I’m thrilled to report that, at last, the proof copy of Moon Over Donamorgh looks the way it should. I’ve ordered a print copy so I can see it with my own real eyes and feel it in my hands. Assuming all is well with the proof, you should see Donamorgh on online shelves within a week!
I solved the problem by using the “Start section break on next odd (or even) page.” That solution was staring at me the whole time, but I never thought to use it. It’s called “being in a rut.” We get so used to doing things a certain way (in this case, using section break to start on the next page), that we don’t even see the obvious.
Mind you, there is still NO REASON why Word should be placing extra blank pages in the document when it gets saved to .pdf. But since that’s what it was doing, I needed a way to work around it. Remember, this never happened with my first two books. It’s completely random.
Anyway! It’s done, and the book can be published. I hope you all ooh and aah over the professional-looking front matter, remembering what I went through to get it that way :).
Happy Saturday!
Marlene Dotterer 
Glad a solution was reached and your proof is done. YAY!!
I have a couple of suggestions for you. Having used Word since it was a puppy back in 87 or 88 I can tell you it does have its quirks, but nothing akin to WordPerfect, Wordstar or any of the other word processing programs I have used. Unwanted page breaks in PDF conversions, are likely caused by hard page breaks (Ctrl-Enter) in your document. Adobe picks those up sometimes as a full page. A way to fix that is to view your book in draft format (view – draft) and take out the extraneous page breaks. You’ll see them as dashed lines. Two dashed lines means there is an extra page between them. Put your cursor on the unwanted break line and hit delete.
If you are going to publish for the online market, you will need to remove all page breaks and extra lines. Smashwords (www.smashwords.com) has an excellent document out on how to do this so that your book can be viewed in multiple formats.
I hope this helps. Good luck to you.
Thanks! Yes, I have been checking this and I did remove all the double lines I could see. I promise you, I never did a ctrl-enter anywhere, but there they were, anyway. Removing these things only seemed to remove all the section breaks, and I still had extra pages in the pdf.
Word defies all natural laws as we know them. When it feels like it.
Keeps us on our toes, methinks.