I’ve already complained about this to my Day Job peeps, but oh my god.  I’ve been working on the formatting improvements for the earlier books (particularly Book 1, since I lost the print-formatted version a couple years ago when my old computer died).  Everything’s been going just fine…

Until I got to the Book 3 files.

Because the Book 3 print-formatted file is four pages long.

*pause for cracked, maniacal laughter*

Now, mind you, this is the book that in physical print is 648 pages long.  So, uh, no.

But I had my ebook-formatted file, and it was fine, right?  So I could just make a copy of that and not do the print-formatting yet, and just do my tweaks in peace and safety, right?

So I tinkered with that for a couple hours.  Went to work.  Went to bed.  Woke up to start working on it again.

Four.  Pages.  Long.

Granted, all the info is in there.  Packed away somewhere in the data.  I can find it when I open the document in a Notepad file — with all the formatting markup there in plain text, making it the work of madness to try to copy it over to a new file like that.

So…

Well.

*pitiful whimpering*

I still have that ebook-formatted one!  I can just make a new copy and–

Hold up, let’s not be a crazy person, trying the same thing again just in case there’s a different outcome.  Let’s be smarter than that.

So I figure it’s the size of the file that’s the problem.  (Cross fingers that’s all it is.)  I’d been having formatting issues with the Book 3 print version from the beginning, because it’s a beast, so the best thing to do would be to split it into two documents and work on it at a size where my writing program won’t choke to death.

Did that for eight hours today, working on the first file.

I have now saved it, and backed up a version in another document format, and am hoping beyond hope that nothing screws up this time.

Please cross your fingers for me.