Unjust Discrimination, Editing Update, and Other Random Bits

Yesterday, Ben Carson (author of Gifted Hands) spoke in a local city to school-age children. A friend of ours wanted to go, and she was trying to find someone to take care of her 4-5 year old daughter because children under a certain age weren’t allowed in.

My four-year-old brother heard about how she wasn’t allowed in, and he burst into tears. “That’s STUPID!” And he’s still talking about it this morning. Poor fellow. He doesn’t understand that sometimes (for unexplained reasons) people of certain ages are not allowed to attend certain things.

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The cover. :)

Editing these last two weeks has gone very well, I am thankful to say. I have finally made it through the whole book, and while there are still little things I’d like to change (for example, a part that probably isn’t very historically accurate, but works as it is now), it’s all done for the most part. God is good—I don’t know how I would have gotten it done if it weren’t for His guidance.

I was hoping to get the book up on CreateSpace before the end of June, but I took too long editing so I probably won’t be getting the free copies like I had hoped. That’s okay, I guess, but I would like to see my book in print form one day. :) We’ll see what happens. This did give me the excuse to completely spell check and design the interior of the book, so I now have a beautiful (well—in my opinion anyway!) book to share with anyone who wants to read it. It also gave me a great excuse to design a cover (right) so that was fun. Even if I don’t get it published right now.

Also, lately, I’ve been working with eBooks and figuring out how to edit them. In my favorite writing program of all time, Scrivener, I can do some basic formatting to the book, then export as an .epub file. Then, with Calibre, I can edit the file to my heart’s content—and, since it’s part html part CSS (please don’t ask me to explain the relationship of the two), I can do whatever I want just as long as I know the proper coding to do! It’s lots of fun. After getting the .epub file just so I have another little program that will convert .epub to .mobi and preserve all the formatting (not changing a single thing), so it’s very easy for me to make the two most common eBook formats now.

If you’re like my mom, that last paragraph probably made your eyes glaze over a bit. Sorry. It is very exciting for me because I can actually control what the final product will look like instead of putting up with another program’s ideas, so for that I’m very thankful.

Also, kind-of as a side note, with help from my uncle I have recently been able to get Microsoft Word. And that was an amazing answer to prayer. God is very good.

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We still have not found a house to rent. Still praying—and trusting—that the Lord has something for us. There are a couple possibilities, but definitely nothing solid yet.

And—this news is very exciting: We will be having another family member in six or so month’s time! One of our friends is already calling the baby “Hannah”, but she called my last brother that and he turned out to be a boy. For myself, I am expecting another brother, and the thought of a sister seems almost to be an impossibility. The funny thing about this baby is that when it is born it will be the 8th child in our family, and I will be the same age as Mom was when the 8th child in her family was born! Lots of excitement going on right now. :)

Many blessings,
Esther