Spring Shoots

Pam Baddeley, Writer Posted on by
snowdrop

Cocoparisienne, Pixabay, Public Domain

Well, a gap in the progress log again, but despite the lack of blogging about it, there has been some progress since my last post. Firstly, I’ve been carrying on with the ‘final’ edit of the WIP. Secondly, I have to report that I heard back from the Magic Oxygen short story competition I entered some time ago, but sadly, I didn’t make the short list.

However, I was a joint winner of a small, non-prize but just for fun competition run on one of the Goodreads forums – 200 words and a certain line had to be included. I’ve posted it on my  short shorts page.

Apart from editing – some days it’s gone well and I’ve done up to three chapters, though other times I can only manage a chapter a day – I’ve also done some work on my book description/book blurb. Some time last year, I produced three rough ones. Last week I posted the best onto SFFC forum and asked for comments. I posted subsequent versions based on the comments – but then received disparate views which left me a bit confused.

So I tried again on one of the Goodreads forums and had some useful input, e.g. that it’s good to go ‘top down’ from less detailed to more detailed, as you want something with impact to show on Amazon before the link to view more, as only limited text shows. Also, that one of the blurbs I’d done as a result of the SFFC input could be worked on to become a ‘long’ blurb (it isn’t that long as such, just has more detail). As a result, I’ve now put something together which has the amended input from SFFC, reworked along the lines suggested on Goodreads, and also using some amended wording that one of the Goodreads contributors suggested. I’m going to head it up with the byline of the book, and with any luck it will also serve as the backcover copy when I finally produce the paperback.

A small side task was to look at one or two sites that would produce barcodes, again for the paperback. I found one that I think will be OK and does it for free, with contributions welcome.

I also took a copy of one of my book title images and played around with making it transparent, as one of the issues with using an image is that if the reader changes their view to white-on-black (or uses a sepia background on a tablet, which I do myself as I find it more restful on that kind of screen), it hopefully won’t appear as a white block against a different colour. Haven’t had time to check that yet as I need to make a small ebook including it. Still don’t think I’ve cracked the actual size issue re the title page graphic, but I’ve found a hint on a book building site that images should be 300 not 75 pixels per inch. I did try to produce a transparent image with text superimposed in Gimp but the text looked puny so the title page image is a work in progress in its own right. Graphics are not my strong point, unfortunately.

I did some reading for general tips on a few sites of people who have self published. A good one which I first found some years ago and then lost track of is Lisa Shea’s. She has redesigned the site a lot since I first found it – http://www.lisashea.com/lisabase/writing/gettingyourbookpublished/

Anyway, to summarise the latest goals and progress:

  1. Produce a fourth e-book version and play it through on text-to-speech and make further amendments – Up to end of chapter 17 of the latest.
  2. Work out how to format a Kindle book including the front and end pages and what to put in those – Pretty happy with the process I’ve documented, apart from the continuing issue with the title page image which has the text too small possibly because of making it responsive and sizing for the screen (not including actual figures for width and height). Need to try again with text title/author name and the logo image and see if they still split across ‘pages’. Need to create a short dummy ebook to find out if the trial attempt at a transparent graphic works, as none of the preview tools are any use for that.
  3. Once the final edit is complete, check where authors can be identified who have used particular pro editors previously identified as possibilities, to validate the quality of the editing and possibly amend the shortlist.
  4. Approach the various editors in the revised shortlist to establish how much it would cost for this long first MS, and whether it can be done without having to spend ‘loadsamoney’.
  5. Come up with a book description that can be used on Amazon and also for the back cover description on the eventual print on demand version. More or less done, with the input from SFFC and Goodreads.
  6. Finalise the back of book text and also remember to add info to the copyright/dedication page such as the book cover designer and editors credits.

 

ROW80 is posting updates on a blog ‘linky’ list again – see here. Alternatively, you can check the Facebook group here.

Pushing Through

Pam Baddeley, Writer Posted on by
computer keyboard

Pixabay, by Simon, public domain

Some progress over the last week or so. I completed the read-through to the end of the novel and embarked on creation of the fourth ebook version for a final read-through before approaching pro editors.

