DeAnna Knippling's Blog, page 96

How to Edit Your Ebooks, Part 5: Tense and Verb Choice

The saga continues…the theme of the day seems to be, "Point it out but don't necessarily edit it to death."

Tense

I'm not going to go into the fine art of selecting tenses much here; my goal is not to be a book on perfecting your style and grammar, but how to edit.  However, I will go into a few points.

What tense to use.

Most works of fiction are going to be in past tense.  He went; she dreamed; it flew; they discombobulated.

Now, in the normal course of speaking in past tense, some things are going to be in the past, relative to the main action of the story.

In dialogue, you should generally use past tense to indicate things that happened in the story's past. "She went to the market," he said.

In non-dialogue, you should start off using past perfect tense.  She had gone to the market to buy groceries, but she'd been stopped on the street by the cops, who weren't looking for her but thought she might know where he'd gone. However, this can be really repetitive, so after throwing a few "hads" in to show that the reader has moved further back in time,  you can switch off to past tense.

Beware using any present or future tenses in non-dialogue, if the main body of the work is in past tense.  It usually means you're writing so intensely that you forgot your characters were a) in the past and b) not you.  You might want to leave those tense shifts, if you feel they add to the story and won't confuse your readers, but otherwise ax them.

This is not to say that you can't or shouldn't write a story in present or future tense.  If you're writing in present tense, then use the past tense for actions that happened in the past; if you're writing in the future tense (which is hard to sustain without getting annoying but can be done), I would advise using past perfect to indicate past actions:

He will go to the rocket and open the door.  Ten years ago, he had been too cowardly to stay on the same continent when the rocket took off.  But tomorrow he will go.

In my opinion, use of the future tense is so weird to most people that if you slip into the past tense, people will assume that the past tense is the main tense of the story and the future tense is just hypothetical.  I suggest using the past perfect to keep people from doing that.  But do what works for you–just do it consistently.

Simpler verb tenses

In general, of all possible verb tenses, use the simplest available.  Don't use have/had (perfect) or was ____-ing (progressive) tenses unless you really need them, for example, to show that something that happened in a past tense story happened before the main action of the story (perfect tense) or that the characters were doing something when they were interrupted (progressive tense).

One, tenses are there to indicate meaning, and you shouldn't use a specific tense if you don't mean what that tense means.

Two, reading all those wases and hads and -ings gets repetitive and old.

Verb Choice

Weak verbs

A lot of people have trouble with using too many of the same verb, usually a weak* or overused verb:

be
go
look
seem
try
do
think
tell
show
put
get
see
begin
start
give
use
want
feel
have

You may want to keep a list of verbs that you overuse and add to it as new ones pop up.  They probably will.

The most difficult of these words to eradicate or at least reduce my usage of, at least for my brain, is be.

I suggest the place to get rid of be and other weak verbs is in the content editing phase that your writer brain has to do before sending the work over to the editor brain.  However, your writer brain may be completely blind to be verbs.  Just writing this paragraph is giving me self-conscious fits, to be honest, but I'll just plow ahead and edit this later, which is exactly what your writer brain may have to do with your work:  send it over to the editor brain and hope for the best.

If so, have your editor brain scan for weak verbs (you may want to do a search for the various be tenses, because it's hard to catch them; your brain may just elide over them).  Highlight them, insert comments–whatever your system is for marking something for your writer brain to look at later.  After you're done, send the document back over to your writer brain and have it deal with the cases individually.

Your writer brain (or your writer, if you're editing someone else's work) will not like this, but having the editor brain pick verbs is a mistake.  In fact, it may be better for your editor brain to do the highlighting, send it over to the writer brain, and then let both sides of your brain leave it alone.  You may end up doing more damage to your work than it's worth, getting rid of those weak verbs.  But have the editor brain review for those verbs anyway–to make the writer brain self-conscious enough about it that you'll use fewer of them on the next story.

