Okay, so in keeping with the notion that everything takes longer, I’m almost but not quite there with the Invictus duology.
A) Still proofing the first book, should finish that today, after which I’ll immediately discard the drafts I currently have and send it to myself again as an ebook and order another paper copy.
I found out something important! If you drop the font size from 12 to 11, and you do that by changing the font in one paragraph and hitting the “update Normal Style to match current selection,” then oops! you can lose all kinds of formatting including italics.
This matters A LOT, because in Invictus, it’s not just the ship’s name and occasional emphasized words that are italicized. This is a world where people send each other the equivalent of text messages all the time, and all of those are italicized rather than in quote marks, and wow, does it look completely awful and weird if the italics aren’t there. This was just the paperback version, which came out too long in Times 12, so I dropped it to Times 11, which got the number of pages to something sensible, but as I say, serious bad stuff happened with accidental removal of italics.
Fortunately, this did not do a thing to the copy on my laptop or most of the flashdrives, just to the version on the hard drive at work, from which I was loading the paperback file to KDP and therefore that’s the only file where I messed up everything in the Normal style. I now have a perfectly fine paperback version with all the italics correct. But from now on I’m going to remember to be cautious with the “update style” function.
B) Finished with major revisions to the second book, which I’m sending to a proofreader now, which is to say, in a few minutes. Serious tweaking has happened throughout both books. I hope I’m done with that now, with just minor tweaking to come. And endless proofreading, after which no doubt a few of you will point out various typos that I missed, and thank you for doing that, but I sure hope no one catches much.
C) Finished the Cruisie duology I was reading, so that was great fun and I’ll post comments later this week.
D) You know what’s handy? I’ve been putting off getting a new couch for literally years, and now I don’t care if the kittens climb up the back of the couch. Someday I will get a new couch, but not this year. Also, ever since getting the robot vacuum cleaner — still love it btw — I’ve been putting most of the chairs upside down on the table to give the vacuum cleaner access to the floor under the table, and you know what makes a cute jungle gym for kittens?
They aren’t showing huge desire to go outside, so I’ve been putting off letting them on the deck or out in the yard. I’m very certain little Magdalene, above, could still get through the trellis that keeps puppies from falling off the deck, and basically I just haven’t wanted to risk it. I need to get some kitten treats and teach them to come when called, which will provide a helpful line of defense against getting too exploratory. I also need to ask my mother to come sit on the deck and keep her eyes on Maximillian while I keep and eye on Magdalene, because I don’t want to look away from one kitten and lose track of the other.
AFTER Invictus: Captive is locked on KDP — September 11th — I will have time for all that. Until then, I expect proofing, proofing, proofing.
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Yay for finishing things! And for kitten pictures :)
I’ve been wading into using styles to format this year, so I’m hardly an expert, but one of the things I picked up is (at least in Word) linking styles – so you if you do italics as a style rather than just adding them directly, you can set that style to be “Normal Style + italics” and then updating “Normal Style” will just update the base font rather than killing the italics.
…I can’t actually imagine doing that while writing, honestly, but since what I’m doing is typesetting an existing text, it’s just (a lot of) hideously involved find-and-replace to get all of the formatting managed by styles so I can play around with the whole typeset without losing any formatting.
Ailis, I started learning about styles a year or two ago and I know how to do italics as a style, but as you say, it’s unbearable to deal with italics that way as you actually write. I also know how to search for italics, so I guess I could manage a find-and-replace. But in this case, the easiest thing by a mile was just to throw away the bad version and recreate a new paperback file with correct italics from the original ebook file. I think it’s fine, looking at the preview — and I ordered another copy to confirm.