Printing Out the Draft

On Tuesday, I had to print out the first draft of my novel to send off to my new mentor.

Easier said than done.

First I ran out of paper. Off to Staples to get more.

Then my printer stopped printing and displayed the "order black cartridge" message. I didn't want to run back to Staples until I absolutely had to, so I took paper out of the printer and fed it back in -- past experience has revealed this will fool the printer to printing 20 more pages on a bum cartridge before giving me the message again. This is great, except that I had just started printing and had about 300 more pages to print. So I had to keep doing it 15 times.

The fifth time a fed the paper back in, the printer somehow changed to envelope printing, so I had to change that back to 8 1/2 x 11 sized paper printing.

On the 10th time, the printer reported to me "paper jam." So I had to pull the printer apart and clear that. Then back to feeding the printer again.

Finally, I finished printing the first draft and was able to run to the post office to ship the first draft off. Then I returned to Staples to get more black cartridge.

Writing is tough. Printing out what I've written can be even tougher.