I'm going on vacation for a couple of weeks, so no posts until I return in early October. If you're lucky, I might also put a few pictures. ;) Since I'll be driving to Tampa, taking a week-long cruise with the family to the Western Caribbean, driving up for a few days to take in scenic St. Mary's, GA, and then jaunting up to Decatur, GA for the Moonlight & Magnolias conference, there will be many pictures worth seeing (unless I forget my camera. I always forget something when traveling...)
Yes, I know, for security reasons it's best not to post one's vacation plans online. But in case any thieves happen to stop on by my blog, I'd like to point out my two roommates who are happily staying home and taking care of my vicious attack cats while I'm gone. Vicious, I tell you.
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The cruise, by the way, is a family get-together that's been in the works since both my brother and I graduated college. I'm very excited - we've been saving up for this for years. Family is something which that has always been important to me, and adding exotic locations to the mix just makes the trip better. Also dragging a friend along (I really had to twist her arm) to go with me on the excursions and to give my parents and my brother and his girlfriend some couple time.
Wish me luck at the Moonlight & Magnolias conference!
And in a random aside, I just got back my results from a contest. All my life, I've been trained to use two spaces between sentences. Apparently, this is not what the publishing industry is looking for. So if you've come from teachers like mine who have drilled the sentence-space-space-sentence rule into you, time to put that aside. From now on, if you're publishing, sentence-space-sentence, single spaces only.
Contest entry fee: $20
Waiting for 2 months: 200XP (kudos if you get the reference)
107,000 words worth of spacing to revise: priceless.
Maybe it was just that judge? In fact, if you'd like to share your spacing expertise, please do. I'd love an excuse not to respace the entire novel - but I'll also accept a mandate explaining why it is necessary to do so.
A couple things:
ReplyDelete1) "which that" - I see what you did there.
2) From what I've been told, it's because Word processors automatically create a bigger space after periods. Similarly, indentations should be the width of one lowercase 'm' according to a graphic designer with a love of type whom I know (tabs are leftover from the age of typewriters). It still seems small to me, so sometimes I do 0.2" indents instead of 0.1" indents on a Times New Roman-sized serif font.
3) What contest was this that you got disqualified or lost or something because of extra spaces?
Also, have fun on vacation!
ReplyDeleteOh, that's interesting! I did not know that about the auto-spacing. That makes a lot more sense as to why I would need to fix it.
ReplyDeleteAnd I had a lot of fun on my vacation. ;) Thanks!