Ugh

I’m going over the revised layout—this is the final pass before it goes to the copy editor, so this is where things get REALLY detail oriented and time consuming. It’s basically the last chance to fix things that are hard to fix, so you end up laying out the same damned paragraph three or four times just to get it looking the best you can.

Some family members are kind of leaning on me to make a physical book out of my grandfather’s letters, and right now I’m just like, ugh, no way. Maybe later I will, but not for a while yet.

Progress report

I input changes on one more chapter (I’m now up to Chapter 23) , but was feeling rather blah about it (the italics situation is a real drag—luckily that seems to clear up in later chapters), so instead I completed the proofreading. Hopefully this revision will be done in a couple of days!

Ugh

So, once again, the italics are giving me trouble because they’re not moving consistently between the word processor and the layout software. I’m fixing that, but I’m definitely going to need to make a special pass through the revised layout just to deal with them. LibreOffice is an improvement over Word because it’s doesn’t crash nearly as much and doesn’t shove random code into your work, but the italics business is a constant pain in the ass.

Progress report

The heat wave broke this afternoon, which of course meant BIG thunderstorms, necessitating a rapid switch from work on the computer to work not on the computer. But I input corrections through chapter 16, and proofread through chapter 25. (There are 31 chapters still.)

Progress report

I finished laying out the book! Whoo-hoo!

Of course I need to input the chapters I proofread earlier, and then proofread and input changes into the chapters I did today, but still—it’s always nice to be done with that first draft!

With the changes from the beta readers, the book is now 85,7500 words long—so a little longer than before, but not massively so. I used 10-point Georgia, and the layout is 256 pages long. I’ll have to remember to fix the spine width on the cover….

Progress report

Yeah, I didn’t sleep much last night—every other day it is! But I slept enough to lay out six more chapters. Luckily before I did that I looked over the headers of the five chapters I did yesterday and found not one but TWO places where I messed up the page numbers—and it wasn’t like the second error fixed the first! That’s kind of the issue with print layouts: I feel like it’s better to focus on one thing at a time, but if you don’t stop and check over stuff every few chapters, you could end up having fix headers on 400 pages or something.

Progress report

Heat wave’s still on, but I was able to sleep enough last night to work today. I finished proofing all 10 chapters layouts and input the changes. Whoo! I feel like I got more done because I took a sizable break in the middle and did something else entirely—that doesn’t usually work for me for actual writing, but laying things out is just so fiddly and detail-oriented that my brain get fried. It’s just too easy for me to reach a point where I’m like, “Why am I being so uptight? Let’s let this slide,” when I know I’ll look at it later and go, “OH MY GOD!”

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!