I used the process I started to develop last summer, and this time there were no ‘rubbishy’ styles thrown up in the Calibre conversion, just one for italics and the rest the odd ones it uses as part of its structure, at the top and bottom of each file/page for example. So I won’t need to use Calibre in future conversions for this novel, such as the real one for producing an epub file for Amazon upload.

The most taxing part of the process this time was at the HTML stage where the tool was going through the motions of saving the file but then prompting to save it when I tried to quit as if it hadn’t saved it at all. Luckily, I played safe by using the File\Save As option and also copying/pasting the text to a notepad file to be on the safe side, because when I managed to quit the program, none of the work I had done in the preceding 2.5 hours had been saved in the original file! It was still the filtered HTML file as exported from Word that I’d started with. Soon sorted that out by getting rid of that version and renaming the Save As version with the right name. Phew! Computers can be sneaky.

A glitch at the Sigil stage was a couple of fonts not displaying as intended; instead, they were defaulting to the options in Sigil for text that has no CSS class defined. Then I realised I’d met this problem last time and it is due to the font names being capitalised by Word, but all lower case in the stylesheet. Made a note in my instructions this time at the appropriate place to remedy that during the HTML clean-up stage. It was in the notes later on, at the Sigil stage, but it should’ve been flagged up under the section on HTML and it was quite a few months ago that I’d met the problem so I’d forgotten.

Also I did some more trials to try to get a single image that would include the book title and the logo for the title page. This continues to frustrate; I found out how to make the image responsive and include that in the CSS by using an id tag in the image inclusion tag and and cross referencing that in the CSS file, but the text continues to look miniscule when displayed on an actual Kindle. So still head scratching. I’ve confirmed by research on the Kindle forum that there is no way in an ebook to keep text together (or text and a logo image). The advice on there is to make the title page one whole image, but despite trying to enlarge the text, it is still pretty teeny on the Kindle itself. Otherwise, all was OK, with correct table of contents, book opening in the correct place and the text itself all being correctly indented or blocked, and italicised text being italicised.

Following this, I’ve embarked on the read-through and have done nine chapters so far which doesn’t sound a lot, but the last three were long ones. The only actual mistake I’ve come across was the use of ‘relived’ instead of ‘relieved’ in one place. The rest, as ever, is tidying up cludgy bits missed previously or sorting out the odd sentence which is really omniscient viewpoint rather than close third. Plus some small bits have come out here and there that I think are obvious and don’t need to be underlined. The main concern is introducing new mistakes because I did realise in time that I was nearly doing that in one place when rephrasing, so I hope there aren’t any that I haven’t caught.

The pro editor question is bothering me a little; I had a look at the work of a writer who recommended an editor who is right for the genre and sounds a lot more reasonable price-wise than most. The writer has used this editor for all their books and been happy. But in the first few paragraphs, a comma splice jumped out at me and one or two places where I’ve been told a comma is required. Comma splices (joining two clauses with a comma when they need either a colon, a semi-colon or possibly a comma and a conjunction such as ‘and’ or ‘but’, depending on the type of clauses being joined) is a general no-no in English (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice), so I’m having doubts about the editor’s abilities. I need to look into this in much more depth for all the recommended editors on my list, but I don’t want to distract myself from the read-through.

Anyway, to summarise the latest goals and progress:

  1. Produce a fourth e-book version and play it through on text-to-speech and make further amendments – Up to end of chapter 9 of the latest.
  2. Work out how to format a Kindle book including the front and end pages and what to put in those – Pretty happy with the process I’ve documented, apart from the continuing issue with the title page image which has the text too small possibly because of making it responsive and sizing for the screen (not including actual figures for width and height). Need to try again with text title/author name and the logo image and see if they still split across ‘pages’. Haven’t finalised the end pages yet.
  3. Once the final edit is complete, check where authors can be identified who have used particular pro editors previously identified as possibilities, to validate the quality of the editing and possibly amend the shortlist.
  4. Approach the various editors in the revised shortlist to establish how much it would cost for this long first MS, and whether it can be done without having to spend ‘loadsamoney’.
  5. Come up with a book description that can be used on Amazon and also for the back cover description on the eventual print on demand version.

 

ROW80 is posting updates on a blog ‘linky’ list again – see here. Alternatively, you can check the Facebook group here.

