That flu thing…
Pretty sure it was the flu, after all. Just after my last post it ramped up again, just to assert its dominance, I suppose.
But it seems to be gone now, and I’ve been back at the proofing and cover-fixing for The Lost Steersman…
Yep. That many.
Rather a lot had to be fixed… there was an issue with ellipses (“…”) where moving the text from Scrivener into Word for upload to Createspace caused them to be converted into three dots with spaces between (“. . .”). According to some sources, that’s the way to do it (Little, Brown, and Chicago Manual of Style), and according to others (various semi-official internet sources) you can do it either way. But the problem arose when the Createspace automatic layout software decided that the dots did not have to hang together, and if they occurred near the end of the line, one or two of ’em might end up on a whole new line. Ugh.
So I decided No Splits, Dudes!  And I had to go in and change all the dots-with-spaces into dots-without.  I’m glad I did it.
And then decided to reverse my previous trad-publisher’s inexplicable war against all hyphenated words.  Hyphenated words have their place.
And then I found a place, previously overlooked by me, where the trad-publisher’s copyeditor apparently did not understand a sentence. So, they simply re-wrote it to what they figured I must have meant– unaware that it was a British-ism. (“He was a moment understanding” is not the same as “He had a moment of understanding.”)
And then, the other errors, of which there were plenty. Copy-and-paste from Scrivener generates a lot of mess. I’ll try the export function next time instead.
So, as of now Createspace has the whole shebang for The Lost Steersman, and they’re reviewing it to make sure there are no problems on their end. Then they’ll give me the okay. After which I will order a new physical copy, just to make absolutely certain — because there are some things that just don’t show until you see it printed. Like the previous color problems.
And that was my week: Coughing, proofing, writing (once I felt better), some music. My sister, meanwhile, has been basking in the Florida sun. Here, it’s 12 degrees Fahrenheit (-11 Celsius).
I can take breather for a couple of days…
