I input changes on the chapters up to 25—oh my God, that was a BEAR. I fully expected to be able to proofread the last six chapters today, but no—I’m out of time and exhausted. Honestly, sometimes I wonder why I dislike layouts so much, and then I have a day like today where I’m like, “That’s right! These things are a HUGE pain in the ass!"
ANYWAY it should be a really clean layout at least.
I’m feeling a need to be more specific about my progress with the layout, since I’m tired of layouts, so more accountability is required. I have read through Chapter 25 and done the changes through Chapter 20. If I keep at it, I should be done fairly soon.
I re-read Trang and Trials, make notes of any details that might require bit of an adjustment to Tribulations, and now I’m going through that and inputting changes. There aren’t a lot, but layouts are just so fiddly (plus of course I have to change the manuscript, otherwise the e-book will be wrong) that it’s fairly slow going. Still, it’s happening, and I’ve found a couple of mistakes—I always feel you should get stuff as clean as possible before you pay someone to copy edit it, so that’s good.
I decided to re-read Trang, just to get myself geared up for the fourth book, and…whoopsie. Yeah. In the first book the layout of the diplomatic station isn’t especially important, and in the second book it’s only a little more important. But in the third book the station layout is HUGELY important. Meaning that I actually drew myself a detailed station layout for the first time for the third book, only to realize now that it contradicts some information in the first book.
I’m re-reading the second book now, just to see where the issue stands. I’ll give the third book another read as well. If the first and third book are the problems, then the choices are to fix either the third book or the first. The third book hasn’t gone to the copy editor yet (still waiting), so hopefully I can just take care of it easily in that book without having it mess up the plot (that will be what the additional read will be looking for). If it’s really not fixable in that book, then it’s going back to the first book, fixing that (plus the two typos I found)—but I wouldn’t bother to fix the paper version (I don’t even know if I can at this point, since I’m not using the same software), and of course anyone who got the e-book before I fixed it would still have an inconsistent copy.
Obviously this problem would have been avoided if I had done a detailed layout of the station at the outset, but I feel like that could have created problems, too. I do plan my books to an extent, but I don’t know what exactly is going to happen in each book until I write it. And this issue was caused by my being overly precise in the first book when it wasn’t essential to the plot, so that’s kind of annoying.
I did blurbs/jacket copy for both Tribulations and A Dislocated World today—now I’m working on getting appropriate measurement for the Tribulations cover, since I know how many pages it will be. Amazon took over CreateSpace, and their tools are frankly a bit clunky and involve extra steps and more opportunities for software incompatibilities—if you just give me an online calculator, I can do the rest, thank you very much. Anyway, at this point I think everything is going to work. Fingers crossed!
Whoo-HOO! The layout is finished! Off it will go to the copy editor! Whoooooo!!!
I’ve got a bunch of non-book stuff that needs to get done, but I am looking to start the fourth book sooner rather than later….
Input the corrections through Chapter 25—only six more chapters to go!
Things have been a little disjointed over the past couple of days, but yesterday I was able to fix the headers throughout the layout, and today I proofread the revised layout through Chapter 25.
Finished the revisions through Chapter 16!
I also did the thing where you decide that something in the headers is going to drive you CRAZY unless you change it. And because the headers are already all through the book…well, that took some time today and will probably take more time tomorrow. (I’m sure there’s some way to make that all automatic through a Scribus document, but I haven’t figured that out.) I was beginning to really hate it, though, and that was just looking at it in layout! It had to do with fonts and font sizes: Something might look good EXCEPT with a specific combination of letters, which of course is a problem if those are the exact combination of letters in your title or name. That’s always a tricky thing—it’s hard with chapter numbers, too, because sometimes you really like a font, and then you get to, I dunno, the number 6, and you’re like, “Oh God, no.”
I was feeling a bit…layouted out, shall we say? So I took a few days off and did non-book things. Today I was back at finishing off the revised layout—I got done through Chapter 8, so yay.
It’s a fun book!
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.
DONE inputting corrections into the layout! I’ll go over the corrections and then do a special check for italics (sigh), and then it will be off to the copy editor!
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!
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.
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.)
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….
I proofread the 11 chapters of layout, and then I laid out one more chapter…and quit. Too tired.
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.
I may wind up on that every-other-day sleep schedule that was so common for me before I got allergy shots, but today was fairly productive. I was busy half the day but still managed to lay out five chapters!
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!”