 

Still Making Progress

Pam Baddeley, Writer Posted on by
stone cutting tools

Gellinger, Pixabay, Public domain

Well, only the second post of the year; already falling into bad habits! I just seem to be doing so much and not having a lot to show. But there is progress, in small stages.

I’ve been working on the WIP using the text-to-speech technique which helps to throw into relief clunky sentences and the odd place where a word was missed out. I had to break off and go back to the beginning again a little while ago because I’d read in more than one place that it was standard for UK books to use single quotes for dialogue (with double quotes inside those for any quote-within-quote). The reverse is true for US books. I’d been raised with the old tradition learned in typing classes that you used double quotes for speech, and so have several other people I know, but books such as ‘New Hart’s Rules’ have been informing me this isn’t standard for the UK. I checked quite a few recent traditionally published paperbacks and they all follow the single quote convention, so I’ve been back through the MS correcting that.

Being concerned that something might go haywire with a global find-and-replace, after doing the replace, I did a search on single quotes to make sure that nothing funny had happened, which resulted in a few small line edits here and there as I spotted other things I could improve. I had to tear myself away from re-reading the chapters in full, but given the number of edits already made on this third text-to-speech read through, I think I’m going to have to do a fourth to make sure there really are only minor things to deal with, before approaching the pro editors. Anyway, I’ve caught up to where I was before starting the quote replacement so I’m hoping to steam away with it now and get the last bit done.

Something I discovered by chance: I use an electronic copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, but on Windows 10 it has gone a little bit glitchy, loading ‘off screen’ so that I have to maximise it via various right-click and key combinations to make it visible. Then it does a ‘stay on top’ so that I have to minimise it to get back to Word. I discovered yesterday that there is a free Wordweb dictionary tool which, provided you accept the option on installation to create a taskbar icon, you can access by highlighting a word in Word (or other software), then holding down the Ctrl key and right-clicking with the mouse. A window pops up with various dictionary help and functions. They also do a pro version for £17 that allows you to purchase add-on dictionaries, and I was tempted when I saw they did the SOED, but I investigated and the last edition is the one I already have – 6th edition (2007) – so it wouldn’t make sense to buy the same thing again in a different form. Anyway, for anyone interested in the free version of Wordweb, it’s at http://wordweb.info/free/. For users of Macs or other operating systems, scroll down that page to the links at the bottom.

Quite a bit of time has been taken up over the last few months writing reviews of the books I’ve been reading for the Goodreads site – anyone interested in seeing those can click the Goodreads button in the sidebar on the home page. I found a few good groups there for exchanging views and finding out information on self-publishing, not just author only forums but also those where the focus is on readers.

Earlier this month I wrote a short story (200 words) with a set topic (a particular phrase had to be included) for a short story competition in one of those Goodreads forums; no prizes, just a bit of fun, and I thought it would be a challenge. I’ve backed off from doing those kinds of competitions for some months as I felt a bit discouraged by the lack of response (didn’t expect votes but some feedback would’ve been nice). So we’ll see how this goes. It doesn’t close until later this month.

I’ve just finished critiquing the latest batch of submissions in the email-based group to which I belong. More alpha than beta readers, as I’ve only sent round parts of a first draft of another novel so far and it’s not the whole book in one go, just a few chapters at a time. I’m parking all feedback on my own material for now, rather than letting it distract me from finishing the current WIP.

I’ve been reading a rather quirky book, The Pocket Book of Proofreading. It also covers copy-editing to some extent and includes some useful information; in fact, it ‘prodded’ me to finally do something about the single quote thing – I had read something about that a couple of months ago, but prevaricated about having to deal with it.

Last time I received a couple of comments from kind people who read that post and asked questions. I should have spotted those back in January so apologies for the delay. @Shan Jeniah Burton, the forum I meant was the Science Fiction & Fantasy Community. Thanks for that tip about APE. @Beth Camp, I’ve been using an old Kindle Keyboard which does a robotic voice for my text-to-speech readthroughs, which I bought secondhand. For this book, I’m going for copy editing, because a professional writer very kindly read an earlier version and gave me developmental comments.

