Mary Sisson's Blog, page 30

Progress report

Input the corrections through Chapter 25—only six more chapters to go!

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 15!

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.”

Progress report

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!

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.

Whoot!

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!

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….