Adverbs

You may have heard of the "rule" that you shouldn't use a lot of adverbs in your writing.  Using too many adverbs is a symptom of a different problem rather than a problem in itself:  there's nothing wrong with using adverbs.  There's just not enough right with them.

One, use of adverbs often coincides with use of weak verbs.

Two, use of adverbs gets repetitive.  And the more repetitively you use anything in language, the less it means.  If you've ever done the trick where you repeat a word until it becomes meaningless (e.g., saying "pizza" literally 500 times), you know the feeling.  Too many adverbs are mentally numbing; the brain sees the -ly pattern so often that it numbs out.  (There are non-ly adverbs; interestingly, people don't have problems with them unless you start using that specific adverb too often [e.g., often].)

But, again, you may want to just point them out with your editor brain and hope your writer brain does better next time.

Passive voice

Another "rule" is that you shouldn't use passive voice.  He was given the big guns.

There are good reasons for that:

You're using a lot of was/has constructions, which gets annoying.

You're concealing information.  Who gave him the big guns, eh?  Your readers want to know.

However, sometimes you will use passive voice.  You want to conceal information; your characters don't know the information; your characters or narrator would naturally, habitually use the passive voice (e.g., anybody who's ever worked for the government).  Or you just want to break things up.

If you have a good reason for using passive voice, go for it.

If you don't, weed it out:  don't use passive voice if it doesn't mean anything.  Words mean things; passive voice means something; if you're a writer, you can break "rules" like this, if you mean it.

You will have the same concerns going on here as you do with editing verbs in general, so you may want to point out unnecessary instances of passive voice and then leave them alone, using your writer brain to write the next story with fewer instances rather than screwing around overmuch with your current story.

*A "weak verb" is also a technical term that indicates how a verb is conjugated; I mean here verbs that are so overused as to be relatively meaningless.

Indypub: AllRomance/OmniLit

I now have books up at AllRomance/OmniLit, in PDF format only:

DeAnna Knippling

De Kenyon

Kitty Lafontaine

I attempted to use Calibre to convert other file types as well…oh, man.  That's going to be quite the learning curve.  But that's publishing for you:  behind every story that goes up at a different website, there's a TON of frantic work behind the scenes, cursing at every delay.

That's not to say that working with OmniLit was difficult; I had to request a code so that I didn't need to pay for a block of ISBNs, but that was quick and painless.  Now I need to fill out a W9, which is reasonable, scan it, and send it back in.  Nothing too horrendous…like learning how to convert to Epub using Calibre. Oy.

As usual, I will probably come out of the process knowing more than most people would ever want to hear.  It's going to take a while before I have total control over how ebooks come out, but I'll get there.  If I can beat Word 2007, I can beat this, too.

 

How to Edit Your Ebooks, Part 4: Text Editing Strategies and POV

When I was doing tech editing, the first thing I would do was format.  One, I like formatting (so sue me), and two, I felt like it allowed me to get a feel for what was going to be in the document.

Now, however, I do my text editing first and format editing second, on ebooks.  Why, I'm not sure, but every time I try to do the formatting first on my ebooks, it gets under my skin. Maybe it has to do with the nature of working with other people's stuff vs. my own; I don't know.  Regardless, you may want to do the formatting first and text editing second.

Text editing, in this context, is reading through the work line by line and looking for errors in the text itself–the things that wouldn't change if you copied all the text and pasted it into another file as unformatted text.  This can also be called line editing or copyediting, but isn't quite the same, as you'll be including proofreading in this stage as well (in shorter documents).

I suggest the following strategy:

For short documents (short stories), don't bother with a style sheet, go through the document once to text edit, once to format, and once for a "sanity check," or a flip through to make sure there are no big uglies.
For medium-length documents (novellas), use a style sheet, go through the document once for style and consistency, once for nitpicks, once to format, and once for a sanity check.
For longer or more complex documents (novels, collections), clean up the document, go through a critique group or beta readers to catch brain farts if nothing else, then finish as with the medium-length documents.  You may want to have someone else read the book after you think you're absolutely done with it.  I guarantee something will jump out.