Anyway, to summarise the latest goals and progress:

  1. Play the novel through on text-to-speech and make further amendments – Up to end of chapter 30 of the latest run through.
  2. Work out how to format a Kindle book including the front and end pages and what to put in those – This is parked at present though I’ve done quite a bit on this. Have looked at other ebooks by self published authors I know, and they all differ. Need to sort out the graphic I was using as the title page – when I had the publisher logo with normal text it split the page text, but the graphic all-in-one wasn’t big enough either and looks silly.
  3. Once the final edit is complete, approach the various editors previously identified as possible pro editors to establish how much it would cost for this long first MS, and whether it can be done without having to spend ‘loadsamoney’.

 

ROW80 is posting updates on a blog ‘linky’ list again – see here. Alternatively, you can check the Facebook group here.

Keep On Keeping On

Pam Baddeley, Writer Posted on by
Plant growing through crack in pavement

SymphonyofLove, Pixabay. Public domain

After the whole Christmas and New Year thing, it’s taking a while for energy levels to get back to normal as far as writing goes. Lots of distractions still keep appearing and I’ve only managed to edit another two chapters since Christmas. The situation is a bit like one of those old school reports which said “Must try harder”.

Hence, not a lot to report, but I am trying to get back to a regular schedule of blogging and checking in with the ROW80 motivational group of fellow writers and bloggers.

One thing I did do in the Christmas run-up was to polish a short story that I wrote a few years back, and submit it to a competition which closed on 31st December. It’s been a while since I last entered a competition – must have been in the first quarter of 2016 – and it’s an odd short story, not at all my usual sort of thing, but the competition looked appropriate.

Other than that, I’ve added another professional editor to my list of those to approach, following a recommendation from someone on the SFFC forum.

To summarise the latest goals and progress:

  1. Play the novel through on text-to-speech and make further amendments – Up to end of chapter 20 of the latest run through.
  2. Work out how to format a Kindle book including the front and end pages and what to put in those – Quite a lot accomplished. Have looked at other ebooks by self published authors I know, and they all differ. Need to sort out the graphic I was using as the title page – when I had the publisher logo with normal text it split the page text, but the graphic all-in-one wasn’t big enough either and looks silly.
  3. Once the final edit is complete, approach the various editors previously identified as possible pro editors to establish how much it would cost for this long first MS, and whether it can be done without having to spend ‘loadsamoney’.

 

ROW80 has changed its format and posts updates in a Facebook group instead of a blog ‘linky list’. You can access it here.

Catching up is hard to do

Pam Baddeley, Writer Posted on by

Cluttered deskDo you know that feeling when there are too many things to do and not enough hours in the day? Yep, that’s been the trouble here, for the last few months in particular, hence no posting on this blog, though I’ve kept up with my round of Goodreads, Facebook and sffchronicles forum updates. Something had to give, and with the continuing edit of the magnum opus which occupied me during this NaNoWriMo – rebelling again, and had a ‘win’ with 58 hours of editing clocked up – it was this blog, sadly. And as soon as NaNo finished, the Christmas preparations, including present buying and wrapping and writing of Christmas cards, took over.

All this being the case, today is the first opportunity to return to the blog for a quick update of how things have been going. I did some more work on how to create an ebook, testing the process I documented in my last post to produce the third iteration in Kindle format then started another text-to-speech read-through on my trusty Kindle Keyboard. I reached the end of chapter 18 before Christmas preps brought everything to a halt. I still have ‘stuff to do’ but hope to get back to it soon. This is the last one before I approach pro editors for quotes and find out if it is affordable.

So to summarise the latest goals and progress:

  1. Play the novel through on text-to-speech and make further amendments – Completed the previous run and up to end of chapter 18 of the latest.
  2. Work out how to format a Kindle book including the front and end pages and what to put in those – Quite a lot accomplished. Have looked at other ebooks by self published authors I know though they all differ. Need to sort out the graphic I was using as the title page as when I had the publisher logo with normal text it split the page text, but the graphic all-in-one wasn’t big enough either and looks silly.
  3. Once the final edit is complete, approach the various editors previously identified as possible pro editors to establish how much it would cost for this long first MS, and whether it can be done without having to spend ‘loadsamoney’.

 

ROW80 has changed its format and posts updates on Facebook instead of a blog ‘linky list’ which you can see here.

