Twelve Months at Hurricane Ridge – First Proof

Maybe this Facebook post says enough.

That tenuous celebratory moment when
I think a project is done
(Twelve Months at Hurricane Ridge)
but won’t know until the proof copy arrives in ~2 weeks.
I hope pages 32-34 work out.
Stay tuned.
Now, a break. Whew.

(https://www.facebook.com/tom.trimbath/posts/pfbid0riUoa6KfQKFHLDhGymnTmsttsUDCMyZjzZDE2X7wyxeH4z74WbZajAdVU9QoHYP1l)

And, here’s more.

Today, May 18, 2026, I hit Publish on my next photo essay, Twelve Months at Hurricane Ridge. Whew. Yay. And yet. With every book I’ve published recently, I order a Proof copy, a physical copy of the book that only I get, to make sure it is good enough. The ‘good enough’ part is important. I aim for perfection, and know I am not going to attain it. I’m fine with that.

There’s always at least one flaw. Sometimes it is trivial. Sometimes it is obvious. I order the Proof, wait for it to arrive (usually about 10 days), then review it to see if I have to fix something, or can go public as-is. As I type, I have about 10 days off from this project. Whew.

Some things that may need fixing or may be wrong. Photo uploads can pass through filters in the upload process, taking a 6 Meg photo and reducing it to too few pixels. This book has some disagreements; pdf files are supposedly stable, yet some have a page missing, depending on the hardware and software involved. And then there are margins, unexpected white spaces, etc. My most obvious find that had to be fixed was when some piece of back-end software turned my graphs from black lines on white to white lines on a black block. 

I may be done. I won’t know until about two weeks from now. Then, I’ll have to decide what to do. The upload and Publish part took less than two hours. The print and ship part takes two weeks. Digital is quicker. Physical is slow. Of course, if I did all the work the cost in time and money would be worse. I’d have more control, but I want to have a life, too.

Much of my worry and hassle at this point is because I use Chromebooks. Publishers like MS Word and Adobe pdfs, preferably on a Windows machine, maybe on an Apple. Google flaunts convention while trying to work to the standards. It doesn’t always work. Calling for Help just puts the poor Help Desk folks into a finger-pointing exercise at each other. Going for good enough helps – usually.

I work from Chromebooks because they are cheap, the software can be free, and they are largely compatible. I’ve run businesses from them. The other options may be better accepted, but they are expensive, cumbersome, overloaded with features, and still prone to flaws. It is all tradeoffs. Lately, Google seems to be striving to add features as if simplicity isn’t worth anything. (Hey, Google. Simplicity is more valuable. So say I.)

As I’ve been building the book, it has been a chore to maintain version control of the files as they swap between the machines. Thumb drives help. For me, libraries help. Libraries maintain current computers with current software that would be expensive for me to maintain. Thanks. (A donation will be made.) I start with Google Docs and Google Draw, save as docs, open on the library’s machines, save as pdfs, which I may upload from home. The Draw file gets saved as a pdf, too.

The time required to upload and publish may only be two hours. The time required to create the files to meet Submission Guidelines is earlier and more. The time required to select and write the content is earlier and greater. The time to create the body of work to pull from takes the most, about a year. The publishers only advertise the two hour part. The creator knows better.

I always wish I would’ve made it better. Missed photos, lost notes, phrasing and wording that comes too late, there are always missed improvements. I see the mountains in the blue and white jagged skyline, but panoramas don’t fit into nearly square formats, and yet books are going to be nearly square. What I write will work for some, but it is a guessed-at audience, and I may guess wrong. There are always doubts.

At best, in less than two weeks the Proof will be here and prove to be good enough. If not, fixes and tweaks may take a few weeks. If so, Twelve Months at Hurricane Ridge will be publicly published, and I can get back to work on my screenplay based on my great-grandfather’s sailing log from 1876 when he suddenly found himself a cabin boy on a tall ship heading from Liverpool to Calcutta to New York and back. But, that’s another story. And there’s always another story.