You also may want to test out your results on readers you know to be at least somewhat anal about grammar.  Keep an ear out for people who make fun of unnecessary apostrophe's and extra or missing, commas.  Go through the editing process on your own, then hand the story over to your Guinea pig.  If you're leaving a lot of problems in the document, you may want to have someone else edit.  If you're leaving a few oopsies (one or two a chapter), don't worry about it; you're probably doing it well enough.

Before text editing, I double-check the following, to save time (and yes, I will go into more detail about these later):

Make sure my word processor is set up for curly quotes, then do a find-and-replace on " and '.
Make sure all my m-dashes are coded as a proper m-dash and not as two hyphens or space-hyphen-space (find-and-replace).
Change all two spaces to one space (find-and-replace).  I can't seem to get myself out of the habit of typing these.
Spell check.

Spell check will often help me catch inconsistently-spelled names; I add the correct spelling to the dictionary so the incorrect ones stick out like a sore thumb.

If you are not familiar with editing, you may want to focus on one or two things at a time, then go back through for another pass.  However, this can cause you to become "blind" to your document, or unable to see any errors.  If you get to that point, set the document aside for a while or have someone else take over.  When you're editing, it doesn't do any good to phone it in.

The urge will almost always be to edit too much.  Remember:  trust your writer-brain.  If you're fussing around with a lot of edits, walk away from the computer, take a break, write something new.  Editor brain wants perfection and order; writer brain wants to tell a story.  Trust your writer brain, because you're not selling perfection, you're selling a story.  When writer brain wants to make errors on purpose–let it.

POV

In general, each section of a story should have a definite POV that should be clearly obvious to the reader.  Not only should the "person" be consistent (first person I, second person you, third person he/she/it/they), but the person at the center of the action should stay the same throughout the section.

This becomes tricky in third-person omniscient work; the whole point of having a third-person omniscient POV is to be able to see from multiple people's perspectives.  However, an excessive amount of shifting perspectives, even when handled perfectly, is annoying–and when it's not clear to the reader that a shift has occurred, it can make a section unreadable and disorienting.

This is one of the hardest things to edit if you've screwed it up, because there are no objective rules on how to do it.

However, if you set subjective rules for yourself on how to handle your shifts in POV and then use them consistently, you will (subconsciously) train your reader how to follow along when you shift.

Some possibilities:

Keep to one POV per chapter, and make sure it's obvious within the first paragraph whose POV you're using.
When shifting POVs inside a chapter, add an extra white space, and make it obvious, etc.
If you're using first person POV, only see what the character can see and think what the character can think.
Avoid "head-hopping," that is, seeing things from another character's POV just because it's convenient or funny or whatever–pick a plan for POV shifts, and stick to it.
If you're using third-person POV, put characters' actual thoughts in italics, e.g., This stupid editing series will be the death of me. You don't need to add, "she thought" afterwards; generally, readers are sophisticated enough to catch on after the first few times you do it.

Once you have your rules set up (and added to your style sheet, if using), go through the document looking for breaks in the rules.  You might find it helpful to search for "I/He/She" or "Me/Him/Her" throughout the document.  During times when you're deeply into your character, it's not unusual to slip from "She" did whatever to "I."

As with many things in editing, if you do it consistently, you can probably get away with it.

 

Society of Secret Cats Reviews!

I have reviews on "The Society of Secret Cats."

Julie says:

I really enjoyed this – kind of like "Where the Wild Things Are" mixed with a bit of Lewis Carroll and a dash of J.R.R. Tolkien with the scary spider creatures. My only complaint really is that it seems almost like too big of a story for a short story…would love to see a novel with this world, or even a novella. It reminds me of those dark yet whimsical stories I loved most when I was a kid (and still do!)

And Karen says:

Dream time adventures that make me glad my cat sleeps with me!

