Getting back on the horse after tumbling off and rolling around on the ground for a few months...

So, I've been a little ranty-pants for the last few days. I hope y'all can forgive me. I was under the weather with the blergs, but I feel a lot better now. My posts from now on will hopefully reflect the improvement!

On the up side, I have had a lot of time to read. When you can't do anything other than lie there like a lump, reading is an excellent option, at least until you fall asleep on the book and drool on the pages...

But I've largely caught up on my beta-reading duties. I've also been FINALLY reading The Enchantress by Michael Scott. I'd already read the rest of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series, and since this is the final installment, I can't believe I've been sitting on it since it was released in May. That is just how busy I've been. Then again, it got buried on my coffee table for a month or so, and I completely forgot it was there. When I found it again a few days ago, I was THRILLED! HEY! NEW BOOK!!! *_*

And now, while I wait for my CP's to finish writing their current wip's, or to finish their revisions, I shall return to the writing trenches.

It's George! Hows about we go for a ride?

It has been so long since I worked on book three in the series I'm querying right now that I have absolutely no recollection of the details I've written so far. I remember the basic story up to the point where I left off, but revising two of my own books, plus doing critiques and beta reads on several others, not to mention all the summer vacation business, I'm afraid I drove all the plot details right out of my little pea-brain.

I know the worst thing you can do is go back and edit before the first draft is complete. I'm trying to promise myself to leave all the words alone, but I must go back and reread from the beginning. I don't remember some of the minor characters' names (folks who are necessary to the plot, but with very little time on the page so far), all the little twisty-turns I've written, and exactly that the timeline looks like. I MUST go back and read it from the beginning. I hope I don't fall into the trap of revising the first draft in progress. Then again, I revised books 1 and 2 so much in the last few months, some revision will probably be necessary. Required, even. Otherwise, what I've already written won't make sense with the other revisions... Sigh.

So there it is. The main reason I've been procrastinating on getting back to writing. Editorial Paralysis.

I'm looking to George for support. Come on, George!

I will repost the Progress-O-Meter as soon as I make some...

Has summer derailed your writing plans? Or have you ever walked away from a half-written manuscript, only to return several months later? How did you get back into it?

Word! Or, Stop the Wonkiness!

I always wrote in Open Office. Well, not always, but for the last few years, at any rate. I never had an issue with it. It worked fine, has a lot of useful downloadable extensions, and best of all, it's free. And then I tried submitting my manuscript to Literary Agents.

For those who aren't writers, I'll tell you it seems like the entire publishing industry uses Microsoft Word. When an agent, or editor, or even a critique partner, asks to see your whole manuscript, it has to be formatted so that the recipient can actually read it. That is the whole point of sending it, after all.

It turns out, Microsoft Word has some sort of formatting allergy to things written in Open Office. Even if I save the file as a .doc Word file in OO, the formatting would sneeze somewhere during the conversion process, and it never seemed to have a hankie close at hand. Headers, footers, page numbers, margins, spacing, chapter breaks, and everything else would end up in a jumbled slush of word soup.

The event that finally sent me to the Dark Side was innocent enough, but doubly mortifying for me. Several months ago, I sent my full manuscript to Spectacular Agent Person. She emailed me that she received SOMETHING, but she didn't think it was my manuscript. It was about 80,000 words shorter than my MS, and was WONKY, WONKY, WONKY. The formatting exploded when she tried to open it in Word.

I quickly went over the submission, opened it up in OO, redid ALL THE FORMATTING, and sent it along again. Lucky for me, it worked that time. I felt like a moron, but it worked eventually. I was just lucky that Spectacular Agent Person was nice enough to point out my embarrassing error and let me resend it. She could have written me off as a lunatic and hit delete.

Fast forward about five months. After I finished ALL THE EDITING, Spectacular Agent Person miraculously asked to see the revised MS. When I fished ALL THE SQUEEING, I took my .odt OO file, reformatted it as a .doc Word file, and sent it on its merry way.

First thing the next morning, I had an email from Spectacular Agent Person, wondering if I sent the right file. It was 17,000 words (What happened to the other 86,000 words?!), and the formatting was once again described as "strange." I scrambled to reassemble my tattered document, screwed up the formatting even worse before I finally made it at least passably readable, and sent it along again. I apologized for the horrible formatting, and blamed it on Open Office.

Surprisingly, Spectacular Agent Person agreed with me, and advised me to do anything I had to do in order to get Word on my computer ASAP. So I did.

I won't even go in to the day-long ordeal of trying to download Word. Needless to say, I finally got it installed, and spent most of the day today trying to de-wonkify Running Down the Dragon. I'm FINALLY satisfied with how it looks.

My next project is to transfer all my other OO documents into Word. Synopses, queries, my other manuscripts, the WIP--everything needs to be reformatted. I suppose I should start with Devil May Care, since I should be working on edits for it right now. Instead, I'm still reading RDTD, since I spent the last two days doing Word-related things, rather than word-related things. :)

This is George. George is a horse. He has Horse Sense. George approves this message.*

Moral of this story: If you are an author, and you are not using Word, go buy it now. If you can't afford it right now, I at least encourage you to send a test file to a friend, writing buddy, critique partner, or ANYONE who has Word installed. Let them open it up and make sure it is actually readable before you send it to an agent! Use your Horse Sense! Be like George!

*And yes, this horse is really named George.