Let’s say you’re out of your mind, which I just might be, and you want to republish an older novel of your own to which you own the rights. You might take a bandsaw and one of the original hardcovers of your novel, which was published and finished before the advent of digital publishing, cut off the spine, and then run the pages through your scanner, the feeder of which might just break while you’re doing it. Let’s just say that’s what you’re doing. Here are my recommendation:

• Scan at the highest possible setting — I did it at 600 dpi. Really, less than that should be fine. I just wanted to give the OCR function in Acrobat Pro as much information as possible.
• Run the OCR function on Acrobat Pro (or the OCR program of your choice)
• Export to Word or RTF after scanning and recognizing text.
• Then, whenever you find a nit, such as 1 for I, do a global search and replace but make sure that you look at each one to make sure that it’s what you want to change. Your 1 could be part of that /1 for A ugliness.
• Run Word’s grammar checker, it will help find stuff.
• Search 0 for O (zero for O)
• Quotation marks will be screwed up. Guaranteed. Check each one. Search on ” and ‘ and then make sure they’re correct. I had some that were truly weird. Especially with sentences beginning with “I. And then, go through and make sure that your close-quotes are all correct.
• Then, if you have a lot of formatting, like I did, with italics, etc., make sure the italics are italics and that stuff that’s supposed to be plain text instead of itals is actually pt.
• Finally, go through the pdf and the Word/RTF doc side by side on the screen and make sure you’ve got what you’ve think you’ve got. Then, put your Word or RTF file into another font — you’d be surprised at how many things this will help you find. (Blowing it up to 200 percent and marching through it will also help.)

The Final Appearance of America’s Favorite Girl Next Door is out on Amazon. Warm up those credit cards and get one for everyone you know.

It’s only available as an ebook. And if you’re not packing Kindle heat, but do have an ereader, it will be available elsewhere soon. Keep checking back here.

Or treat yourself and get a Kindle today. Or tomorrow. Whichever is more convenient.

Robert Hass, one of my favorite poets:

“I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain
it must sometimes make a kind of singing.
And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps—
First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.”

It’s a beautiful idea. You can read it and hear him read it on The Poetry Foundation’s web site.

It’s a strange thing to read your own novel when it’s about to get kicked out the door. And so it was this last week or so, finishing yesterday, with my ‘final’ reading of THE FINAL APPEARANCE OF AMERICA’S FAVORITE GIRL NEXT DOOR. Found a lot of little nits, so you with the ARCs, lots of little things are changed, so you have yourselves a nice little collector’s item. If you want one, an ARC, contact margaret@shelfmediagroup.com and she may be kind enough to send one to you.

But back to ‘strange’: Spend 10+ years writing a novel and there are bound to be things you would change. But there’s a certain authenticity to the moment that seems necessary. Currently, the official publication date is December 1. But you may be able to get it earlier. I will update.

Okay, if you can forget the wash of strings, which I think adds to it, I think this Scott Walker song, On Your Own Again is truly extraordinary. One minute forty-five seconds of masterful writing. “I was so happy then, I didn’t feel like me.”

Here’s the (very low budget, i.e., no budget) trailer for THE FINAL APPEARANCE OF AMERICA’S FAVORITE GIRL NEXT DOOR.

If you’re wondering who the lovely young woman is, it’s Jacqueline Dolan, my daughter. You can find out more about her here.