In the interests of disclosure, I must say that they both got free copies of the story, and I know them.  But so very happy

Indypub: Perks.

Something that finally hit home over the trip was that I lots of people, personally, who now read ebooks.  A lot of them are close family and friends.

I realized that I didn't want them to have to pay for ebooks.  They've done enough in my life, one way or another, that I can't really ever repay them. So I'm working on setting up a list, getting their preferred formats…

Of course, these are also the people who are getting stuck with my annoying questions and requests for help, etc., so it's not like "free" is really the operative word here.  And I'm not done; I have to go through my contacts list and check everyone's names twice, to see if they've been naughty or nice.  But I have a nice start to it.

It's weird how strongly I feel about it.  On the one hand, sure, I have a spot every week where people can download my stories for free on the weekends, but I know they're not all using it.  And then some of them will go along and buy a big block of them, and I know very well it's someone close to me.  So July may be low in sales

But it's worth it.

I'm not a doctor, or a mechanic, or a lawyer, or IT or anything that could easily benefit the people around me; this is what I have.  I'm proud to finally be able to share something.  I think it's a Midwestern thing.

Home again, home again, jiggety jig.

Happy Independence Day!

 

Some highlights from the trip…

 

Ray and I drove to Hot Springs, SD, so she could go the rest of the way to Flandreau for Grandparent Camp, that is, to stay with her grandparents for 10 days or so.  We left on Wednesday morning.  Sunday night, she was like, "So…what time are we leaving in the morning for Grandma Camp?"

"We're not.  We leave on Wednesday."

Monday morning:  "Do I have time for a shower before we leave for Grandma Camp?"

"We don't leave today.  We leave on Wednesday."

"Aww…"

Eventually Wednesday arrived, she took a shower, and off we went, without forgetting anything significant.

Driving through Denver at 8:30 a.m. was something of a challenge, but we didn't lose too much time and only had to come to a complete stop once or twice.  The rest of the drive was smooth and easy…I kept asking Ray if she wanted something to drink or to stop to use the bathroom.  No.  She did not want to delay any more than she had to.  We ate at a Burger King somewhere on the road, and she finally broke down and took a break for half an hour to play with some little kids at the playground.  And then we were off again.

We made good time to Hot Springs and called to see where everyone else was; they were in Rapid City with no air conditioning.  It had gone out on a 105F day.  But they stopped at my uncle Doyle's auto shop, and he fixed it.  The air filter for the air into the car was packed; they hadn't been getting fresh air at all for quite some time, which might explain a few things…

Ray swam until they arrived, although I chased her out of the pool as they were getting close, so we could go eat.  Which we did, at the Dairy Queen next door.  But didn't have ice cream.  Now that I think back on it, I can't see how we didn't have any ice cream the entire trip, but there you go.

Afterwards, we went up to the Vets Home to see my Grandparents.  (A double-set Grandparent camp.)

They are older.  In fact, everyone is older.  The only person on this trip who didn't look older on this trip was Katie, and I was still shocked to find out that she was old enough to drink.  I mean, of course she's that old.  But it was still a shock.  I should have been over that shock when she was, oh, 22.  But no.

Anyway, Grandma and Grandpa are getting older, but not so old that they didn't enjoy playing with Betsy's Nook, which we left with them.  The font size adjusts, of course, so any ebook instantly becomes a LARGE PRINT ebook, which they were very excited about.

(A break to tell our cat Fafnir that Ray is not here. This information has to come about once every four hours or so, apparently.)

Back to the motel.  Good lord that kid can swim.

The next day, we drove on the Needles Highway, which is this scenic route that goes through Custer State  Park.  We started out in Custer – I have to say, this trip changed my mind about the town.  When Lee and I had gone through over a decade ago, it was a very brown, depressing, "you'll eat it and like it" kind of place.  Now, whether it's due to the amount of time that gambling's been legal up in Deadwood or because the baby boomers are starting to kick their kids out of the house (and thus have spare time and aren't feeding a van full of whiners who won't eat anything but chicken fingers), it's changed.

