Edits for Ebooks

There is that old saying that you can pay a little now, or you can pay a lot later.

I just put my novel, Aurora Rescue, back on Amazon as an ebook. I signed up for their lending service, so I will wait 90 days before I submit it to other ebook sources.

I have noticed that when I read a lot of ebooks, the formatting is less than wonderful. I suspect part of the reason is because of quirks in the auto-format process in MS Word. Note in the sample above (I put this on edit view that allows me to see all the symbols), that there are several paragraphs. Some of them have a little arrow before the sentence starts (see green arrows), which is accomplished by manually striking the Tab key, and some have no arrows (see red arrows) which is a result of the automatic formatting. I suspect that when ebook paragraphs start flush left instead of being indented, it is because the digital file that was submitted included many or all "auto-formatted" paragraphs. Therefore, the spaces before the start of the new paragraphs are not picked up when the manuscript file is converted to an ebook file.

I know for Aurora Rescue, I went through the entire manuscript before I submitted to be sure each paragraph had the little black arrow in front. I also tried to remove any spaces after the closing punctuation of a sentence. (See the orange arrow for an example of a space after the quote marks.)

The above sample is from my newer novel, Family Secrets. Even though it is not being prepared for an ebook yet, I am making an effort as I go to be sure all the formatting is uniform. I am hoping that by "paying a little now," I will have a clean, well-formatted manuscript when I am finished. It will save me some time so I do not have to "pay a lot later" when I get down to my final editing.

Aurora Rescue Now Published

Aurora Rescue has now been published in traditional book format. It is already available on Amazon. It will soon be available at bookstores and on other online retailers.

Contractions.......Or Not

While editing Aurora Rescue, the first novel I completed, I noticed something very interesting. I did not miss the contractions.

To give a little bit of history, when I first started this novel, I received input from both my granddaughter and her mother. The one plea from my daughter-in-law was to please use good grammar. So, even though I have a lot of dialect for some of my period characters, for my main characters, I did my best to avoid contractions.

Contractions are how many of us talk, although regionally, we do not use the same contractions. Contractions are a good way of reducing the number of words for a militant publisher that insists that a manuscript be limited to a certain length based on word count. But, I realized as I edited this book for the umpteenth time that, whether reading it quietly or speaking it out loud, I did not miss the contractions. My brain must have registered the contractions that I normally would have spoken. I was very comfortable with the "will not" instead of the "won't" and "cannot" instead of the "can't."

Now that I re-read Family Secrets, I see that I used a lot of contractions in the dialogue. After all, I have been living in California's central valley most of my adult life and my characters are from the same region. I know how we talk. However, based on the lessons learned from editing Aurora Rescue, I am going back and reviewing Family Secrets to see if I can get rid of some of the contractions.

I will deal with the word count police later.

Civil War Study

I have been reading books from the Civil War era that I believe will be very helpful to me as I write Armitage, even though the bulk of the historical portion of this novel will be set in the Reconstruction period.

Killing Lincoln written by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard dealt mostly with the events surrounding the death of President Lincoln, but the first section also described in detail the final battles of the war that lead up to General Lee surrendering to General Grant. It also brought out the point that Lincoln demanded lenient terms for the surrender. His goal was to heal the woulds of war and reunite the nation.

They Met at Shiloh was a novel written by Phillip Bryant who has been a Civil War re-enactor for about 20 years. It centers on four characters, two from the North and two from the South, all of whom fought in different units during the battle at Shiloh, and all of whom came in contact with each other in one way or another before this battle was over. This book is very detailed, as I am sure all the Civil War battles that are re-enacted are, and I found the detail about the uniforms, the terminology, the logistics and the tactics very interesting.

A Dry Writing Day

No, I am not referring to the weather when I say today was a dry writing day. I am referring to the writing reality that not all days as an author may be spent indulging in the wonderfully creative process of putting words on paper to create a great story. And, since I am one writer who loves to research, a "dry" writing day does not refer to that either. 

Today was dictionary and style manual day.

These four books are sitting beside me today. I usually use the online dictionary when I am in the process of writing. However, when the computer is off, and I need a quick look-up of a word, this is my standard go-to book. I have owned this Webster's Standard American Style Manual for years. (You can tell by the price--I doubt I can find a style manual for that price nowadays.) A lot of people, including many family history writers, like the Chicago style manual, which I found and used online when I was taking law classes. But, this book, for a quick look-up, works well.

