5/8/05: It's a completed manuscript!

[davidlevine]

Editing hours: 69.5 | Since last entry: 6.9 | Percent complete: 100%

Final manuscript word count: 124,247
Final manuscript page count: 584
Synopsis word count: 3460

It took me over an hour to browbeat Microsoft Word into formatting it properly (why, oh why, doesn't find and replace with paragraph styles impose all of the style's font settings?) and over five hours to bash out the synopsis.

On the synopsis, what I intended to do was a light edit on the synopsis I'd written for the Lupton contest last year. What I wound up doing was just sitting down and telling the whole story from the beginning, one paragraph per chapter, trying to get in as much emotion as possible without running too long or losing any important plot points. What this banzai first draft lacks in panache, I hope, it makes up in verve. I'm not as concerned about the synopsis as I would be if I weren't sending out a complete manuscript at this point.

I looked at the manuscript occasionally while writing the synopsis, but mostly I just re-told the story from memory. In some cases I simplified, combined, or omitted incidents to make it smoother; in a few cases I admit that I wrote what I wanted to have happen in a scene instead of what's actually on the page. It's a lot like the synopsis of Les Miserables in the booklet of the CD of the musical of the novel... it bears a resemblance to the original in the same way that a postage stamp bears a resemblance to an enormous painting like "Whistler's Mother" or "Sunday on La Grande Jatte." But, with luck, I've captured the flavor of the original -- the same shampoo in a smaller bottle.

And so Remembrance Day is done... by which I mean I am letting it go, rather than that I feel I'm really finished with it. I would still like to rewrite a couple key scenes near the end, where Jason reveals all to Sienna and, for some inexplicable reason, she doesn't kill him. I would still like to raise Jason's fanatacism in the months leading up to Remembrance Day, to make him kill with his eyes open instead of by accident. Clarity's chapters still need more description. The aliens should still be more alien.

Nonetheless, it goes in the mail tomorrow morning. And I'm not going to touch it again unless I get an editor saying they will buy it if I make certain changes, or it's many years from now and I've decided to revise this old trunked novel based on what I've learned from the many bestsellers since.

And so to bed.

Comments

[allanh.livejournal.com]

To whom are you submitting the manuscript, and in what order?

Enquiring minds want to know!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Huge enormous congratulations!

[eleri.livejournal.com]

WOOHOOO!

[shawn-scarber.livejournal.com]

Ah, now that's a pretty picture. Congratulations.

[crazysoph.livejournal.com]

Congratulations, sir!

A teacher of mine used to say, "Art is never finished, only abandoned." That seemed very sad at the time, but I think I understand better now.

When do I get to see something new from you? *ducks quickly away*

Crazy(They don't call it "moving on" for nothing!)Soph

[davidlevine]

It'll be nothing but short stories from me for the rest of this year. I'll send you some of those when they're ready, if you like.

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

Yay! Hoping to find your baby on the shelves of my neighborhood bookseller.

[davidlevine]

Me too! :-)

Word neep

[djonn]

(why, oh why, doesn't find and replace with paragraph styles impose all of the style's font settings?)

Two possibilities.

First, if you're running a find/replace operation on the paragraph-mark, Word will dutifully replace all the paragraph marks, but it won't pay attention to any formatting that may have been manually applied to parts of the paragraph. (This can be a Good Thing, as otherwise you might lose things like underlined text that you've applied manually.)

Second, the Word template engine will only actually reformat a paragraph mark (and thereby the paragraph it's attached to) if you actually tell it to do so -- especially if you've been tinkering with the style's characteristics . . . and "Replace" doesn't necessarily count as "update". Broadly speaking, there are two signals to which Word pays attention in this regard -- the checkbox in Tools/Templates & Add-Ins for "automatically update document styles", and the act of selecting a paragraph (including the paragraph mark) and pressing either Ctrl+Space or Ctrl+Q. Ctrl+Space zaps out all manually applied character formatting, while Ctrl+Q zaps out all manually applied paragraph formatting, in either case leaving the text in the style's default value.

Re: Word neep

[davidlevine]

I understand all that. What I was doing was searching for a certain text format (font, color, etc.) and replacing with the desired paragraph style. But when you do this you do not have the option of "Reapply the formatting of the style to the selection" like you do when you manually select a new style for the paragraph. So the resulting paragraphs had the new underlying style and the new font, but the old size and color.

I wound up doing a long, long series of [F3][Ctrl-Shift-S][Enter][s][Enter] (repeat find, select the style menu, press Enter to reapply the current style, select "reapply the formatting of the style", press Enter to complete the operation). And with the long reach to the F3 key I couldn't do this without glancing at the keyboard, so the whole process was very tiring on the eyes as well as the hands.

Re: Word neep

[djonn]

Argh. I should have known I was underestimating your Word-neep literacy....

Hmmm.

Depending on the exact nature of the text you were dealing with (and with benefit of hindsight), two more thoughts:

One -- given the volume of replace operations, that might have been a good candidate for creating a macro, maybe with Word's "record macro" feature.

Two -- I wonder if you'd have been better off defining a character style rather than a paragraph style for that particular material. It sounds to me as if what got you in trouble was that you were replacing text formatting with paragraph formatting, rather than text formatting with text formatting....

Re: Word neep

[davidlevine]

I was working around a limitation of the little Windows CE device I use for writing, which is that it doesn't have styles, by color-coding the chapter headers, date and place headers, etc. I wanted to find all the green paragraphs and make them Heading 1, all the red paragraphs and make them Date Header, etc. So I was, indeed, replacing text formatting with paragraph formatting, but that was only because the paragraphs were all Normal.

It would have been a good idea to create a macro but I didn't remember Word had such a feature...

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Congratulations!

[channe.livejournal.com]

Congratulations. When you sell it, I'll buy it. :)

[davidlevine]

Thanks! I'll hold you to that! :-)

[mkhobson.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! Confetti is sprinkled!

M

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Yay!

[davidlevine]

Thanks! Love the icon.

[sallytuppence.livejournal.com]

Yes!!! Congratulations!

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

Woo! That's looking good! Like large piles of money, I'm sure I'll never have that many pages of my own. Good luck!

So...what's next? :)

[davidlevine]

What's next? First, rest. At least a week with no writing. Then I'm going back to short stories for the rest of this year. After that novel #2, a fantasy set in an alternate WWII, which will require a lot of research.

And don't be so sure you'll never have that many pages of your own. All you have to do is start writing and keep writing, and those pages will pile up.

[scarlettina.livejournal.com]

Congratulations, David! manymore where thisone came from!

[davidlevine]

Thankyouverymuch.

[snippy]

Grrreat!

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

Mazal tov! I hope it has an easy journey to publication!

[davidlevine]

Ken ayina hora! Ptoo!