 

Onward and Upward

Pam Baddeley, Writer Posted on by

Since the last post I’ve been busy, so busy I’ve had no time to blog about what I’ve been doing. First off, I completed CampNaNo well ahead of the target which I had revised a couple of times but couldn’t increase above 35K (35 hours in my case, being an edit) because you’re not allowed to amend your goal once you reach the date when you can start ‘winning’. I left it too late for another increase so my last recorded goal was 35K and I ended up doing the word count equivalent of 65 and three quarters hours of editing. I completed the text-to-speech read-through I embarked on a while back and looked well on track for tidying up a new dummy ebook and performing another read-through to ensure no mistakes had been edited in.

But sometimes things are a slog. I went back to working on ebook production, and then became sidetracked into doing a full-blown edit once more because I picked up a couple of books cheap, The Penguin Guide to Punctuation and The Penguin Guide to Plain English. A perusal of the first one in particular convinced me that I still wasn’t using semicolons correctly and that most of them should be colons. Also, I wasn’t sure about comma usage in places. The upshot is that I’ve started re-reading the whole book onscreen and have done not only little tweaks, but a lot of full rewrites and rejigs of some sections. It has taken a few more hundred words off the word count. But I’m not convinced it’s correct as I get the impression that, in the process, I’ve introduced the passive – ‘was walking’ – into places simply because the flow seemed to require that. I need to go back over those first eleven chapters (as that’s how far I’ve got) to make sure I’m not doing too much of that.

I made progress in my understanding of ebook production thanks to finding some posts by Rudy Rucker which still have value despite being written in 2012: four covering ebook production, from the most lightweight process to the most thorough. The first post  How to Get Started kicks off the process and each is linked through to the next if anyone wants to check them out.

I already knew that the foundation is to follow the Smashwords Guide to Editing first, to make sure everything is implemented through styles. That’s fundamental before embarking on any process. So I had already done that prior to creating the first dummy ebook for text-to-speech.

The process I’m following involves saving the consolidated book file (which I add the front and back matter to) as a filtered HTML file. The trouble is, Word incorporates all sorts of rubbish which isn’t needed in an ebook so I’m using an old HTML editor I have to strip out unnecessary style info and to create a proper CSS stylesheet with the correctly defined styles in it, linked back into the main file.

If I use Calibre to create an epub, I don’t need to remove the style section as Calibre will create a stylesheet, but I do need to get rid of lots of ‘panose’ entries and to make sure the styles that are left are correct. Also, for later stages, I may replace the embedded front page graphic which includes my publishing logo, with a link to the graphic file.

Word creates a lot of its own styles such as ‘msonormal’ where the normal style was used in the original. For the HTML I’m using a find-replace to turn this into a ‘para’ style instead. I’m also getting rid of the <SPAN> tags that it insists on adding, so that I make the HTML as simple as possible, formatted using <p class=”classname”> tags only.

As a troubleshooting step after that, I create an epub file from the cleaned up HTML one using Calibre. There’s a school of thought that Calibre files are not always accepted on Amazon. Whether this is currently the case or not, Calibre is certainly useful because it creates a lot of extra styles if there is anything odd in the input. I found a number of things that weren’t visible in the original Word files – spaces formatted as red, some letters that were formatted not to display in Word – plus a few paragraphs that stubbornly insist on having ‘inline’ formatting, in other words having a <p> tag around them with everything defined manually instead of using a CSS class. So I was able to use my HTML editor on the filtered HTML file to clean all this up, and in the case of things where the cause could be seen in the Word original, clean it up there also.

For ebook production, I’m probably going to take a cleaned up HTML which incorporates the fixes identified from the Calibre conversion, then take that into Sigil and manually add the file breaks for each chapter. I use Word to define a pagebreak for the chapter heading style, and ebook readers will normally obey that, but the ebook would remain one big file if it isn’t split either manually in Sigil or automatically by a Calibre conversion, and large files can give problems on some readers.

I’ve written up this process for my own use in a Word document, which is still in progress as I’ve broken off to do more editing, as I said above. Like I said, I’ve been really busy!

