Thursday, October 05, 2006

How I Spent my Evening

I worked last night and part of today on reformatting my Taleran books from Times New Roman 14 to TNR 12, which is the font that my prospective publisher wants to see the books in. The good news you can take from that is that he wants to look at all three.

I usually write in TNR 14 because it's easier for me to read on the screen. Of course, it fills up more pages, which would be of concern to any publisher. Changing the font should have been as easy as hitting select and apply, but on my computer (an possibly on everyone's) changing from 14 to 12 point occasionally breaks a paragraph in mid line. It doesn't happen very often but just enough so that I have to scan the whole manuscript fairly carefully to catch it. That takes a while when you're working with manuscripts of 68, 71, and 72 thousand words respectively.

And, of course, since I am pathologically incapable of leaving anything that I've ever written alone, I made a few minor changes here and there. Plus, I also caught a few errors, like failing to capitalize "Luna" and somehow inserting an extraneous word in one sentence. Those are just ones I caught on a quick scan, so I'm sure there are other errors as well. I thought about giving the whole trilogy a reread but I'm afraid I'd introduce as many new errors as I would catch and correct old ones.

No manuscript is ever perfect, I keep telling myself. Let it go. Release. Release.

Well, maybe just one more time through.

2 comments:

Sidney said...

In the days when search and replace was a complicated process that meant turning the floppy disk over and booting a different portion of my word processing program on the Commodore 64, I failed to catch a couple of instances of a character named Langdon which appeared as Langley in print. Times--no pun intendend--don't really change that much. :-(

Admin said...

Great news that this publisher wants all three books to look at. I hope they get published. Good luck Charles.

- Brad