Progress report

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.

Progress report

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.

Chugging along

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.

Continuity, argh

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.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that

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!

Progress report

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.

Progress report

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.”