Mary Sisson's Blog, page 25

I guess the cat needed waxing....

I didn’t get quite enough sleep last night thanks to one of the furrier and mouthier members of the household, but I was like, Darn it! I’ll just have some more caffeine and push on through!!! And I got through Part 3, whoo-hoo!

And then of course when I was looking over the page numbers I’d written down for the index, they were off—aye yi yi. Well, I guess I’ll be doing the more-careful check after it’s all done rather than the more-casual….

Indexing and its purpose

After waxing the cats, I proofed and indexed the rest of Part 2.

Indexing this book is a little weird, because the standard advice is that you don’t index a name mentioned in passing. So, yeah, my grandad says something about Marlene Dietrich, and I don’t index it, because it’s not like he knew her or has anything important to offer.

But when he writes something like, “Yesterday Fred Smith told me that Joe Blow is in Africa,” and that letter has a date on it….then I feel like I should index Joe Blow, because his family might be very interested to know where he was and when. So I’m indexing a lot of trivial mentions of non-famous people, but then again, I kind of feel like giving people access to information about relatives who haven’t had history books written about them is why I’m bothering to do this damned index in the first place.

Today I learned new vocabulary

Cat waxing! Waxing the cat is of course an extremely urgent task when you must procrastinate!

Progress report

I didn’t think I would be able to get anything done today, but I was actually able to index & proofread about half of Part 2, so yay for that!

My First Index

So, it turns out that indexing is one of those activities that’s actually pretty easy to do…until you absolutely hit a wall and just can’t do it any more. A little like long-distance driving, for me at least. It definitely helps to know the material—it also helps that I was careful not to actually read the book again when I did the layout until now. Definitely when doing an index you don’t want to be so used to/tired of the material that you just say, “Oh, yeah, Jim again—he shows up a lot, no big deal.”

I’m indexing and doing a final read at the same time, which so far I think is working OK? I have found a couple of errors, some of which I’ll need to fix in the e-book, so I feel like I’m not completely worthless as a proofreader just yet.

I did the Introduction and Part 1 before I hit the wall, and if the schedule allows I’ll probably be able to do Part 2 in one day and Part 3&4 in one. Then it’s a matter of getting the cover ready, and I’ll have a print book!

Progress report

I finished & checked the layouts for Parts 3 & 4 (which together are about equal in length to Part 1 or Part 2), plus I laid out the front matter and the Resources page in the back. The other bit of back matter is going to be the Index, which…pray for me. I’m going to try giving the layout a final read while indexing it—we’ll see how that goes. This is my first index!

Progress report

Part 2 (which is even longer than Part 1!) is done—that seems to have gone a lot quicker. I’m going to be optimistic and say that’s because I sorted out how I wanted to handle laying out letters back during Part 1, but it could also be just that I didn’t get enough sleep last night and am missing all the errors. The final read will tell, I suppose….

Anyway, I’ve got Part 3 into the layout software, so yay.

Progress report

I was a bit busy today, but I figured I’d at least get Part 2 set up so that I could get a lot done on it tomorrow. When I started the new file, I realized that I had set the pages up in the earlier sections to be 8 x 5.5 inches instead of 8 x 5.25 inches. Whoops! Given the length of what I’ve laid out already and the fact that this book isn’t part of a series, I decided to just make the pages 8.5 x 5.5 inches with a slightly larger top & bottom margin than before. Making do!

Progress report

Part 1 has been laid out, and the layout has been gone over. Yay! That’s a big job—Part 2 is just as big and starts on the left-hand side instead of the right, so…hard work is good for the soul, I guess? Probably won’t get to it until the weekend.

As I mentioned, Part 1 is 49 pages long, which is reeeeeaaallly long for a chapter layout. It occurred to me earlier that I should probably print out only 5-10 pages, because a change early on could alter the next 48 pages. So naturally I printed out the whole thing at first…oops. We’ll see if I learn my lesson when I’m doing Part 2.

Progress report

So, I had foolishly initially laid out Part 1 before laying out the Introduction—it turned out not to matter, but if you ever decide to lay out a paper book, I strongly recommend you start at the book’s actual beginning, it will potentially save you a lot of time. Anyway, after I did the initial layout of the Introduction and printed it out, I decided that the font was too big, so I took the font down two points.

Those two points reduced Part 1 from 79 pages to 49! So, yeah, as much as I hate the teeny-tiny print, you do want to make the font as small as you can while keeping it readable. (Also a big font makes a book look like a kid’s book.)

I’m looking at this book and realizing that, since it’s nonfiction, the paper version should really have an index. That’s not going to be too much fun to do. But I think I should, because you can’t search it the way you can an e-book.

The font is, of course, Georgia.