I wasn't able to do much last night, but I got my read-through done and updated my blog with the new revision of chapter 1. I've lost a quarter of words in that first chapter which probably means I use too many damn words.

I had to run and errand and listened to part of the last chapter. That last fight will need some work. Also when the MC makes a choice, I need to emphasize that she knows (even if she doesn't want to believe it) she can't have her cake and eat it too.

::gulp::

Copyedits have just been dropped on my doorstep.

I'm a'skeered to look.

Yeah, I know it's stupid.

Good luck, Barb.

I finished listening to my last chapter on the way home from work. That chapter really needs work.

Word is starting to irritate me. Why did it change the style in this pasted text? Why isn't it letting me change the style back to normal? Grrrr

Word always irritates me, but I've used it so long it's hard to imagine using anything else. Oh, my essay about Johnny Drama came out in anthology yesterday. Really awesome feeling, although it was totally obvious it was a bunch of poets and me.

There's a lot I like about Word and we have a history (I worked on some software that used to be part of Word, I worked for a company that used to make the spell-checker for Word before Microsoft went internal, I worked on a Word file converter that was licensed to a number of software companies), but this bit where I press on a style button and it flashes to the right style and then reverts back to the wrong one, that sh*t ain't right.

I managed to work through chapter 9, with the cuts and tweaks. I'll be ready for chapter 10 now which will shorten a bit since I'm leaving out a scene, maybe merge into 9. Chapter 11 will be disposed of entirely and replaced.

Styles are the horror story of Word. Embedded things can blow up in your face, and you need to track through each style in the document to see which one is triggering the next one. "OK, remove the blue style." "Don't you mean the red style?" "No! The blue one--you idiot. "

I write in Notepad, then open the file in Word or WordPerfect (depending on the machine I'm on) to run Spellcheck.

I don't know how Word handles the document in memory, but the file format is so complex (before docx) that I can understand how documents can get frelled. Sometimes you could purge problems by doing a "Save As" since the file would be put in linear order unlike doing a "Save" where things are stored in a non-linear manner. (Which I haven't tried, maybe I should)

A good way to unfrell. Select all the contents of the document. Copy it to the clipboard. Exit word completely. Tell it yes you do indeed want to keep the contents of the clipboard available to other applications. Go back into word. Open a blank document if you have not set it to automatically do that on start. Paste the contents into that blank document. Correct formatting that does not carry over properly in the clipboard. Save under name that won't override your old document. Voila comparatively clean version of your doc. Right now I'm seeing problems in a document this may not fix, and I may have to take it over to Open Office for repair.