dr_pretentious | Minor Formatting Grumble, With Bonus Situational Irony

To get all the last bits of improvement that my old publisher and I made to Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply and Closing Arguments, some of which happened while she formatted them as ebooks, I've found I need to copy the text from pdf, plunk it into Text Edit and strip all its formatting, then plunk it into MS Word, which is what my new publisher needs the book to arrive in. Getting it into standard manuscript format is easy. Going over it paragraph by paragraph so I can restore my occasional use of italics and section breaks is a pain in the tuchis. I concluded that this would actually be a less annoying way to fix the problem than to go over the outdated MS Word version I first submitted to my old publisher, word by word, checking it against the ebook version for changes and updating it.

The ironic thing is, I only have this painstaking process to go through because I submit manuscripts that have already been critiqued by a kickass workshop and that are almost entirely free of sentence-level errors. Drollerie Press asked for no significant revisions, only a sprinkling of minor changes. If I had submitted a less polished manuscript, one that obviously required fixes the moment she decided to accept it, my job would be a lot easier now.

At least everything else is done, so I'll probably still have the Rugosa book out the door Monday or Tuesday.