Sure, the brown, depressing places are still there (in fact, Dad, who is a notoriously picky eater, tried to make us stop at the very place that made Lee and I swear off the town, but I had prepared with the address of a place that had been recommended and insisted on not going there), but it's sprinkled liberally with places that might possibly have food that hasn't seen the inside of a tin can.

We ate at Sage Creek Grille; the decor is kind of weird and sparse-feeling, but the food was good.  I had salmon on an open-faced sandwich, and it was moist and flavorful.

Up the street was a bookstore; down the street was a bison statue painted with Lakota designs…and a rusted mint-and-white Studebaker.  We saw both; I begged and ordered Katie to photograph the Studebaker.  She couldn't understand why.  I guess she hasn't been around car buffs long enough.  I'll have to wait to see how the pictures turned out; she has a  professional camera and a trained eye, so I know they're better than the ones I would have taken.

Ray found three books of ghost stories, and proceeded to read them all along the Needles Highway.  Scenery.  Pfft.

We stopped at Sylvan Lake (because I begged) and walked around it.  Mosquitoes the size of IV needles.  But we went around the whole thing, walking on top of the huge boulders on the side of the lake, standing above the water.  Up into the rocks.  Ray kept bringing me all kinds of tiny flowers, including wild roses, which eventually ended up squashed inside her ghost-story books.  The lake's small, maybe a mile or two around, but we kept going off the path.

I saw all kinds of billy-goat kids, the human ones, that made me fear for their lives, but I didn't actually see anyone get injured jumping around.  Impressive.

We had to do some minor climbing around the backside of the lake.  I'd forgotten how terrified my mother is of heights; plus, her knees were bothering her (more with the getting old).  But she made it down the back side, which was nice, because we got to see where the water spilled over the dam holding up the lake, and we went through a cut in the rock, which smelled like caves, and then we got to splash through the lake up to the overlook on top of the dam.  I don't know about you, but it's not really an adventure unless your pant legs at least get wet.

And then we were off again, tooling around the mountains.  Dad was driving, which was boring, but I suppose I have to share the whole driving-around-the-mountains thing with people who can't take off and do it whenever they feel like it.

Really, Thursday was, "We ate lunch, stopped at a bookstore, and went back to the motel."  But ah, the road.

Pizza was had that night as an appeasement to the Father Belly.  There's supposed to be a place called Boomer's with good pizza, but we went to Pizza Hut instead.

Friday, we checked out and drove up the other side of the park, on the Wildlife Loop.  I had Mom with me for company (and directions).  It was more like driving in Iowa than driving in the mountains, with these winding roads and only a few tight turns and some pigtails thrown in for fun.  We stopped at the State Game Lodge and ate at their buffet…the first buffet I've been at that was worth a damn.  Very traditional Midwestern food (alas, no jello salad), but it was all prepared very well.  Except the green beans were a little overcooked, but if that's the worst you can say (and they weren't out of a can, mind you), that's saying something.  Good fish with pineapple sauce, and bread pudding with creme anglaise.

We found out that renting a non-running-water, bring-your-own-linen cabin was about $45 a night.

We found out that Flandreau had had a horrible storm, and all kinds of power lines were down, trees down, semis tipped over…luckily, everybody was okay, but we were going to have to leave.  We made it through the rest of the loop.  Right as Mom and I were circling this tight turn overshadowed by rocks, we heard a horrible cracking sound and thought wer were going to die…but it was only thunder.

We hit the main highway, and the water let loose so hard that Dad pulled off the road and we lost him for a while.  We ended up at Doyle and Sarah's house, and they dragged us off to Prairie Berry, because they'd wanted to take us on Saturday, but there was no way Dad would stick around that long.

Prairie Berry is this winery up in the Hills outside Hill City.  Good food, better wine, fantastic wine truffles.  I picked up some Sand Creek.  I wanted to like the chokecherry stuff the best, but it just didn't shine.  –I have lots of fond memories of picking chokecherries for jelly during the summers at Grandma's old house by Polo, SD.  I did get some jelly, but I haven't tried it yet.

