I was gone all day yesterday, and just got up today to discover that the proof copy of Title Goes Here: Issue three has arrived! All looks good, so that issue will be ready and available on time–yay! I it seems that my double-converting theory is correct as our twice-converted .pdf file is displaying all my fancy fonts and formatting. I think it’s time to start considering re-doing the file for Issue One.
Otherwise, I’m still working on finishing up the novel. I started my final proof-read the other day, knowing that I was going to have to go through it carefully because of all the changes I made on my last revision pass. Any time you’re doing a lot of deleting, adding, and moving, you wind up with orphaned words, repeat words, missing words etc., so I knew I’d have a lot of that to get rid of. But it’s proving a lot more involved than that. I didn’t start adding/changing until about chapter six of part three, but I’ve been doing MAJOR line edits and fixes from page one. A big thing is that one of the first steps I took when re-formatting the files as book pages was to change the sentence spacing. I was raised with it heavily enforced by my teachers to put two spaces after the end of a sentence, but that’s fallen out of common usage in the last few years. So, I’ve been removing that from my manuscripts when I format for publication. (Can’t do it in my day-to-day writing–it’s far too ingrained!)
Anyway… I went through the entire manuscript and did a find/replace on period-space-space to period-space. Then I repeated to shorten periods after question mark, exclamation point, and the end-quote mark when combined with a period, question mark, or exclamation point. Not the first time I’ve done this–I do it every issue for TGH (though thinking about that, the two-spaces method is an old typesetting technique, so it would probably make sense to leave it in…). This time, though, something went haywire in my find/replace. It somehow managed to replace period-quote-space-space with just a period-space, for one example, so now anywhere I have a quote ending in the middle of a paragraph, I’m having to add the quote mark back in. It also somehow threw in random question marks throughout the text, so that every now and then a sentence that is in no way a question suddenly ends in a question mark. When I first did the find/replace, I noticed shortly after that it had actually changed my name in the header from Inanna Gabriel to Inanna Gabri???. So, I’ve had a lot to fix, between that crap and the normal line edit/proof reading stuff. It’s been going quickly, fortunately, but still a good deal more work than I expected of it.
So the proof-reading isn’t done, but well under control. Now I get to worry about the cover. I think I know what I want, but I’m a lousy photographer and don’t even own a camera other than the one in my phone, so it’s not something I can do alone. I believe Starwind is going to do my cover photography for me, but we need to find a time to do it, still. And I also need to convince her or someone to do a photo of me for the bio page. I don’t envy anyone having to take a picture of me while I whine about not being photogenic. But I should shut up if I hope to convince her!
So, that’s it for my overdue update. Issue Three of Title Goes Here: will be available April 13!
’til next time,
~Inanna Gabri???
