A new couple moved into the village and I smiled when I met them for the first time. They asked me the usual questions, then my name.
"Glynis, Glynis Smy" I responded.
They had obviously heard of me and delighted me by saying, "Oh you are the author, you live near the vineyards".
It was on the tip of my tongue to point out,that I was an ex nurse,who had self-published two poetry books, but no I thought. No...yes I AM that author.
My ego boosted itself all the way home,on cloud 9 !!
. . . . . . . .~~~~~~~
Many years ago I decided to learn to type. It was something that I did not do as a nurse, and I felt would help me in the future. I was taught to add double spacing after a full stop and comma.
I have been reading that it is frowned upon in some publishing quarters, so decided to investigate further. This is what I found:
Cameron Chapman:
I'm a copyeditor and I would beg everyone to use ONE space after a period. If you check newer style manuals, particularly the Chicago Manual of Style (for the U.S.), they specify one. The primary reason that two spaces used to be standard was because of monospace fonts (courier) on typewriters. It supposedly made it easier to read if there were two spaces between sentences since everything else was spaced exactly the same. It created a sort of "mental break".
Since copyeditors have to take out all those double-spaces before manuscripts go to the printer and we generally have to turn on the "track changes" feature in Word, even auto-replacing all those double-spaces with single-spaces creates a ton of extra work on both the copyeditor's end and the author's/editor's end. All those tracked changes come up with a comment and are marked in red in the manuscript. You can see how that would just create a practically unmanageable amount of clutter on the page.
So now I am retraining my brain.
2 Comments:
This sounds like a good topic for a blog. How do you handle the self publishing issue. Are you any less published if you self publish? No. So why do we feel like we have to even mention it? Are we ashamed? Why? If some uppity publishing house or agent has the bad taste to reject us, is that our problem? I say no. You were right not to mention the self-publishing.
Thanks for the great tips you left on my blog. You're the only one, so far, who has answered all my questions.
Just passing by to thank you for the comment on my blog and for the warm thoughts. Apologies for the delay of reply as I just got home from my mom's. I am bit better now.
Post a Comment