book update:the good thing about editing while tired...

My sleep schedule is completely whacked.

It's 9am, and I have yet to go to sleep. This vacation, it's been quite normal for me to get up in the mid- to late-afternoon hours. I've become a total vampire, sleeping during most of the day, typing and futzing during the evening, walking up Namsan at night, then showering and continuing to type and futz until well past dawn.

Some highlights of the manuscript editing:

1. It's tedious work, converting essays from un-indented Internet paragraph format (with spaces between paragraphs) to "normal," indented text. I've performed the same sets of keystrokes hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

2. A book's page count depends greatly on font size when the manuscript is around 95,000 to 100,000 words. I'm using the Palatino font for the interior text. At 12 points, the book originally weighed in at about 400 pages. I can get it down to around 300-some pages-- including the extra essays-- using smaller font sizes.

3. Many of the essays are so short that they can fit inside a single page. This makes them look ridiculously puny, almost as if I were publishing a book of poetry. I'm thinking about altering the book's size to 5" x 8". That would significantly thicken the book, but text would make a bit more sense, spilling over onto extra pages.

4. It's not easy to go back to an old essay and start removing all the vulgarity that made it halfway interesting in the first place.

5. Even (perhaps especially) for Mac, Microsoft products bite. I'm using MS Word for Mac, and it's not always the friendliest beast.

6. The good thing about editing while tired is that you tend to care less about chopping something out of your ms. For most of us, excising a line or a paragraph can feel like self-amputation. When you're half-zonked, that's not the case.

And that's all the news for the moment. I'm off to bed. At 9:15am.


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