I’m now in the final stages of finishing off my short story collection. This means that I am struggling through the misery that is formatting the manuscript and trying desperately not to make some hideous error that anyone who knows anything will through their hands up in horror at. It’s mightily difficult, I can tell you. Turns out that people are subconsciously extremely picky about the layout of their books. Yes. I mean YOU (in the nicest possible way.)
I recently had to change the font of the whole book which sent me into a spiral of intense anxiety and hours of traumatic reformatting. I won’t be doing that again in a hurry. You’ll be getting Times New Roman and I’ll hear no more about it. But it doesn’t end there. No. I learnt about hyphenation, justification, capitalization of titles, copyright pages, title pages, half title pages, numbering, headers, footers, sectioning documents and then my brain imploded.
I never wanted to know about these things. In all honesty I wish I still didn’t. I feel like it might have pushed out some other extremely valuable information from my brain, will I go home and not remember how to turn the TV on? I’ll just be poking at it with a fork, my tongue lolling from my mouth until someone comes to rescue me? If I am victorious I think I will climb a mountain and emit some kind of war cry to claim the surrounding lands. I will have earned it (and it will appeal to my delusions of world domination.) Then I will go home (land conquered) and write something new. Oh sweet relief, NEW things! How marvellous!
It’s been so long since I wrote many of these stories and they have been through so many edits that I can’t read them for what they are anymore. I just see lines and lines of poorly hyphenated text monsters. So I’m really looking forward to you all reading them and telling me what you think (and providing a shed load of money for Tearfund in the process.)
Around launch time (soon I hope) I am going to do a series of blog posts on the stories behind the stories which I hope will make the book even better to read (and will give you a sneak preview if you haven’t ordered your copy yet - why you wouldn’t have is unfathomable but there we are, it’s what they call marketing I believe.) The main question people ask me is where all the weird and wonderful ideas (mostly weird) in my stories come from, so I’m going to tell you, en masse! Crikey, you’re lucky right? No need to thank me. Just get in touch when you have the book saying how, in particular, you were touched by the quality of the formatting. Ta!
I recently had to change the font of the whole book which sent me into a spiral of intense anxiety and hours of traumatic reformatting. I won’t be doing that again in a hurry. You’ll be getting Times New Roman and I’ll hear no more about it. But it doesn’t end there. No. I learnt about hyphenation, justification, capitalization of titles, copyright pages, title pages, half title pages, numbering, headers, footers, sectioning documents and then my brain imploded.
I never wanted to know about these things. In all honesty I wish I still didn’t. I feel like it might have pushed out some other extremely valuable information from my brain, will I go home and not remember how to turn the TV on? I’ll just be poking at it with a fork, my tongue lolling from my mouth until someone comes to rescue me? If I am victorious I think I will climb a mountain and emit some kind of war cry to claim the surrounding lands. I will have earned it (and it will appeal to my delusions of world domination.) Then I will go home (land conquered) and write something new. Oh sweet relief, NEW things! How marvellous!
It’s been so long since I wrote many of these stories and they have been through so many edits that I can’t read them for what they are anymore. I just see lines and lines of poorly hyphenated text monsters. So I’m really looking forward to you all reading them and telling me what you think (and providing a shed load of money for Tearfund in the process.)
Around launch time (soon I hope) I am going to do a series of blog posts on the stories behind the stories which I hope will make the book even better to read (and will give you a sneak preview if you haven’t ordered your copy yet - why you wouldn’t have is unfathomable but there we are, it’s what they call marketing I believe.) The main question people ask me is where all the weird and wonderful ideas (mostly weird) in my stories come from, so I’m going to tell you, en masse! Crikey, you’re lucky right? No need to thank me. Just get in touch when you have the book saying how, in particular, you were touched by the quality of the formatting. Ta!
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