On Trials and Tribs of Technology

What I'm reading: The Horsemaster's Daughter by Susan Wiggs; More GH entries

What I'm writing: Chapter 22 again (finally! after a week of edits)

After sending my final edits for Starting Over to my editor, I thought I'd be ready to get back to Miri and Dalton. I can't shift character heads back and forth, so those two had to wait while I dealt with tightening Colleen & Graham. However, I got a message from my editor yesterday morning that after she made the revisions, the manuscript insisted on being in italics! She couldn't figure out why, and sent it back to me. Only problem was, on my end, it looked fine. I resaved it and emailed it back, and sent a copy to my husband at his office. He saw it 'normal', but the editor still had the italics.

Of course all of the frustrations and anxiety are compounded by the fact that there's a 16 hour time difference between my place and my editor. And, on top of it, my email system was being cranky, refusing to connect to the outgoing server, although I could receive messages just fine. Since my husband's office was losing connections as well, it was probably a 'real' problem.

The decision was made for my husband to forward the manuscript to the publisher and hope that it looked OK when she opened it. This morning, she responded to him and the editor -- all italics on her end, but she managed to figure out why. There was a box checked in the AutoCorrect that shouldn't have been. However, I think I'm now going to have to go back and reinsert all the italics that are supposed to be there. Strange, because I rarely go in there--my biggest problem is remembering to change from straight to curly quotes when I submit to Cerridwen. If anyone knows how to get those settings to be document specific instead of global, I'd be ever so grateful.

But--at least during that hour of optimism between sending the file and going to bed, I managed to start writing again. Not my daily goal by a longshot, but it felt good to be back in the creative mode instead of frustrated editor.

Then, this morning, one of my email programs opened to tell me it had some problems but saved the files in question to a 'recovered' folder. Turns out that folder had 937 emails in it--every single thing I'd done since Dec. 13th, both sent and received. So I get to put them all back into the right folders. Eventually!

And after all that, someone used my credit card number to charge a plane ticket. Not a big, expensive one, but it's still such a pain to have to deal with all that entails. On the other hand, technology did let me find out almost immediately, since I didn't have to wait for a paper statement.

On the bright side, apparently my last round of edits survived the formatting wars and are now off to the final line edting folks.