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