Well, I've gone and done it. I've spent hours and hours but it's done. My book -- my first novel, published fourteen years ago and soon to come out in a new trade edition -- has been kindled. I'm not very tech savvy, so some of the aspects of getting the book from a printed hardcover (I never had a copyedited version of the novel on disk) to a kindle-loving html file have been trial and error, or more often than not, blind luck. There was cursing. There was slamming shut the laptop and going to bed angry. But it's done, and it should be live on Amazon any minute.

I should be clear: This isn't my first book available on kindle, but it's the first one I submitted myself. From the pdf scan, through a really bad OCR file (due to a low quality scan), to Word, then many corrections later, many tries at kindle conversion later, it's done. I feel like I sit enough as a writer; this project has only widened my posterior! So I'm glad summer is almost here, and the kindle project is done, for now. I have, oh, four more books to go! All out of print and ripe for kindle-world. If my back side can take it.

One thing I love about my kindle is reading my own work-in-progress on it. You can upload a file, then download it for like, ten cents. Then you can remind yourself of what you've written while you travel -- but you can't edit on it even though it has a keyboard. That will be the great improvement in kindle version whatever...2? 6? 26?

Do you own a kindle, the Amazon reader? I'm not sure yet how I feel about it, except that I do own one. I got it as a gift, in preparation for a trip to Europe. (I couldn't charge it most of the time... argh.) I bought a book on it, a favorite author, Reginald Hill, and promptly got tired of going through the pages. It's easy to read, that's not it. It just feels like, oh, I don't know -- not a book. However many people love e-readers, and who am I to tell them how to read their books. God love 'em, they're reading!