I have been busy, busy, busy. I sent my first query letter with a few chapters of my book last night via email. Fingers are crossed!!! Today I printed my letter of introduction, Introduction page to the book for my readers and a few chapters to send directly to NYU. The saga getting my pages printed oh boy!
Staples needs to up their game if they insist on calling themselves Your Copy/Print/Scan center. I have written everything in Google doc and since this isn’t quite new technology I assumed that Staples would easily take my USB and print out my documents; meaning my book, my letter and my introduction page but never assume is said for a reason. Staples doesn’t use software that recognizes Google Docs but I didn’t know this until it was too late.
I went into Staples intent on sitting at their computer work station and print out my documents myself, all you need is to insert a debit card; I logged into Google, opened my book and the other pages that I needed and clicked on print accepted the charge and then nothing. The printer was out of ink, I called over the copy sales associate and she told me that they were out of stock in the ink cartridge. I told her that I had already been charged for the printing job and she assured me that she would print it out for me at her station. This was the beginning of my lesson in the limits to what Staples can accomplish for those who write in Google docs, not much. After trying to email the documents, pulling them from the USB and still no printing to be had, the manager had a brainstorm and downloaded and converted my google docs to Microsoft and I got my book printed, however the format was completely off, but I wasn’t going to complain to the manager or the sales associate because they both worked so hard to get me my book printed.
If I had known that I would have had to convert these pages into Microsoft, I would have done that myself at the workstation beforehand but that is neither here nor there. I came home and printed what I needed myself and hooray my printer didn’t break down, didn’t have a hissy fit and didn’t try to eat the pages and didn’t run out of ink. Miracles do happen!
And now the ball is out of my court; this doesn’t mean that I am not going to keep sending out more letters, but I broke the ice so to speak.