So to summarise the latest goals and progress:

  1. Play the novel through on text-to-speech and make further amendments – Completed that runthrough and will have to repeat when the latest editing is done
  2. Work out how to format a Kindle book including the front and end pages and what to put in those – Quite a lot accomplished. Have looked at other ebooks by self published authors I know though they all differ. Have a process now to follow which will be trailed when the next ‘dummy’ is produced for text-to-speech checking
  3. Complete the latest edit then produce another ebook for text-to-speech checking
  4. Once the final edit is complete, approach the various editors previously identified as possible pro editors to establish how much it would cost for this long first MS, and whether it can be done without having to spend ‘loadsamoney’.

Here is what those nice folks at ROW80 have been up to:

Camping It Up

Pam Baddeley, Writer Posted on by

CNW_April 2016_Participant

Or not as the case may be … I’ve joined a cabin for July CampNaNoWriMo and set myself a modest initial target as I did in April.  Although I should exceed it, I don’t think I’ll be able to manage so much editing this time as in April, because I have a busy second half of the month looming.  Never mind, I’ve been able to manage 18.5 hours of editing so far and have moved on with the current text-to-speech edit.

That’s also with doing three crits for an email crit group in the past week or so.  I usually end up spending a couple of hours apiece on those so they are a significant chunk of writing time, but of course I’m getting a critical eye on one of my own books in return, the one I completed the first draft of after a couple of years of NaNoWriMo.  They’ve thrown up quite a few developmental issues that I need to address.  Like a lot of my unfinished novels, this was started years ago, and until the last couple I couldn’t get time or sufficient motivation to push on with it.  NaNo was useful for that, plus a couple of writers’ retreats I attended where I got a good chunk done each time.  Sadly, that retreat has closed, but I’m doing my own mini retreats in effect.

Anyway, it’s a toss up as to which book I should turn my attention to once I’ve got the current WIP completed and self published.  The most sensible thing would be to tackle one of the two short books that have had a load of rewrites over umpteen years as I don’t think either of those will need a lot of work, compared to what I’ve had to put in on the current one.  After that, there is a long contemporary supernatural novel that will need a lot of work to bring it up to date with modern developments – unfortunately, life has caught up with fiction as it deals with a lot of topics such as mass migration that have become very pressing in recent years, so I’m not sure how I’m going to tackle that.  And then I have the one I’m sending to the crit group, plus a partly written murder mystery/supernatural tale set in different time zones, and fragments of about three or four other books.  Oh, and there’s the other supernatural one that needs a complete rewrite.  So lots to do, which is why it is important to focus on one thing at a time otherwise it gets a bit overwhelming.

So the goals this time with progress:

  1. Play the novel through on text-to-speech and make further amendments – done to end of Chapter 26
  2. Work out how to format a Kindle book including the front and end pages and what to put in those –  No further progress, but I have found an article I bookmarked ages ago which has a different method and I’m going to follow that one when I finish the current play through because I am going to repeat the exercise to catch any typos that have been introduced by the current round of edits, which turn out to be a lot more substantial than I was expecting
  3. Once the final edit is complete, approach the various editors previously identified as possible pro editors  to establish how much it would cost for this long first MS, and whether it can be done without having to spend ‘loadsamoney’.

And here are those nice ROW80 people and their updates:

Lessons in Line Editing Part 2

Pam Baddeley, Writer Posted on by
Stop sign with pen

staand, Pixabay, Public Domain

Since my previous update, I’ve continued using the text-to-speech method of editing and I’m finding it more and more valuable.  It has shown up three typos so far, but its main use as before is in making it obvious where more work is needed.  In some places, I’ve completely redrafted a section because of it.

So far I’ve tacked the first fifteen chapters since the beginning of June, and that’s with days off doing other things.  So that is hugely faster than the previous edit which began last April.  I’ve decided to incorporate this method into my regular editing cycles which have to get a lot quicker.  I think if I concentrate on doing a clean up of the obvious stuff including continuity problems at the second draft, then do a text-to-speech read through for draft three, that will create the different mind set which I’ve found is highlighting many areas that need addressing which were not showing up on the radar before.  Perhaps, because different parts of the brain are used to process speech as opposed to written words, this has the serendipitous effect of making weaknesses obvious?

When I finish the current exercise, I’ll produce a rough ebook again and read that through to catch any typos that might have been introduced during this edit.  Hopefully the ‘big stuff’ will have all been dealt with this time through.

I’ve also blogged about my issues with the Windows version of Scrivener for producing compiled books, either for ebook or print.

