Details, detales

I’ve been meaning to mention that Darren and I have finished the editing on A Dirge for the Temporal and I’ve started on the layout of the book. I’m trying to do a story or two per night. I had already set up a template with all the font properties for the story titles and body text. I’ve copied all the stories into the document in order but that’s the easy part.

Finessing the text once it’s in the document involves a lot of tiny details. For each story I go through the same process:
-First remove extra spaces, often people use two spaces between sentences, this is a leftover from the days of typewriters. Now computers automatically adjust letter-spacing so two spaces creates a distracting blank space.
-Since italics don’t transfer when the text is copied I have to search through the original document for anything in italics then make the same word or phrase in the new document italic.
-Another thing that doesn’t always transfer is what they call ‘curly’ quotes. Instead all quote marks and apostrophes come out straight like a degree mark. So they all have to be searched and replaced.
-Then, section dividers have to be added wherever the author has used * * * because I just can’t help myself and always have to have fancy dividers instead of plain old stars!
-Finally I look at each page to see if hyphens can be avoided and one word lines. Also those fancy dividers give me fits if they land at the bottom of a page or some other awkward place. Sometimes it takes quite a bit of finagling to force them up or down into a better position.

When I’ve done all that for one story it’s on to the next and back to step one. A lot of these things might seem unnecessary but for the text to have the greatest impact it needs to be easily readable with no distractions for the eye.

current mood: determined
current music: Stereo Type A by Cibo Matto

Rawk the vote

Preditors & Editors is running a poll and I’m very pleased that RDSP has been nominated in several categories. The... View Article

Back on the waiting room floor

I was too depressed to do a journal entry yesterday. After thinking that Sick should be appearing any day on... View Article

Friday

The new year is now under way and I’m happy to report that Everybody Scream! has been completly transcribed and... View Article

Anybody seen a stranger around here?

I just finished reading D. Harlan Wilson’s Stranger on the Loose and I was very impressed. I will be writing... View Article

2004 – year of the dog?

2004 looks like it’s going to be a pretty good year for the Raw Dog because he’s got what dog’s... View Article

Sometimes you gotta be sneaky

I’m so excited that contributors have actually started to receive their copies of Sick. Maybe it was worth it to... View Article

Every little bit

I was happy to see that 15 Serial Killers is now available in e-book format from Amazon.com. Hopefully Sick will... View Article

The luxury of time

The past few days I’ve mostly been working on the layout for 100 Jolts. I think this book is going... View Article

Editor’s Block

Betcha never heard of that one. That’s because there is no shortage of works needing to be edited. Although it’s... View Article

How many legs does a table of contents have?

We’ve been playing musical stories with the contents of A Dirge for the Temporal so long that I don’t even... View Article

Without the aid of technology

We’re moving right along with the transcription of Everybody Scream! There’s over 76,000 words typed in now. One thing I... View Article

Things a publisher will do for a novel they love

In my last entry I mentioned that I had typed a few more pages of Everybody Scream! which got me... View Article

Blogs

How do people ever keep up with their blogs? Most of the blogs I visit people write in every day,... View Article

Widows, Orphans and the Lost Art of Book Layout

Finally the layout for our second book, Sick, is complete! After a huge sigh of relief I began to contemplate... View Article

Identity Crisis

Experts say that for a small press to succeed it needs to have a distinct identity and cater to a... View Article