Doyle and Sarah had driven up in a convertible Mustang (he's a car guy, as I think I mentioned).  On the way back into town, he pulled over and made my parents drive it, along the Skyway, which is this road that goes along a ridge through Rapid.  We followed along behind them, and they drove slowly, with the top down but the windows up.  Doyle made Katie call them to put them down, or else:  the magic of cell phones.

We stopped at the Dinosaur Park, which is old and crappy and absolutely wonderful, and watched the sunset.  Ray slipped in some mud and wanted to leave…it was surprising.  I've never seen her stress about getting dirty before, but apparently there's a first time for everything.

Ray and I rode in the tiny backseat of the convertible on the way back.  She had her arms up in the air like it was a rollercoaster for most of the way, which I suppose due to the roads was not an unreasonable thing to do.

Now I want a convertible, and that's all I have to say about that.

We went back down to Rapid and spent the rest of the evening around a fire pit, making smores and drinking dessert wine.  I managed to snag some dill-pickle-flavored chips, which I have to get from South Dakota, as I haven't seen them anywhere else for a while (Pringles don't count).

In the morning, Mom and Katie and I went to Storybook Island.

I have been there many times, but I've missed going for several years.  Ray's nine.  She isn't going to be young enough to go without being all sophisticated about it for much longer, so I was soaking it up, mine all mine.  She got her face painted with a white kitten and a cupcake (in honor of her favorite Minecraft video maker, Cupquake), and I got her a cherry slushee and a necklace that said snickerdoodle, which is something that Lee calls her from time to time.  She bragged about it to everyone.  We ran through the maze, climbed up the treehouse, and drove the firetruck.  She hung out with the baby goatlings in the petting zoo, which tried to eat her hair and her jacket, and showed the wee ones how to pet goats.  The day was golden and shining and balmy.  Katie took our picture at the top of the troll bridge.

And then it was time to go.  Of course I'd left stuff at Doyle's house in the rush to get everything packed, and he had to track us down and drop it off.

I used Lee's GPS on the way home after ending up a monastery. It's been years since I had any idea of where anything is in Rapid, and it's changed a lot since then.  I stopped in Hot Springs on the way back to try to find a restaurant that I've been wanting to try, but it's long gone.  I ended up at a bookstore, found a couple of things I hadn't heard of, and talked to the owner for a while.  It stills embarrasses me to tell bookstore owners that I'm a writer.  She asked for a card, but I don't carry them around anywhere but at PPWC, so I signed up for her email list instead.  It was the Wild Burro, and she had a tight, fantastic selection of books.

She's only now starting to feel the pinch of online bookselling, she says; it really annoys her when people come in, write down the names of books (or, worse, take pictures of them with her cell phone), and leave without buying anything.  She's thinking about switching over to a gift shop with maybe 100 titles of books along one wall; she thinks she'll probably make just as much money that way.

Eventually I left, got on the road, and got stuck in a hailstorm near Torrington.  The hail wasn't the scary part; the funnel clouds starting to form were.  Anyway, I got home safely, after Lee was asleep.  The cat was waiting for me in the middle of the room, looking disturbed.  I apologized for leaving Ray elsewhere and went to bed.

Today:  off.  Tomorrow:  full speed ahead.

On the road…

I am off to drop off Ray at Grandparent camp, after three days of, "Is it time to go yet?"  This log will more than likely remain quiet until next week after the holiday…have a lovely week!

Death by Chocolate Review

The folks over at Bab's Book Bistro reviewed Death by Chocolate.  Is sooo nice

You can buy the book at Smashwords, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.

How to Edit Your Own Ebooks, Part 4: Preliminary Choices

As you're getting ready to edit your first story, there are some choices that you need to make.  (You'll probably only need to make them once.  Except in the case of the template; you'll be fiddling with what seems like forever.)