So my goals for ROW80 and progress in red:

  1. Play the novel through on the KK and make further amendments – first 15 chapters done
  2. Work out how to format a Kindle book including the front and end pages and what to put in those –  No further progress, but I have documented the method and know what needs to be done mostly. I’ll get more practice when I finish the current play through because I am going to repeat the exercise to catch any typos that have been introduced by the current round of edits, which turn out to be a lot more substantial than I was expecting
  3. Once the final edit is complete, approach the various editors previously identified as possible pro editors  to establish how much it would cost for this long first MS, and whether it can be done without having to spend ‘loadsamoney’.

And here are those nice ROW80 people and their updates:

Plea to the Developer of Scrivener for Windows

Pam Baddeley, Writer Posted on by
Abstract image of computer data

Prawny on Pixabay, Public Domain

I was recently asked by Eden Mabee, in a comment on my recent progress, what I was referring to when I said I had been disappointed to discover issues caused by missing features when compiling in Scrivener for Windows; features present in the Mac version which therefore doesn’t have those issues.  As the answer would have been too long to include as a reply to her comment, I thought I would write a post to explain what I meant.

This is also, in effect, an appeal to the developer(s) of Scrivener because, when I went to the support forum under the ‘Scrivener for Windows’ section and looked at the ‘Wishlist’ thinking I would create a polite request to add the features in question, the ‘Before Posting’ note said “All features of the Mac version are planned for inclusion in the Windows version. We can’t provide any specific dates, but anything you see in the Mac version will be coming to the Windows version if it’s not there already. Therefore please do not post asking for features from the Mac to be made available for Windows.”

That stopped me in my tracks because I had been meaning to ask if there was a planned date for adding the features in question to the ‘Compile’ feature in Scrivener for Windows.  I think two of those features are pretty fundamental for anyone compiling their project either to an ebook or to a print publication:

  • the ability to keep centred text centred rather than having it move to the left margin in the compiled version
  • the ability to have the first paragraph of a chapter or scene flush against the left margin (blocked) rather than having it indent itself in the compiled version

 

The editing mode shows both kinds of text correctly.  The Mac version, I’ve discovered, has options in the ‘Compile’ feature to preserve centred text and to keep those initial paragraphs blocked rather than indented.

So I was very disappointed when I did a trial run recently as part of my final editing push (to use in a text-to-speech run-through) and discovered that these options do not exist in the Windows version.  Therefore, it is necessary to compile the book in the epub format so that you can then manually hack the underlying HTML using a program such as Calibre or Sigil.

So there is a longwinded workround for the problems above for ebook, BUT I don’t know whether there is one for a print version, and I am going to want to do a POD of each novel.  And I’ve heard from other Scrivener for Windows users that there’s a further issue affecting print books: it isn’t possible to have two different headers (or footers) to handle left and right hand pages.  So, for example, the page number has to be in the same place on both, which would look daft.

So for me, Scrivener for Windows is not a complete solution.  I thought originally I would be able to use it to produce finalised output for both ebooks and print layouts for CreateSpace, and it now appears that I’ll have to come up with a totally different method for POD.  And whenever you have to maintain two different versions of the source ‘code’ like this, it opens up the possibility of errors as it is obviously very important to keep strict version control of the two versions to make sure they don’t get out of step.

I already have an issue with version control as all my books are currently in Microsoft Word, so I am having to copy them into Scrivener to split them up into chapters and scenes.  I thought I would be able to copy the chapters in (I have a separate Word document for each chapter, as having worked with Word for a long time, I’m used to the way it used to corrupt long documents), and include physically typed scene separators, as I want scene separators between each scene in the ebook (in the print version, I would only have those where a scene break coincides with a page break).

Unfortunately, due to ‘Compile’ not preserving centred text, the typed separators all ended up against the left hand margin which looked stupid, so I took them out and had to split each chapter into scenes, then use the option in compile itself to add scene separators.  I only did this for the first few chapters as a trial since this version is purely for editing purposes, but I’d have to do this for the whole book when it comes to producing the proper ebook.

