Progress report

We’re having another heat wave, so I didn’t sleep well last night. I got some stuff done, but it wasn’t my most productive day ever.

I proofed three chapters of layouts and input those corrections. In the process, I realized that there was a mistake in one of the headers (just a formatting error—I didn’t misspell my name or use the wrong title or anything funny like that). So I needed to fix that for all 10 chapters that had been laid out, and since I was doing that anyway, I went ahead and followed my own advice, scooting the headers and chapter numbers to just inside the margins. I’m glad I poked through the “POD publishing” tag on this blog—better to do it to 10 chapters now than 31 chapters later….

ETA: I laid out the front matter, too—that’s easy and doesn’t take long, so it’s a good thing to do when you’re tired.

Progress report

I laid out six chapters, plus I fixed a couple of things I forgot to do—some of which involved reloading the text from the word processor and laying it out again in a couple of chapters, ugh. But overall I think things went well. I know I keep saying that the Scribus/LibreOffice combo is efficient once you get the hang of it, but 1. it is, and 2. I used to lay out things in Word, so I know from inefficient. (Here’s an old post when I was using Adobe/Word, and I’m SUPER psyched to lay out six chapters—like, I definitely worked today, but I didn’t kill myself or anything.)

Oh, and I gave A Dislocated World to the copy editor, so that’s good.

Progress report

Laid out four chapters! Whoot! Scribus is fiddly, but yeah, once you remember the quirks, it’s actually pretty time efficient. I don’t know that I’ll ever get up to 10 chapters a day or anything, just because laying things out really kind of drains me, but definitely if I had more endurance for the work I could get a lot done in a day. Especially since Tribulations (hey, did you see the new covers on the home page?) doesn’t have any interior art.

Ah, yes, Scribus

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? What I remember about Scribus is that it’s efficient once you get yourself set up, but there’s definitely a learning curve. I was reacquainting myself with it, and I remembered doing a little how-to post, so I looked at that—ah, yes, it’s coming back to me now. I don’t really have time to do a deep dive into it today, but I hopefully will set myself up to get a good start tomorrow.

Wild night

With one thing and another, I haven’t finished the betas on the next Trang novel yet, but I’ve been mulling over them and thinking about the fourth book, which I have a vague outline for but not much more. A couple of nights ago I had a really good idea for that book, and last night I basically a thunderstorm of ideas that resulted in my hopping out of bed, turning on the lights, and annoying the cat about a million times to write them down. So that was a lot of progress there, and I’m very happy about it. (My writing process is kind of a bitch, honestly—just ask my cat.)

One thing I think I have to do now is swap the titles for the third and fourth book. Trials will make more sense with the fourth book, while Tribulations makes equally-good sense for the third. It does kind of lose the whole, “Oh what trials and tribula-a-tions” thing, and it means that I will once again be laboring on Trials, but that’s OK.

Progress report

I got back the beta read of A Dislocated World (the World War II letters). It’s interesting because the questions simply aren’t that different than the questions for Trials: What’s an APO? Why doesn’t he know whether or not he needs to pay income tax? Is the Maine unit in Maine?

It really brings home something I realized in journalism school, which is that nonfictional stories and fictional stories are both stories, and should be treated as such. (This concept is really important to the movie Big Fish, and is a big part of why I liked it so much.) There is some essay, which of course I can’t find now, where a writer points out that, although science fiction is known for its world building, a problem with a lot of novels in other genres is that they don’t bother to do any world building when it would really enrich the book.

And a big part of the editing I’m doing with this nonfiction, historical book is world building. Nobody knows what the hell the ETO is anymore, nor how it differs from the CBI or the POA—you have to explain all that. You have to build this nonfiction, historical world, otherwise these letters won’t make any sense.

What else? The copy editor is available! Yay!

Progress report

I did the beta edits for the first three chapters of Trials. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but it was probably the majority of the work, because a lot of the questions were about background—how is the station laid out? what do the Snake Boys look like? where do the Portal Aliens live? why is Creepy the former Host messiah?—which is great, because obviously I’m super-familiar with all of that, but anyone who hasn’t read the two earlier books, like, VERY recently isn’t going to be.

There was also an objection to the specific manner in which two of the human characters insulted each other that I really liked, because I’d been feeling like Trang’s being multi-lingual had been sort of dropped in this book, so now they are insulting each other in French. Which always makes me happy.

Progress report

I wasn’t really able to focus on Trials today, although I did get some good ideas last night. Instead I proofed the bonus content for the World War II letters, which are titled (horn toots pretentiously) A Dislocated World: Letters from a World War II Surgeon. I put the cover on the home page, too.

Progress report

I went through the beta reads today for Trials—I think I might let things marinate and work on them tomorrow. It’s kind of what I expected—both readers have read the earlier Trang books, but it’s been a really long time (I asked them to please NOT refresh their memories), so there’s a lot of questions about the basic setting and situation. So I’m going to try to figure out a way to bulk that part out a bit without making it too much of an information dump.

Progress report

I was going to start work on the Trials beta reads today, but I didn’t sleep well last night, so instead I went over the introduction & informational bits I put into my grandfather’s letters and did the front & back matter. Because it’s nonfiction, I am doing a bibliography, but because it’s not academic writing, I’m not footnoting or anything. I actually pondered doing an index for about three seconds before I remembered that it’s going to be an e-book and people can use the “search” function.

Progress report

Today was kind of a blah day—didn’t sleep well, had other things to do, etc.—so I just finished out Part 1 and called it good.

By the way, the beta readers are all done with Trials, which is awesome. I’ll look at that after I send the letters off.

I was thinking about it last night and was actually pretty pleased to realize that I’m not going to have a huge doubling of production tasks, because I’ll be laying Trials out but not the letters, and I’ll be putting up the photos and whatnot from the letters here, but not doing that for Trials. So at least it won’t be super-repetitive.

Progress report

So, I’m doing basically the final pass over the letters before I send them off to a beta reader, who will hopefully let me know if my explanatory additions & edits work. I’m also taking a crack at things like getting the names consistent—I don’t know if it is a good thing or a bad thing that my grandfather & I clearly shared an inability to spell or remember names, but I do feel a deep sense of connection with him on this front. Also he tends to list the bazillion things he is doing, and then complain that he’s getting no work done—because “work” = “surgery” to him. For better or for worse, I feel the same way about writing.

Anyway, today I did the introduction & most of Part 1.