This morning I woke at 6:00 from a stressful dream that involved getting engaged to a man who wouldn't speak to me and swaping places in a speeding car with Jami Jinkins, because she was driving and people were trying to run us off the road.
It was still night, yet I know it was 6:00 and time to get up.
It was hard.
I told myself I could sleep later. That if I kept sleeping now, I would probably only get more sleepy and I'd regret missing all the productive hours. So I got up, made myself peppermint tea and read some of the HTML book (after my Bible, of course.) I did the examples in HTML. My browser wouldn't really display them so it was hard to check my work, even the stuff that looked just like the example. Not sure what's going on there. Then I ran the grammar check through "Across the Distance" - yeah, I know I should have done that before but I forgot it existed. It's a lovely tool despite having to run it through all the stuff it gets wrong or you want to keep. Then I found every "and" in the entire book and made sure the comma was in the right place. It took all morning for those two tasks and I scarecely got through before I was falling asleep in the chair. I lay (whoops, I mean 'lied') down for a few minutes and only got dizzy for my troubles. I loaded "Swing" only my kindle to look over. I helped clean the house. I started laundry since I'm down to wearing my "Lion King" production shirt and Christmas socks...
I planted the sprouts. I tried to organize the rest of my life with varying degrees of success. It seems I'm waiting on lots of things before I can go forward. Right now I can really only do the editing and the more I review and remember grammar rules, the more paranoid I get. How will I know when it's ready?
Should I take "Across the Distance" down for minor edits? What do I do???
I don't know. I'll keep learning and improving but eventually I'm just going to have to allow the fact that my first novels aren't going to be as good as my last. Still, I do want to be as professional as I can.
Speaking of which.
Pop and I have a new brainstorm to get a external hard drive. On this external hard drive, I'm going to locate and store a novel organizing program, the best editing program I can download, and Grandma the same graphics/layout program that the publisher used for "Secret of Sentarra" - wish I would have known that then. So when this hard drive comes in the mail and we manage to get all these programs onto it, I'm going to have a novel-factory and HOPEFULLY by then I'll have figured out a good system so I won't have to do things like - edit a book again, and then reformat it for kindle and then figure out what size the cover has to be NOW that I've cut out the first chapter... la la la.
Now. If I can just figure out the best and quickest way to become a good editor.
But do I focus all day on one aspect, like editing? Or do I edit one book and begin plotting another and work on formatting a third? Which would be more efficient? Which would be diverse enough to keep my brain from going on auto-pilot? I dunno....
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