Zanski: Blog

I am pleased to see the repaired version of Back Trail on the pages, and I'm grateful to Lazeeze or whomever it is who works weekends for tending to my Saturday afternoon submission.

Even so, despite the many times I've gone over the text, my own errors persist. For instance, in referencing the United States, my rule is to use "US" in quoted dialogue and "U.S." in expositional narrative. But not always, apparently.

Another, brought to my attention thanks to the sharp eyes of some correspondents, including prolific SOL author Anne N. Mouse, is a rather glaring date typo: wrong century. What's more it breaks another of my rules, to use numerals (twelve) rather than numbers (12). Eventually, I'll get around to fixing it.

There are others I've found and I'm sure there are more. I won't rush to fixing them unless they are so subtle and insidious that they would deceive the average reader into misunderstanding the storyline.

Considering such errors in the main, I begin to sense a subtle vibe that I may only be human. Go figure.

Contrary to earlier stated plans, I found it advantageous to repost Back Trail before proceeding with False Trail. To that end, just a few minutes ago I submitted an odt file of the entire story. Now we'll see if I finally got it right. The suspense....

I am ducking out of email replies for the moment and returning to the truly joyous work of formatting detail. I won't go into how bass-ackwards I've been approaching all this posting business, but what I thought was a time-saving approach has been quite the opposite. Now I must turn a clean txt file back into a clean odt file. I am thankful for all the advice and guidance which has made these processes more understandable to me. Whoever said you can't teach an old dog new tricks without a rolled-up newspapaper and lots of shouting was right.

I might also note that I have deleted two somewhat rancorous blog posts that suggested SOL was somehow responsible for my own failure to grasp the processes that are explained in detail on the author's pages. While I do fall back on my unfamiliarity with much of the jargon, my vitriol was uncalled-for. Mea culpa.

Betwen the coaching from Lazeeze and the advice of many others, I think I'm getting a handle on this. I've learned that stories can be submitted in multipke formats, not just the preferred text files, and I've received numerous tips and tricks from readers and other authors. NUMEROUS.

And while I still can't explain the odd Ös and other doodads, I do plan to try to clean up and repair the paragraph breaks on Back Trail after False Trail is posted. False Trail is ready to go as a txt file (at least as ready as I know how to make it), but Lazeeze is in correspondence with me and I asked his advice on a process that may affect my choice of file type. Even so, the txt file I have looks neat and clean to me, so I may just push the button. But not yet.