rolanni: (walk in the snow)
[personal profile] rolanni
...They hover for a moment, then they fall on past.*

We got up early-ish in anticipation of the snow. Steve made a wonderful potato-and-sausage breakfast, put the towels in to wash, fed the birds, and started baking bread. My contribution to domestic productivity being the appreciative consumption of breakfast, folding the towels when they were dry, and alphabetizing the hundreds of tracking slips associated with the Great Eidolon Mailing. Those chores done, Hexapuma and I retired to the living room, I to read Fledgling, he to produce Sleep Rays.

Mozart is on the bed, also engaged in Sleep Ray production, while Scrabble is in Steve's office, chaperoning Win Ton and Theo.

It is, as I type, 2 degrees above zero(F) and snowing. We're told to expect on the order of 18 inches of snow -- a number that has remained disturbingly steady for the last 24 hours. On the one hand, I sure could use a snow-day tomorrow. On the other hand, I really would like it if the lights stayed on.

I did go back and plant that hook in Fledgling which added a handful of words -- nothing to signify.

As I'm going through the manuscript, I find that, not only is the spacing is Utterly Borked throughout, but the fonts skip from one to another, random as lambs in the springtime. Not best pleased with Open Office 3.0, me. I suppose, in some ways, my typewriter consciousness has finally caught up with me. On a typewriter -- here's a picture of a machine remarkably like the one I learned to type on for those of you too young to recall "typewriters."

With a typewriter, I say, one sets the line spacing by means of a ratchet. You may vary the line spacing within the document by manipulating the ratchet, but once the spacing is set for, say, double-space, it stays that way until you change it. None of this single, double, space-and-a-half at whim nonsense. I have always treated a word processor like an absurdly complex typewriter. I set my parameters -- in the case of this particular manuscript, double spaced, inch-round margins, Arial font (I know, I know, but it's easy for me to read) -- and I expect them to stay that way. I am not at all pleased to find that Evil Gremlins get into the file while it's closed and play skittles with the product.

I don't want to have to set paragraph styles every dern time I go to a new paragraph. I. Just. Want. To. Type. And to have what I type remain as I typed it, until I decide to change or delete it. This seems so simple and basic that it's Even More Infuriating when it doesn't work.

Ah, well... Today's task is the fast-read. After I pull the Brilliant Resolutions to those two plot-points out of my hat, then's the time to spell-check, fix the fracking formatting and put the book on a bus to our editor.

Where I hope it will arrive in readable condition.

---------
*Rachel's Song, James McMurtry

Date: 2008-12-27 06:37 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] anisosynchronic.livejournal.com
(Regarding word processors.... they're all lame these days. Word makes incredible messes when it crashes (the sight of 43 recovered windows reopened and the extension put on some of them being .asd, is something I wish up people I dislike... put tables into tables and do somethign in the table in the table and then do control z and control y too quickly and Word can get extremely unhappy.... )and believes that compatibility is somethat that belongs maybe on on match.com perhaps. Open Office has quirks and no sane draft mode (space on the display for page top and bottom margins is not usually usefully when attempting to write and being more concerned about content than format while writing....) WordPerfect decided some years ago to turn into an appalling bad copy of Word.

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