Behind the Scenes a Little

The weather turned last night. It was unseasonably warm with temperatures over 80(26.67C). Today it's about 65(18.33C). Why is that important? Because the cool front came with wind that knocked the power out and interfered with the blog. I don't have everything in life scheduled, but the blog is one thing I have a set time for.

I transferred the corrections from the printout of Book2 to the computer. Some of it was simple like fixing commas and typos. I had things like "barely had barely" and "be been" where I'd rewritten sentences and missed a deletion. They don't show up in spell correct. Not that that always helps. Part of working on books 2 and 3 required checking things in The Rise of Aethan Lightbringer. Right away I found a spelling mistake that spell correct showed the whole time, but somehow I didn't see it.

Other parts of transferring fixes to computer involved changing paragraphs or how a page flows. I had this one really weird sentence to start a paragraph.

“Eleven at last count,” Mussarev said. “As long as we were being bombed, we lost no one. ..."

What? That doesn't make sense, considering how many people died at that time. What was this guy thinking when he said that? I spent several minutes reading the context and pondering. He stepped off stage for a few minutes while the dialogue continued without him. When he came back, he kept going with his own thought, and I'm not sure what that was. I think he meant they lost no one in the air. I ended up deleting part of it and saving the original to a Remnants file to go over later. My Remnants file is a file where I save things, if I have to delete paragraphs or pages or sections. When I was getting back into writing, I hated deleting something in case I needed it later. It made it mentally easier to delete things into which lots of work had gone. I don't use one any more. If it needs deleting, I just delete it.

Something more disturbing was a discrepancy between the printout and the computer file. I use OpenOffice. There have been instances over time where I thought something had been changed by the program during the save process but couldn't prove it. This time the printout did not match the source file, and I don't remember fixing anything after printing. The printout said "is". The book's file said "his". His was the correct word. I've been thinking about getting MS Word for a while, because OpenOffice won't save the settings for widows and orphans. Maybe I should think harder about that. It's annoyed me the whole time I've used it and interferes with how a book looks in print.

So, the corrections are all done. The next step is to go through and work on things that are too big for the correction stage. I did a bit of it with the page flow changes I mentioned. Sometimes an entire page doesn't quite work. Usually, it's too choppy or feels rushed and needs a few extra sentences to smooth out the flow of it.

I'm still trying to get YouTube videos made. I need more wardrobe for the Messengers channel, and I've spent a lot of money lately that I hope will pay off in a few months. I checked a second-hand store this week but wasn't able to find what I needed, although I did pick up a shirt I can use later for a gag. One of the problems is I don't want to rush to get it all started only not to have enough time to get a video out every week. It takes a lot of time to make and edit and upload videos. I've been doing tons of research in the evenings. I can't do it all.

That's mostly where things are at the moment. Have a great weekend.