The writing report

[annathepiper]

Some more reformatting work done today as I went over the Prelude and Chapter 1 of LD and put them into manuscript form; I figured I'd do well to just get used to writing in that sort of format so that I wouldn't have to worry as much about formatting stuff properly later. Also sent around the FB combined file to cafiorello and princessheacock, and fixed up my working drafts folder.

Writing time got somewhat truncated today as solarbird and I went out to look at houses, but I did in fact get both Real and Fanfic writing done this evening.

Trilogy work:
Written tonight: 506
Chapter 1 total: 830
Lament of the Dove total: 4,806

Iterations:
Written tonight: 307
Chapter 6 total: 949
Story total: 21,994

Now, off to bed. Zzzzzzzzz.

Comments

[princessheacock.livejournal.com]

A reason to start out writing in different chapters : Loading time on Word.

As the filesize gets larger the program takes longer to open it.

[annathepiper]

Yes, I know! And I mean, well, it stands to reason; I DID say the file is huge. ;)

Now I've also figured out how to still split the thing into different chapters and restart the page count in the proper place in each file, too. So I am going to go ahead and do that for the thing I'm working on now.

[wrog]

So is there actually a point to using something like Word for doing manuscripts (i.e., where you can't/shouldn't be doing rich text anyway)? I'm genuinely curious.

Plain text files are much smaller than .doc files. Emacs can do word counts and spellchecks just fine. And if you really care about load time, then vi is the obvious winner. :)

Yeah, I know,... Editor Wars... religion...

[annathepiper]

Well, the first immediately relevant point is that in the manuscript formatting guidelines I've seen, as well as in the formatted manuscript sample that mizkit shared with me, if you want something done in italics they want you to underline it. So that's something I can't do in a text editor. Also, I know how to do headers in Word; I don't know how to do headers in anything else. And I'll be needing page numbers, the title of the manuscript, and my name in said headers.

I don't really give a shit about load time, and will quite cheerfully compose prose in vi if I'm not at my own personal computer and telnetting into my account. Emacs, however, is not something I've ever comfortably learned. I don't like the complicated command set and having to remember which combination of four keystrokes I have to do in order to do something.

When I'm at home on my own computer, though, I prefer to actually compose in Word. Mostly because it's easier for me to edit text in a word processor than it is in a text editor.