The Basic Usage, Vocabulary, and Composition book, copyrighted in 1975, I have had since my early days enrolled in the "Writer's Digest Book Club" (not sure if that is the proper usage -- have not looked it up yet) has some good information. However, today, after I stalled as long as I could, I got busy reading through The Elements of Grammar. It is not exciting reading, but, I must admit, it was more interesting than I thought it would be. You can see in my picture I have my little homemade tabs and my highlighter to draw attention to elements of grammar to which I probably will want to refer in the future.

I know I won't do it, but it would not hurt me to read through this book about every 2-3 months, just to refresh myself on all that good grammar usage that sometimes stumps me when I am in the process of putting words on paper. After all, certain usages just are not comfortable to me, and I have to look them up every time. One, for example, is that it is not intuitive to me to ALWAYS put a period inside of quote marks, even for "short phrases." Yet, there it is on page 103. Why is it that I can only put the end-of-sentence punctuation outside the quote marks when "it is a question"? Or, for some reason, it's okay if it is "an exclamation point"!

Don't ask me. I just pack plenty of water and chocolate and buckle down to double-check all that dry style and usage business when I am in the final stages of editing one of my books.

Missed the Mark?

          I hate it when I have completed a great story, which is my humble opinion about my novel, Family Secrets, only to feel like I have missed the mark.
          I am referring particularly to my antagonist, Gerald, my heroine Jennie's unfaithful husband who is deployed to Afghanistan. The focus of this novel is on Jennie ferreting out the secrets in the lives of her mother and maternal grandparents and using the lessons of their experiences to help her work through her own challenges. One of her challenges is her husband.
          However, in the process of developing Grandpa Mike's character, I not only drew upon my own husband's Vietnam War experiences, I did some research on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as it applies to Vietnam War veterans. Some of my more current sources also covered the challenges of combat stress, PTSD and concussion, or mild Traumatic Brain Injury, as it applies to those returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
          That brings me back to Gerald in Family Secrets. He is an unsympathetic character by reason of his poor choices made prior to his most recent deployment to the war zone. However, the more I learn about the challenges facing our most recent returning combat veterans, the more I wish I had written a book with a focus on them. Greater understanding needs to be shared, not only with the nature of combat stress, but also the challenges of those family members left behind. What can veterans and their family expect, and how do those families adjust to and work together with the returning combat veteran to help everyone in the family return to the normalcy of civilian life?
          I have decided to bring this subject a little more in focus in future books in the GOLDEN OAKS series.

Off to First Publisher

Family Secrets was submitted to the first publisher on my list this past Wednesday. We will see what happens. I am not working on any additional submissions until next week because it is time for me to catch up on everyday life.

During the editing process -- oh, how I dread the editing process -- I worked 12-14 hour days. This was after I already had someone edit the manuscript. Unfortunately, I rewrote some sections and reworded a lot of sentences, so there were still many opportunities for editing.

Part of my issue is, I like sentences with dashes, such as the one above. That is pretty much a no-no. Yet, I like the cadence with the dashes better than using the separation with commas. Especially when I am writing in a first-person voice, I want to emphasize the choppy way some people talk. Dashes do it for me better than using the plain ol' comma we use to separate phrases in a complex sentence.

My editing teeth-grinders:

1. I was surprised how many times I left out the comma or question mark to finish a dialog sentence enclosed in quote marks. It was probably caused by earlier edits to that sentence. I just hope I caught them all.

2. I do my best to choose last names for my characters that do not end with the letter "s" because I always get confused with how to handle the plural and the possessive. Even as I read how to do it in the style manual, I get confused. Is it Jones's? Jones'? Then, when there two Joneses......

3. The proper usage of affect and effect always gets me, even when I have the dictionary open to the definitions as I write. I will figure it out, then when I read over the sentence later, I am still not sure I got it right.

4. The lie/lay and laid/layed/lain usage is always a quandary for me. I avoid those words like the plague when I can.

Other than that, I am pretty good at grammar. When I am editing, I still need to print out my manuscript in order to catch a lot of errors. But, for good, bad or whatever, the manuscript is on its way.