Jury Duty bonus

Spending all Monday morning trapped in a jury duty waiting room turned out to be an excellent motivation to work on my writing. I spent hours fine-tuning a children's article I started months ago, and got it ready to send out to reviewers. I wasn't the only writer at work, either. Author Charles B. Kastner was there proofing his manuscript for the sequel to his book about a 1928 cross-country footrace, Bunion Derby. Looks like a fun read!

Redirection

Now that my book is in, I've been writing up article ideas I've had in the back of my mind. Today's project was supposed to be Alma Spreckels and sugar crystals. Instead I had an idea for saving money with organizing and whipped it out over the last hour. At least it's all writing!

A Very Rough Draft

Now that my book is in, I'd like to write up some of the great article ideas I had to put off during all that manuscript preparation. Today I sat down to pound out the first one. Boy, it's awful. It's almost embarrassing. But now I have a draft, something I can rethink and revise until I get it right. A bad first draft is the necessary first step towards a brilliant finished product.

Awkward?

I'm also checking over some of the new wording and thinking "Boy, that's awkward." Then I realize it's not the copy editor's writing, it's my own!

copy editing questions

I just got back the copy edited version of my book and am supposed to look over all the changes. The copy editor has made a lot of great catches, but also changed all singular usages of candies that end in s to "an M&M's candy" etc. Can you really not refer to a singular M&M or Skittle? Must do some detective work.

When I write, I like to plug in my headphones and listen to soothing music to help cut out the background noise.  Yesterday, wondering why my ITunes kept opening up to "I Saw Three Ships" (yes, it's Christmas music, but I only have a limited amount of quiet music without lyrics on my computer), I finally realized that the setting was stuck on Repeat One.  I'd been listening one single song for nearly a week and hadn't noticed!  I hope that means I've been concentrating hard on writing.

On Formatting

At various stages in the Candy Experiments drafting process, I think I've gone from Word to Google Docs and back again, with various other stops along the way.  Now that I'm trying to compile experiments into a single Word document, there's all sorts of crazy formatting that's slipped in with the changes.  Hopefully my new Candy template and some shortcut keys will help me straighten it all out, although I have to say that Bullets and Numbering is giving me special trouble today.