feature in Libre Office, but it was rejected. So I had to take all 40 notes and redo them. I then submitted the book and waited.

Subsequently, I did a number of changes to the book after a resubmission was rejected no fewer than seven times. Among those seven times I assumed, since Smashwords automatic conversion program doesn't always notify you as to why it rejects a manuscript, that a non-standard font was at least one of the reasons for rejection.

In my home, I have a FreeBSD central server, which I use the Linux laptop and the Windows desktop to access. On the laptop is Libre Office Writer, in a Fedora operating system. Fedora is one of those operating systems that disallows the use of some software if that software has legal encumbrances such as restrictive licenses. So, I am left without an acceptable font.

After searching on line I found a times new roman font to download. The process was easy. The font set, which is a True Type font, was installed using a program called kfontview. The font was downloaded, I opened kfontview and installed the times new roman font.

Now I can access the manuscript for my next book from either machine.

Why transcribing?

"Newtonville" was written in longhand. Much of it was written while I was unemployed, some of it while on vacation. Can't take the old Commodore 64 with you to write, so I bought a couple of legal pads and started writing. It;s just an added editorial layer. I write in longhand, then transcribe it and can edit it as I go along.

I don't do this for everything I write, so the joke I made two years ago about getting writer's cramp really is funny, since I didn't write any of those Mexican Drug War stories in longhand.

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