Back to the grind of working out the little things in The Alice '65. Specifically, making sure the quotation marks are consistent and there aren't any unwanted spaces anywhere. I've found that Word likes to mess with you when it comes to quotation marks in dialogue. If you have someone cut off in the middle of a sentence and use an em-dash to indicate that, Word puts the wrong direction quotation mark after it. At least, it does in Times New Roman font.
And sometimes, when you do a copy-paste within a dialogue section, it adds a space between a quotation mark and the beginning of the sentence. So that entails going through line by line and correcting it all. I'm sure there's a better way to do it, like by off-set printing, but this also needs to be done for the ebook, so...it gets done.
There's also making sure I don't wind up with a single word at the top of a page, in place of a sentence. I'm not doing widow-orphan control so the number of lines per page is consistent...but sometimes that means a single 2-letter word winds up at the very top of a page. What's interesting is, by working it so this doesn't happen, I'm coming up with slightly better sentence structure and continuity. I've found spots where just shifting a word here and eliminating or adding a word there makes the whole paragraph easier to read.
It's putting me further behind, but I want this book to be as perfect as it can be, and that means taking my time. When I rush, I screw up.
I'm still messed up by Daylight Savings Time and this massively rushed trip. But it was worth it. This photo is of my niece, Krista, with her husband, Micah, to her right and my sister, Jerilynn, to his right. To her left are her three brothers -- Andrew and Daniel (my nephews) and Steven (by my brother-in-law's first wife) -- then my brother-in-law, Steve. A very California-style family.
Except, I heard more country music on that day than I'd heard in the previous 10 years...and I'm still reeling.
And sometimes, when you do a copy-paste within a dialogue section, it adds a space between a quotation mark and the beginning of the sentence. So that entails going through line by line and correcting it all. I'm sure there's a better way to do it, like by off-set printing, but this also needs to be done for the ebook, so...it gets done.
There's also making sure I don't wind up with a single word at the top of a page, in place of a sentence. I'm not doing widow-orphan control so the number of lines per page is consistent...but sometimes that means a single 2-letter word winds up at the very top of a page. What's interesting is, by working it so this doesn't happen, I'm coming up with slightly better sentence structure and continuity. I've found spots where just shifting a word here and eliminating or adding a word there makes the whole paragraph easier to read.
It's putting me further behind, but I want this book to be as perfect as it can be, and that means taking my time. When I rush, I screw up.
Except, I heard more country music on that day than I'd heard in the previous 10 years...and I'm still reeling.
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