Very Excited about the Writing Project!
Good morning. This is me. There’s not too much time left – about 20 minutes.We’ve taken our shower, gotten the medicine, and packed the bag, but we’re going to have to leave early to make sure the car is warmed up proper. Rich did this a couple of times yesterday to make sure we didn’t freeze up or lose the battery.
Today it’s like -2 degrees, but it’s supposed to feel like -19 degrees … the wind is at 12 mph, but I’m not seeing a wind chill number. It’s supposed to warm up to like 30 tomorrow, but it’s going to be about 80% chance of snow. Ahh wind chill is about -15 degrees. I’d like to hear from Sister that the center was closed, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.
I think it’s about time to wake up Rich … I feel bad I’ve got to wake up Missy, but there’s not much option there. Hold on.
Hmm, sweetie bear says that he doesn’t need his car done, but then now he’s saying he’s going to start mine so I can relax. We tried to tell him that wasn’t necessary and that we could help ourselves too, but he’s like “No-no I’ll do that.” I don’t know how on Earth I landed someone this nice. It will give me a little more time to write … WooHOO!
I don’t know how long it’s going to take to tell this part … maybe just a few moments, but I wanted to say first off that after I wrote the last entry on Saturday, I began a project that I’d started before, but then had to start over again. I’m so pleased with the results.
I decided that I was going to make a serious attempt to get the first book or two done in time for giving it to the boys for Christmas. The first book is short, because there is only 5 months, but we did that and got started on the second book which is 2004 and a full 12 chapters. I think somewhere in here very soon we’re going to the part where the entries get longer because AOL had upped the characters from 2000 to 25,000. I had started saying I wouldn’t use all that because I’d lose the few readers that I had, but truth be told it wasn’t long before I really got into some long serious writing.
Yesterday beside Book 1 – 2003, I got two chapters done with Book 2 – 2004. I’m really, really happy about that, though I know I have a lot further to go. I have the better part of 5 more books to do WITH the lengthy ones coming up. I’m so happy with how things are going. My goal is to have printed copies for a few people like Rich, me, and the boys. I don’t know how we’re going to bound it, but it’s going to be their Christmas present. Well, that and probably about $50. I really wish it could be more, but that’s about as far as we can go right now.
Rich was very helpful in that he talked to me about the project for bits of time when I needed to express some of my excitement. He teases me about being able to pay for the new house. We’re all for that! I am so excited that we’re doing this and just getting it out there. I have no idea of how boring or exciting it’s going to be, because there’s so much from the start to finish. I know that sometimes we get into the obsessive stuff so I’m worried that’s going to be a loss of time or others’ interest, but the thing has to be about first pleasing us and then the world. Things happened as they did and that will be that.
The process that we took up was to start from August 2003 … and we did that by copying one month at a time from the view edit screen of blogger, and then we edited for the obvious errors – the kind of thing on Word where there’s a squiggly red or green line. And, then we went back to the start of the chapter and read it through and edited it once more. We didn’t take out ANY content, but sometimes if a sentence needed some help with a word or two or punctuation then we would make that change. I felt really good with the speed. I mean it takes a long time, but there was visually good progress.
There was something else really, really neat that happened. I’d remembered seeing something about a table of contents maker from one of my ribbons on Word. I hadn’t tried it yet, but I was thinking it would be a really nice idea. We’d already done some work in changing formats, so that everything was Cambria and everything was 12-pitch and everything was black. This really helped the overall appearance and credibility of the project. But, the part I really didn’t know until I finally found the Table of Contents thing under references was how extremely easy it was to convert the project into an excellent table.
Because everything went from AOL to blogger, we lost the pictures at least now at the beginning, but we maintained the headings so that … all we had to do was press like two buttons and the Table of Contents thing went through and grabbed every on of those titles and made it into its own reference page. I couldn’t have been more ecstatic. It did an excellent job and it looks SOOO great! And, there was one more advantage. It had a button to update, so after we checked and edited and pages sometimes changed, we only had to press one button and it went through and made the correct changes on the table. AND, it did the same when we had gone back to check the format of the titles so the right words were capitalized – it went straight into changing the same on the table. Man … the program is just phenomenal.
The one other note is that it helped to be able to add in project headings and foot notes and making sure the separate chapters we were saving started with the right page numbers and that when we combined the chapters for that particular section we could with a few buttons change all the page numbers both on the individual pages and on the Table of contents. It also did this as we went along so that we found in the later parts of our work after having found this system that we could write one at add one item at a time and then update and it would keep a direct running tab on the sections to be listed in the Table of Contents.
I just couldn’t be more enthused. I think that in general the whole thing looks very professional and as I read one chapter at a time I’m actually pretty happy with what we were writing. But, then more on that later, because now it’s time to post and skedaddle out the door … Be taking care – and obviously looking forward to some really nice days off to produce on this project!
posted by Ann Marie @ 12/22/2008 06:57:00 AM
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