Run – Connecting The Dots

Connecting The Dots

Can I make a suggestion? Never write a book that is 450 pages long! Also, while you are paying attention, let me add, never write a book that has centuries of footnotes! Yep, writing this book has been a trip!

Not really being in charge of what needed to be written, at least not on a conscious level, I just kept writing what came to mind, like pouring milk out of a pail that just kept refilling. It was a messy process just trying to keep ahead of expanding content.

When I started working with editors, I found that they preferred Word to work on my manuscript. I had started the book in a program called Scrivener which was really helpful for a piece with so much research behind it. But switching back and forth between the documents my editors produced in Word, with mine in Scrivener proved too much for me. So about 4 years ago, I pulled the document out of Scrivener placed it in Word, and discovered (not for the first time) that I really should have taken a tutorial on how to create footnotes in scrivener before using that feature.

This penchant I have for jumping into projects full throttle, knowing nothing about the product (but trusting that I will be able to figure it out along the way, has bitten me in the arse before (but somehow, I keep doing it …). Did I mention that the book has over 250 footnotes? Or that I am dyslexic, and that tiny letters and numbers are VERY hard to copy without reversing or scrambling the order? (Yes, lots of fun!) Not to mention that I hadn’t created a footnote in 40 years. Speaking of which did you know that there are different requirements for footnoting different media? OMG!

So, I migrate my book out of Scrivener only to discover that I had not entered the footnotes correctly in Scrivener, and now none of them are embedded in the document. Meaning, none of them transfer with it! I had to reenter all the footnotes, some of them being four years old at that point and some I couldn’t find, (not surprising given both my lack of experience with footnotes and my dyslexia!). This meant that after all my hard work, I found that now I had to rewrite parts of the book.

Check Back Next Tuesday for more in this series …