You'll need to:

Pick a dictionary.
Pick a style guide.
Set up a clean template, including at least:

Copyright
Table of contents
Text layout
Credits
Author bio
Publisher information
Teaser(s) for other work


Decide how much of a style sheet you're going to use.
And for non-fiction, a whole lotta other stuff, including:

Indexing, if any
Acronyms
Outline levels
Glossary
Bibliography
etc.

Again, I recommend not trying to tackle non-fiction for your first project.  Or, if you can possibly help it, works that have been scanned into the computer.

Throughout the rest of the series, I'll give examples based on what I currently do and use; by no means are my choices definitive or even permanent.

Dictionaries and style guides.

It may seem like common sense to say, "I know how to spell," "I know how to make any word plural," "I know how to capitalize," etc., but the better an editor you are, the more you will be consulting a dictionary or style guide, because there's being sure and then there's "according to CMoS15, you can suck it."*  Editor brain is highly-argumentative brain.

Pick solid, well-respected, commonly-used guides, and use them as consistently as possible; this will get you around most questions of spelling, grammar, style, etc., most of the time. The rest of the time, you're just going to have to pick the best of the available options, and use it consistently. (If you're using a style guide, any time you have to look something up, dump it in your guide so you don't have to do it again.)

I use Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionay, 11th Edition as my dictionary (although I will usually just run over to http://www.merriam-webster.com/ online).  For everything else, I use (and abuse) The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition, although I should probably update to the latest version, the 16th.  The Chicago Manual of Style website (http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org) has a lot of really helpful information, including their forums, in which you can read extensive debates over what should be the clearest points of usage.  You can also subscribe to the Guide online, which I found helpful back when I was doing more editing, because it's easier to do a search than it is to find anything quickly in the hardcopy.

Setting up a clean template.

Setting up an ebook template is a potential minefield, not only because of the technical aspects, but because there are two big schools of thought on this:

1) Set up a template using a word-processing program.

2) Set up a template using HTML.

Now, if you're going to publish to Smashwords (and you should), you're going to need to submit your file in .doc format.  It is also easier to deal with text in a word-processing program than it is in HTML (once you're using a WYSIWYG HTML program that is as easy to use as a word-processing program, it's a freaking word-processing program).

On the other hand, if you're going to publish anything that has been scanned, a word-processing program can take any problems you might have and make them worse.  In addition, once you start adding cute little formatting touches to your book, you're increasing the chances that your program is just going to screw things up behind the scenes.

My current compromise between the two is to use a MSWord 2007, setting up a minimally-formatted template, and strip out all formatting before I set up the story.  I do not have the HTML experience necessary to make approaching templates from the HTML side a smart investment of my time.  I have checked my current templates in HTML mode and found them clean by comparison to examples.

If you wish to follow my method, I'll walk through the steps on how to set up the template I use later on.

In general:

Before you start, start with a blank slate and make sure all text in the document is set to "Normal" or the equivalent.
Make one master template, which you will then modify to make your working templates.  Do not make your working templates separately.  This will prevent brain farts of fixing a problem in one template but not the others.
As you paste things, like your author bio, into the template, paste them as unformatted text and go back and format them, if necessary.
Add everything to the template that you can.
Any formatting other than italics or bold needs to be built as a style.  Use as few styles as possible.  Use the styles 100% of the time.
Set up placeholders using an easily-searchable string or character for material that will vary, like title, dedication, main story text, chapters, credits, etc.  I use curly brackets: {}.  One of the checks that I do before I finalize a story is to search for {.
Edit your master template carefully, using the checklists that I'll provide later for editing your text.  You don't want the same typo in every freaking template.
Check all links to ensure the actual link (rather than the text) starts with http://.
Check for hidden bookmarks and remove them.
Do not link to a distributor website on your template.  Distributors will pull your books if you link to a competitor's website.  You may and should link to your own website, social media, and email contact information.
Once you have a master template set up, set up one working template for each type of submission method, for example, one Smashwords template, one template for other ebooks submitted by .doc file, and one template for ebooks to be converted manually (for example, using Calibre or other conversion software).
Modify the working templates as necessary.
Set up one template for each pseudonym, if using.

