If you are not a Game of Thrones fan, please ignore this paragraph. If you are a fan, you are without doubt watching the ‘House of the Dragon’ prequel, but were your eyes as sharp as ‘eagle eyed’ Judith’s during this weeks episode? King Viserys Targaryen was onboard a ship, in rough seas, taking his daughter, princess Rhaenyra to the Isle of Driftmark where he intended to speak with Lord Corlys Vearyon to propose a marriage between Princess Rhaenyra and Lord Corlys’s son, Laenor. There was a shot of the Princess in the bow of the boat with an island in the background. The island was on view for about 2 seconds. “That’s the Mount (meaning St Michael’s Mount)” Judith said. I hadn’t noticed, but shortly afterwards the scene depicted was of the Kings carriage making it’s way over the causeway to St Michael’s Mount. Sorry, I mean the Isle of Driftmark! She is one very observant girl.
So, back to our publishing journey. This has been both a very exciting, and a very frustrating week. Exciting because we received our manuscript back from copy editing/proofreading; it was a big step taken on the road to getting a real book in our hands. Mind you, all we had to do now was go through it checking all the suggested changes and either agree to them or ignore them. This is where the frustration set in. The help video provided by the publisher suggested only to use a late version of Word, or Google Docs, to make the changes. Well, on my ancient laptop I use Libre Office but apparently .odt files can cause trouble in the typesetting stage, so Google Docs it was to be then, ‘simples, no?’ No, indeed. Google Docs is not an application we are familiar with but as ever in this publishing process, we were learning on the job. Importing the word doc (into Google Docs) took forever and was then very slow to operate and I had no idea why. Was it something to do with the internals of my laptop? Was it the Wi-Fi speed (my man-cave works off a Wi-Fi extension)? Who knows. Speed tests were run and all was normal. As it was cold in the man-cave (way to early in the year to turn the heating on, although it would be cheaper now than in two weeks time!) and the sun was shining into the living room at the front of the house. We set up the camping table in there and connected the laptop to the main Wi-Fi and also to the big telly. This enabled Judith to sit on the sofa whilst easily being able to read the manuscript on the TV. All went well for three chapters and then a message popped up saying something about comments limit had been reached and to make a copy. I failed to make a note of the message and clicked on the ‘make a copy’ button. And nothing, the message disappeared and the system just froze. Eventually I managed to shut the document down, but it struggled to reload and then it froze again. Time to abandon ship – it was dinner time anyway – have a drink and a rethink.
The following day (Saturday) I used a borrowed laptop (that had Word on it) and decided to plug an Ethernet cable directly into it from the router to bypass the Wi-Fi. The document loaded and I managed to page down to where we had got to yesterday. I needed to know what the message had said so clicked on ‘accept’ for the next change and sure enough, up popped the message again. Taking a photo of it, I then retreated to the man-cave to google it on my laptop. It seems that use of edit comments and the agreeing/ignoring of them, bloats the document and when you create a copy you can start again from where you left off i.e. all your changes are saved. Printing off instructions, it was back to the sunny living room to try and make a copy. This time I closed the message window and used the file drop-down menu to make the copy and it all worked. Yippee. It was now a case of turning on Planet Rock on the radio and resume working my way through the manuscript. Judith had trusted me to a) solve the problem and b) make the corrections on my own as she was visiting her dad (that visit turned into a big drama, but that is for another time, or book?). Most of the corrections were just correcting grammar or improving sentence construction but, as agreed with Judith, I highlighted three suggestions that needed a joint decision, which we altered on Sunday whilst we completed the remaining chapters. The next task was to save a copy back into Word. All these things are easy when you know how; thank goodness for google!
Judith has also spent many hours preparing her Instagram Posting Plan, choosing photographs and thinking carefully about the captions and hashtags to go with them. We have also prepared some reels for posting, beginning with our ‘rap reel’ and more are in the planning stage. Our plan is for you to learn about us and our book and we sincerely hope you enjoy them. Then, just as you think you are getting things under control, a friend says you need to put the rap reel on TikTok. Great! And how the hell do I do that? Time to interrogate google again, I guess.
With luck, by next weeks post, the Final Edit of the manuscript will have been sent back to the publishers for typesetting, the final stage before publication. Watch this space (and Instagram, of course).
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