Microsoft is Sabotaging Me

"Did you try turning it off, then back on?"

 

Humans are strangely optimistic in the face of certain failure. That's me with Microsoft products. I'm trying to (finally) finish the final read-through of my manuscript, but once again, Microsoft is stymieing me. The same thing happened with my first go-round: I got about 7/8's of the way through it when text began disappearing. I was forced to split it into two separate documents, one with the last five chapters and the original with the first thirty-five. Luckily, I still had the source document with non-disappearing text to work from.

Now yesterday, just as I was getting close to the finish line, it happened again. Approximately half of chapter thirty-six vanished. I could see the top half of one line, apparently the demarcation between visible and invisible text, then nothing below that until chapter thirty-seven. Trust me, it's impossible to fix. I tried everything. And Google was no help. One of Microsoft's "volunteers" even suggested that if I just scroll up and down a few times, the text will reappear. Really? (It didn't.)

I have no idea how I can possibly upload my manuscript to KDP. Trust me, one cannot upload it in sections. I'm told that copy and paste works in KindleCreate, but I'm dubious. I haven't tried it yet because I'm not done editing, and possibly I can copy and paste one document, but two?

Desperate, I tried Google Docs, and maybe I'm just too dumb to figure it out, but where the hell is the formatting button? Sure, I pasted it in from Word, but it didn't retain the formatting; it's just one long block of text.  

Next, I went on a search for alternate word processing programs. LibreOffice is free and supposedly good, so I've now downloaded it. That's as far as I've gotten. I'm almost afraid to try it; I have an impending sense of doom that this won't work, either. Not to mention that it's now hogging a lot of space on my hard drive. Will it even let me copy and paste from Word (two separate documents, no less)?

Searching online for a solution to my problem is extremely frustrating. It's as if Google can't comprehend what I'm asking. Or it assumes I've somehow accidentally inserted a text box toward the end of my manuscript, which is causing the text to be obscured. Trust me, I never inserted anything, and why would I? I don't just randomly click on Word commands that I've never in my life touched before. 

The first time this happened, I thought perhaps the font color had (implausibly) changed to white, so I tried highlighting the missing text in various colors. That didn't work. Then Microsoft barred me from doing anything; the cursor was frozen in place. Yes, I did try closing out the document and reopening it, but the problem persisted. 

As of now, I'm left with a story that has no ending. I'm not ready to give up. I spent months writing this novel, and I'm not willing to trash it because Microsoft wants me to. I anticipated a few issues with publishing, but this definitely was not one of them.

Of all the frustrations I was prepared for, I never figured on landing on one that would stop me in my tracks.

Thanks a ton, Bill. Your products are "awesome".