I feel like I'm missing things.  I may add more to this later.

Style sheets.

Back when you were still looking at your story with a writer's eye, I suggested that you set up a list of terms/usages that you didn't want changed.  In editing, this is the beginning (but certainly not the end) of a style sheet.

A professional style sheet has a lot of stuff on it, and different editors set it up in different ways.  What I want you to think about here is how much of a style sheet you want to use; because it won't be published, you don't have to worry too much about sticking to conventions.

I generally don't use style sheets on short stories; they don't take that long to edit, and I can usually keep the details in my head as I go.

I generally use style sheets when I'm cleaning up novels; I have a terrible habit of changing minor character names as I'm writing, because I don't want to spend a lot of time looking things up when I'm on a roll.

I track:

Character names.
Place names.
Business names.
In fact, any proper names that I make up.
Dates
Times
Weather (sometimes)

However, you can track anything you worry about mixing up, from what the character's wearing to the type of weapons they pack.  (If you're worried about whether, given dates and times, a murder was/was not possible, that's a content question and should be resolved before you hit the ebook editing stage.)  I also find it useful to add links to my style sheet with images, so I know what a location looks like or I have a picture of the hunka hunka who is filling in for my character until the movie gets cast to use for inspiration, etc.

You can also set guidelines for yourself in your style guide, like:

Whether or not to add periods at the end of items in a bulleted list.
Whether/when to spell out numbers.
The maximum number of words in a sentence (if you're worried about getting too wordy).
Where notes/citations should appear in text.

I'll put together a sample style guide template later on, which you can include as part of your editing checklist, if you like.  Nonfiction will be a lot more complex in this regard than fiction.  When I was tech editing, we had hundreds of pages of information in all the documents we used as style guides, not counting acronym lists.

 

*You should never say that to a client.  But I have used it in critique group.

Is steampunk dead?

I hear this question: Is steampunk dead? (Actually, I hear, "Is it dead yet? Now is it dead yet? How about now?) I'm going to set aside the issue of whether I like steampunk or not. I think ~punk will continue to evolve. Other ~punks, like dieselpunk, are shoving their way onto the scene; whether they shove actual steampunk off the stage has yet to be seen and isn't really important for what I have to say, which, incidentally, includes some not-very-nice things.

Alternate-history fiction is for history buffs. I am not a history buff and find it, generally, annoying. O HAI DETAIL ABOUT LINCOLN WUZ SO CUTE LOLZ!11! WHAT IF THAT DETAIL WERE CHANGED??!!!???!!??!!??? AND EVERYTHING ELSE WUZ ACCURATE!!!1111!!! SQUEEEEEEEE!!!
Steampunk, which started out as fairly nuts and definitely punk, is settling down into a fashion accessory. See Etsy.
The good thing about Steampunk is that it opens the door to grossly inaccurate alternate histories, in which minute, mind-numbing accuracy but for One Vital Point is no longer a requirement. That door opens not just on the Steampunk era but all settings, including fictional ones.
In through this door, for better or worse, came things like Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.
And so, while people argue about steampunk, what I would rather see is a celebration of a ~punked alternate history genre. Every movement needs a term, and I think Steampunk is bigger than Steampunk, so I'm going to invent that term now: history punk.

Steampunk might die out, but hardier I think is the idea that you can screw around with history in ways that are more complex than "What if Hitler won WWII?!!?????" History is full of stories, and when you're a punk, you break the stories and make really loud WRONG noises with them. I hope history punk becomes popular; I've been wanting an excuse to finish my story about the post-WWII Nazis invading Iowa with gremlin-run mechs, only to be defeated by Nancy Drew and a quadriplegic version of Val Kilmer. You may insult my lack of ability to love alternate history....now!