As I have gone through the inbuilt text based training a few times without much of it sinking in, I bought a course on Udemy produced by Karen Prince which was very useful and also explained quite a few things that aren’t obvious in Scrivener’s own help, mainly to do with the levels when you compile a book.  With regard to the missing features listed above, she recommends turning off the option during compilation to format any file containing e.g. centred text.  (You do this by ticking ‘As is’ against that file.)  When you do that, everything goes through to the compiled version as it was in your original: the compile facility doesn’t apply any reformatting.

The trouble is it also means that a) you have to completely format the text in the font etc you want to use in the ebook, which isn’t always the same as your editing environment, and b) you don’t get the automatically added table of contents links, and I don’t know how to overcome that manually.  For me, to tick all the chapters to be ‘as is’ would cancel out half the point of putting the book into Scrivener in the first place.  I have a huge ‘investment’ in Microsoft Word.  I can see Scrivener being useful for a partly written book I have which switches around in time lines between different characters.  I expect it will help a lot in working out what needs to go where in that novel.  But for the books I’ve already written, I need Scrivener for the formatting process and it is letting me down on that.

Anyway, here’s hoping that these features make their way into the Windows version soon.  There hasn’t been an update since last October, but I understand that they are currently working on a version 3 which may or may not have the Mac features in it.  I just don’t know how long we have to wait…..

Lessons in Line Editing

Pam Baddeley, Writer Posted on by

Pencils with eraser endsThis account of my writing progress has slipped for a while, mainly because I’ve been so busy writing and also learning how to create ebooks!

The last time I blogged, I had just entered a couple of short story comps.  After that, I returned to the latest line edit, and finally ploughed my way to the end – Chapter 36.  So far, so good.  But I wanted to get the book into one file, (due to having used Word from earlier versions which tended to corrupt large files, I use the one document-per-chapter way of working), and turn it into an ebook to put on my old Kindle Keyboard.  I do read aloud portions of my work anyway, but I’ve seen recommendations from quite a few indie writers that it’s a good idea to use an electronic reader of some kind, even a program, as this tends to highlight typing mistakes.

I spent two days building a very rough prototype book, mainly because I got sidetracked in discovering the various issues with the tools I was using, and trying to resolve them, in anticipation of when I need to do this in earnest for the real book.  I will probably blog about that separately for those who are desperately interested in technical stuff.  But I succeeded and have been playing back the book, pausing to update the original Word files, then playing again.  Sometimes I have to go back and listen again to a section so it is a fairly slow process, and I have only reached the end of Chapter 8.

My experience is different to what I expected.  Not wanting to blow my own trumpet, but I haven’t found any actual typos so far – BUT – what I have found are a lot of places where it now jumps out at me that a) a sentence isn’t needed at all; b) there is an unintended repetition of a word or even a rhyme within a couple of sentences or so – such as face and disgrace, so a reword is needed; c) an entire paragraph is clunky and needs redrafting; d) part of a sentence would work better if moved from the back to the front of the sentence with any necessary rejigging of verb tenses or whatever.

The strange thing is that I was trying to address all this in the previous line edit that took months and which I’ve only just finished, so I thought I had caught most of it.  But it seems I didn’t and it is now jumping out at me while hearing the book read by a rather robotic voice which often misprounces words – it can’t tell the difference between ‘lives’ as in (not examples from my MS)  ‘Fred lives here’ and ‘The lives of the famous’, so it always pronounces ‘lives’ as in the second example.  It also runs on from the end of a paragraph to the next paragraph without pause, even over a scene break so it’s a bit garbling at times.  But it has been invaluable in throwing up all this – stuff, for want of a better word – which had somehow sailed through in all the previous painstaking line edits.

So my goals for ROW80 and progress in red:

  1. Complete the novel edit by end May – the latest line edit was completed.
  2. Play the novel through on the KK and make further amendments – first 8 chapters done
  3. Work out how to format a Kindle book including the front and end pages and what to put in those –  Tried importing the Word files into Scrivener but discovered there are deficiencies in the Windows version, so the basic book has to be produced as an epub and then fixed in a good freebie program called Sigil.  There will be a lot more to do to tidy up the real book, but I have written up the process I followed, in detail, so I don’t forget what I did when I come to do that.
  4. Once the final edit is complete, approach the various editors previously identified as possible pro editors  to establish how much it would cost for this long first MS, and whether it can be done without having to spend ‘loadsamoney’.

 

OK, here are the updates from those nice people at ROW80: