What an experience the last month has been! First it was catching and correcting errors in Amigos for Kindle. Lesson: get a trusted reader (or two) to read a ms before you publish.

Then my dear sister-in-law who drew the illustrations and was widowed in December said she’d love to have a print copy. Simple, I thought. So I went to Createspace to format a paperback version. Easy peasy, right? Not for me. The first pages with Title, Dedication, etc. should be unnumbered or with Roman numerals. The body of the manuscript should start with page 2.

I decided to alternate headings, my name, title, my name, etc. Somehow that tended to mess up the page numbers. Once every other page was # 3. 2,3,4,3,6,3,etc. Another time every other page was 73! Tearing my hair out at one point, DH Mark manually numbered every other page. Which promptly disappeared when I made another formatting flub.

Not to bore with minute detail, just know that I spent hour after hour, day after day for weeks before getting it right. At one point I thought it was good enough to order a copy. Wrong! All kinds of problems, to my eyes, though my mother-in-law, a university English professor and avid reader, assured me that most readers would never notice. Back to work again. Finally, I think, it’s acceptable and I’ve ordered copies to take to a family reunion on the Columbia River July 4.

So now Amigos should be available for sale on Amazon and elsewhere.