I expected feedback from both beta reader exchange people this weekend and no love. I know people get busy but the thing that keeps going through my mind is that nobody is getting back with me because it sucks so bad.

Allyson, I can do more if you want, just not until after today. Also if you want my audio files I can give them to you before I erase them, you can hear your book read in a soft Scottish accent.

Oh no. She was completely absorbed. She didn't know what brambles are, and she didn't know what "spirit of his entire colony, all 84 thousand 6oo and 92 of them" (typed from her dictation) means, exactly, but thought it had something to do with feeling like he was back home. In the cave. Where his mom... DIED. She giggled out loud at one point, but I didn't want to interrupt her to find out where.

She read through page 22 and then went to watch cartoons. She said she'll read more tomorrow, but "it's reaaaally long, Mom." She told me to tell you also that it's AWE. SOME. She plans to email you when she's finished.

For perspective, she's the best reader in her 3rd grade class.

If you feel like it, Gud, I'm always happy to receive feedback, but it would be too late to incorporate it.

Thanks for letting Kara read it, Deena!

Anyone here using Word 2007? I'm having problems with cut-n-paste into the LJ posting box and I'm looking for advice.

Allyson, no, thank you! Her birthday was Friday. Getting to read Sam was like an extra present.

Hey, Sail. I am. What's it doing?

It's losing it's paragraph spacing. I've had to go in and add an extra hard return between each paragraph in order for LJ to register that there's even one line between paragraphs.

The best fix I can see is to paste it into the TEXT tab, rather than the HTML tab. When you paste into a wysiwyg online editor from Word, it pastes in all of Words code. Not just web coding, but proprietary MS code, which the wysiwyg doesn't always recognize. I'm guessing the paragraph break is one of those things that's changed enough to be unrecognizable.

Doing it that way, if you've formatted words in italics, or underlined, or with links, those won't come through, but you can get around that by using the html code [i][/i] (only in carets) for example, around italicized words, within the text. Of course, it also loses the paragraph breaks, but you can see it immediately, and just use a hard return there (rather than code) to make it break properly.

Does that make sense?

At first I thought it was the difference between Word 2003 and Word 2007 (I didn't realize my Word was saving everything as .docx files until I ran into this problem), but once I saved the file as .doc and tried cutting and pasting it, I found it was still doing the same thing (which it never used to). I'm just going to start remembering to put an extra hard return between paragraphs when it's something I know I'll eventually end up posting in LJ. It's really only my fic that I want to post online that is effected and that's not much.

You know though, when I think about it, I did mess around some with the line spacing when I started one of my more recent documents. In fact, it might have been the one that's been giving me problems. I wonder if that may have had some effect on what the LJ posting box is seeing as line spacing between paragraphs. I may have to experiment some more. I probably caused this myself without even realizing it and now I'm going to have to try and trace my footsteps. Sigh.

Thanks for your help, Deena. New computer, new programs, so much to get used to!

You're welcome.

It lost the paragraph break when I posted some lorem ipsum for me just now, so it may not be you. It may be that saving as a 2003 doc just takes out anything "special" that would keep it from being read in the older version of Word, rather than everything that makes it different.