All is well

Before Easter, I met a kink (something which should reside in a Kink Port?) in the progress of #WVGTbk2. Suddenly, without precedent and without  (meaningful) warning, the Kindle Direct Publishing site started responding to my submissions with this:

 

There was "a problem" – pretty scarey. I went to the Help page, which of course didn't do what it said on the ti...tle. There was a tab marked Community, where  I thought I might at least find fellow-sufferers. I described my problem, hit Send, and got ... another meaningless error-message.

At this point I took a breath. Perhaps the two errors were related. Maybe KDP was running on a skeleton staff over Easter, and some critical function was down (as they say, if avoiding the odious IT-speak about experiencing an outage...

<autobiographical_note>

A kindred spirit, when I formed part of a three-man crack team with the task of [tasked with – "Oh Christ! That ever this should be" in the words of the Ancient Mariner] bringing English to the Digital Equipment Company) explained that Outage was a typo  for Outrage.

</autobiographical_note>

 ...). So I just had to wait for a day or two and try again.

Which I did, but to no avail; I got the same error.

But all is now well. There was an internal XHTML error in the cross-references, caused by my effort at ensuring consistency (by using a clone of my *AL* chapter as a "starter" for my *AR* chapter, and then deleting the text). I didn't delete the IDs (which was the point of the exercise – except that I forgot to update the IDs to point to new stuff). The poor compiler got its wires hopelessly tangled.

So all things have in a beautiful way, as the Ancient Greeks used to say when they meant everything was OK – παντα καλως έχει  (give or take a diacritic, which we didn't do). Now it's a simple matter of writing the thing.

 

b