Mary Sisson's Blog, page 31

Progress report

I proofread the 11 chapters of layout, and then I laid out one more chapter…and quit. Too tired.

Progress report

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.

Progress report

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!

Progress report

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!”

Progress report

We’re having another heat wave, so I didn’t sleep well last night. I got some stuff done, but it wasn’t my most productive day ever.

I proofed three chapters of layouts and input those corrections. In the process, I realized that there was a mistake in one of the headers (just a formatting error—I didn’t misspell my name or use the wrong title or anything funny like that). So I needed to fix that for all 10 chapters that had been laid out, and since I was doing that anyway, I went ahead and followed my own advice, scooting the headers and chapter numbers to just inside the margins. I’m glad I poked through the “POD publishing” tag on this blog—better to do it to 10 chapters now than 31 chapters later….

ETA: I laid out the front matter, too—that’s easy and doesn’t take long, so it’s a good thing to do when you’re tired.

Progress report

I laid out six chapters, plus I fixed a couple of things I forgot to do—some of which involved reloading the text from the word processor and laying it out again in a couple of chapters, ugh. But overall I think things went well. I know I keep saying that the Scribus/LibreOffice combo is efficient once you get the hang of it, but 1. it is, and 2. I used to lay out things in Word, so I know from inefficient. (Here’s an old post when I was using Adobe/Word, and I’m SUPER psyched to lay out six chapters—like, I definitely worked today, but I didn’t kill myself or anything.)

Oh, and I gave A Dislocated World to the copy editor, so that’s good.

Progress report

Laid out four chapters! Whoot! Scribus is fiddly, but yeah, once you remember the quirks, it’s actually pretty time efficient. I don’t know that I’ll ever get up to 10 chapters a day or anything, just because laying things out really kind of drains me, but definitely if I had more endurance for the work I could get a lot done in a day. Especially since Tribulations (hey, did you see the new covers on the home page?) doesn’t have any interior art.

Ah, yes, Scribus

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? What I remember about Scribus is that it’s efficient once you get yourself set up, but there’s definitely a learning curve. I was reacquainting myself with it, and I remembered doing a little how-to post, so I looked at that—ah, yes, it’s coming back to me now. I don’t really have time to do a deep dive into it today, but I hopefully will set myself up to get a good start tomorrow.

Progress report

Finished the betas! Whoot! Whoot!

Progress report

I’ve been working on the betas, and in the process also teeing up a few things for the final book. I should be ready to start laying out Monday or Tuesday, assuming all goes well.