23/08/2024
Once upon a time in a cozy little town, there lived an author named Mildred Wainwright. Mildred had a penchant for writing, and her stories were loved by all who read them. But there was one thing Mildred didn’t have a knack for — formatting.
After months of hard work, Mildred finally finished her latest book, "The Curious Case of the Missing Left Sock." It was a whimsical tale full of twists, turns, and talking laundry. Mildred was thrilled. She could already imagine her readers laughing out loud at the antics of the sock-stealing gnome. There was just one thing left to do: layout the book.
Mildred, being the fiercely independent type, decided to tackle this task herself. "How hard could it be?" she thought. She opened up her computer, fired up her word processor, and got to work.
The first challenge came when she tried to set the margins. Mildred had always thought margins were just those annoying spaces where nothing happened, but now she realised they were vital. She tried setting them at one inch. Then half an inch. Then two inches. Suddenly, the pages looked like they’d been formatted by a drunken octopus, with text crammed to one side, and random words floating in a sea of whitespace.
Undeterred, Mildred moved on to the headers and footers. She typed her name at the top of every page. But when she previewed the book, her name appeared upside down on some pages, backward on others, and once, it even ran vertically along the spine of the book. She swore she hadn’t clicked anything to make that happen, but there it was, like a graffiti tag from a parallel universe.
The real nightmare began when Mildred tried to insert page numbers. She wanted them at the bottom of each page, in the centre. But no matter what she did, the numbers would either vanish entirely or end up in bizarre places, like the middle of a paragraph or halfway up a sentence. On one page, the number 7 appeared in bold, right in the middle of a dramatic monologue by the sock gnome. It looked like the gnome had suddenly developed a stammer.
Exasperated, Mildred decided to take a break. She went to the kitchen, made herself a cup of tea, and tried to calm down. But even as she sipped her Earl Grey, all she could think about was the mess waiting for her on the screen. She tried to relax, but visions of disjointed paragraphs and rogue page numbers haunted her.
Finally, after another failed attempt that left her book looking like a ransom note, Mildred threw her hands up in defeat. She stared at the ceiling and let out a long, dramatic sigh. "I’m a writer, not a formatting wizard," she muttered. "I need help."
And so, Mildred decided to do what she should have done all along. She hired a professional book designer. A week later, the designer sent her the formatted manuscript, and it was a thing of beauty. The margins were perfect, the headers and footers behaved themselves, and the page numbers stayed where they belonged. Mildred was thrilled.
When she held the final proof in her hands, she couldn’t help but laugh. The layout was so flawless that it seemed like magic. Mildred realised that sometimes, it’s okay to leave certain tasks to the experts. After all, she wouldn’t expect her book designer to write a novel, so why should she try to format one?
And so, Mildred lived happily ever after, typing away on her next story, blissfully unaware of how margins or page numbers worked.
And the sock gnome? Well, he got his own spin-off series — beautifully formatted, of course 😉
The Rural Publishing Company is dedicated to sharing the stories of rural, regional and remote authors, via a self-publishing model.
