It’s been a busy few months after publishing On the Line. Rather than close my laptop and depressurise after months of the all-consuming book-making process in which you’re ‘on it’ from waking up to going to bed, with a zillion little things on my mind, as soon as it was done, it was on to doing the Epub version. Being a bit of a polymath, vital in self-publishing, it’s not enough to just know your way around Adobe Indesign (print layout), Adobe Illustrator (drawing), and writing a complex book (Scrivner); now you have to write code as well (HTML/CSS etc), and understand the wacky - 1990s tech - world of EPUB.
One issue I find with multi-tasking like this is that by the end of each part of the process, were you achieve semi-expert ability (you remember all the keyboard shortcuts) you find you’re an amateur again when starting the next. This means you’re always forgetting and relearning what you knew! I find writing an EPUB doc a process of relearning and getting to grips with the changes made since I last did it, going from EPUB.1 to EPUB3.3, what works on Amazon, and what does not.
Once the Kindle version was done, I thought, rather than just forget it all again, why not do over all my old EPUBS to the latest standard, meaning Down, Higher Education and Me, Myself & I.
Down’s done (mainly. changing all diagrams from PNG to SVGs), and Higher Education is half done (lots of editing/correcting the text), as well as Me, Myself & I. I intend to bring out a second edition of Higher Education with a lot more diagrams and an improved layout, and the EPUB version of Me, Myself & I is just meant as a placeholder for a third edition, which is the next job on my list (there are no more print versions on sale).
MM&I was the first book I did, and I had no idea what I was doing when it came to editing, laying out, or drawing the illustrations, so to me, it’s a total mess. But, I also know that this crappy little book, full of errors and spelling mistakes, also helps many people achieve solo ascents of El Cap and other walls. Unlike Down, MM&I was never meant to be a big seller, as how many climbers do you know who want to solo big walls, so maybe that was my excuse for shoddy workmanship. But also think I followed the Zuckerberg mantra of “Move fast and break things”; only mine was “Move fast and don’t worry about the spelling”.
For paid subscribers, there’s no need to get the EPUB, as I’m going to continue to post the chapters here and will do so every day this week until it’s all online.
Note, the text is ten years old, and what I’d write or say would probably be different today, but that’s not to say I was wrong ten years ago, only different.
The Body
They say that training is 80% physical and 20% mental in sports, while in the actual competition, this is reversed. It will feel 100% mental and 100% physical on a wall! Soloing a wall will probably feel like the most exhausting thing you've ever done, squeezing every ounce of energy from your body. When you make it down, you'll feel like you'll never climb again (it never lasts!).