For the last week I’ve been frustrated. I’ve tried to publish the May 2009 issue of my Twitter poems chapbook, but I’ve been running into some challenges that have held up the process.

For starters, I bought a new laptop, an Acer AspireOne. It’s a tiny little Ferrari of a laptop, but it really is a cool toy. But of course, Microsoft and Acer have teamed up to force me to purchase Microsoft Office or be relegated to using it the complimentary X number of times and be without. I downloaded OpenOffice instead, the committed cheap ass bastard that I am.

I spent three days trying to figure out how to convert from OpenOffice to .pdf. I couldn’t do it. My .pdf converter doesn’t recognize OpenOffice files and won’t convert text files properly. Nor would it work correctly with Microsoft Word 2007, which is the format I was saving my OpenOffice files in. I finally had to save it in MS Word 2003 then go to my desktop computer, which I gave to my six year old so he could play his games on, and open the document in Word to convert it to .pdf.

I thought that had solved all my problems. I didn’t.

It took me another two days to figure out why the .pdf converter was melding every document I’ve converted to date into one file. At first I didn’t recognize that was what was happening. The front cover of the .pdf document was the cover of HardSoftwood.

After scratching my head for a couple of days it finally dawned on me that I had used the combine documents feature of my .pdf converter on the HardSoftwood project and never turned it off. Duh! So besides being a cheap ass bastard I am now a dumb ass bastard. Two for one.

At any rate, long story short, I fixed that issue and now am ready to present to you the 13-page chapbook titled Twitpoems. You can download it for free with the World Class Poetry Toolbar.