Things Claude is NOT Good at...

It has been a couple of days of ups and downs--mostly downs at this point--getting Kiln-Formed Glass Beyond the Basics ready for re-release. Early in 2025 I tried to take my original pdf proof and reformat it myself for digital publishing. I failed abysmally. There were all kinds of errors with line spacing differing from paragraph to paragraph, fonts not being available, and layout and icons just being totally messed up. So I paid a not-inconsiderable sum to have someone on Fiverr redo the layout for me. She took it from a side-by-side page layout to a single page--and supposedly fixed all the spacing nonsense--leaving me to review (i.e., re-read it all carefully) and insert page numbers for the table of contents and index to get it finished. 

Unfortunately when I got it back from her, life had already taken off in a million other directions (thank you Palladia), and the manuscript languished. Fast forward to the end of 2025 (a year which turned out to be a dumpster fire on a train wreck in the middle of a plague pit as my spouse would say). Exhausted and beaten, I headed off on a 20-day vacation with the spouse. It's two back-to-back cruises, and traditionally I pick a handcraft project or two to take along with me to keep my hands and creative brain occupied. This time, however, I took nothing but my laptop with the formatted copy of my manuscript and a burning desire to finish it by January 15, 2026. It took ten days into the cruises before I even had enough oompf to crack open my laptop. But my well of energy and creativity finally filled back up, I parked myself on a lounger in the sun with my laptop open and ready, flexed my fingers, and started back on my manuscript. 

High on my recent successes with Claude (and ignoring last year's dismal failure at having him helping me plan a drip irrigation system), I passed the edited manuscript off to him and asked what he could do. He looked it over and found a lot more work than I had thought there would be. Turns out the human editor had introduced a raft of spelling errors, and completely ignored all the hyphens which had previously been at the end of lines of text (and appropriate) which were now, with the new formatting, in the middle of lines (and totally inappropriate). Claude analyzed everything I needed to do and said it was difficult, but he could do it. He ran some Python scripts, created a program or two, and after a couple of hours of back and forth with me, he was done! He complimented me very prettily on my book, said he had fixed everything it, and crowed about saving me $1,000-$1,300 in proofreading and editing fees. I went off a giddy afternoon sipping sangria and congratulating myself on using of AI to get a MAJOR project done before it was cool. That was a couple of days ago.

The next day I looked closely—and with much dismay—at what Claude had done. It was unusable.
When I told him my findings, his suggestion was to take all the problems he had found (and said he fixed) and to fix them myself manually--ideally in InDesign. As it turns out, I had the InDesign file from the human editor. I also had ZERO experience using InDesign, but I put my big girl panties on and started wading through the edits. 

As I compared Claude's suggestions and the two files I had from the human contractor, I fell deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of problems: The font used by the contractor was a Windows-proprietary font not easily (or even less-than-easily) available on a Mac, line spacing errors were rampant, and when I fixed them, the fix caused a cascading failure of other errors. All the energy and morale I had been rebuilding began to drain away and Palladia slunk back off to her cave. I had to stop for the day.

Yesterday, loins girded and two iced lattes consumed, I picked it up again. My first breakthrough was finding that the human contractor had sent me a folder of the fonts used in the document so I had the hitherto-missing font. (Yay!). That success was followed on by others, and I fell into a good rhythm that got me through all the hyphen fixes and the first 20 pages of spacing and other nonsense. High on success--but nervous about having to potentially redo everything for the printed versions--I then spent over an hour setting up the ISBN numbers and beginning the print-publishing process. Though I don't even know if I want to use Amazon to publish, I started with them. I had to slog through a bunch of forms and upload the entire manuscript just to find out pricing! Anyhoo, I am moving forward again, and still planning to hit my January 15 publish date--at least for the digital copy.

Lessons learned so far? Anytime I need someone to say wonderful things about me to make me feel better and tell me yes everything can be done and it’s done and isn’t this great, I’ll go to Claude. When I need someone to share the hard truths of life with me, I’ll go to my human friends like Zaga and Lynne. Then I'll do the work myself and leave the sangria till it's done.