I Write, You Read, eRead?

 

Good haul from Boston friends.

After almost a month long lazy streak hiatus, I'm officially back in the saddle of blogging. I hope everyone had fabulous holidays. I spent mine baking, reading, knitting and of course, editing and critiquing.

As evidenced by the photo to the left I have plenty to read thanks to Christmas presents but this weekend's reading will be dedicated to my manuscript.

Yes, it is that time. I'll be curled up on the couch with my own book. I mean to  read the completed third draft straight through. And it is only apropos that I have three rules to go along with the process.

1. No stopping to edit.

2. No getting depressed that a scene isn't quite how I hoped and walking away.

3. No distractions.

It will be a challenge, but I intend to read it on my Nook with a fat, blank pad of paper beside me to jot down notes. The notes will become my revision plan for a fourth draft.

See how realistic I've grown. This is the new 2012 Monica. I've accepted that I'll probably go through a dozen (or two) more drafts before my story is done with me. But if I continue at my current rate of three months per draft....well, it will be a while before we get there.

Does anyone have experience viewing personal documents on the first generation Nook?

I was experimenting last night and the font was all funny (I think it was Verdana even though my document is in Times New Roman) also it was tiny. I then tried to make the font of my document size 22, and that made it easier to read but it was still a weird font and bizarrely formatted. If it is a matter of formatting my word doc or pdf to mimic the epub page size and fonts, then I'll happily take the time to adjust it but I can't find any clear guidance online.

My next attempt will be to download a program that converts .doc files to .epub. If anyone has any advice or experience with this I would love to hear it. I'm not trying to be a perfectionist. I don't mind if the formatting is a little weird. I just want to read 225 pages without my eyes going cross. In any event I'll probably blog about how it all goes down.

Also I will eventually email copies of my manuscript to a few betas who have Nooks and Kindles from various generations and I'd love to give them files easily read on their eReaders rather than forcing them to read at the computer.

Regardless, lets have three cheers for paper saving technology.

Being a writer these days certainly involves being savvy with electronics, doesn't it? I wonder if former generations had similar issues. You know that typewriter business was probably a hassle. I mean, replacing ribbons, getting ink on your hands and ruining freshly typed pages. And I don't know what else, adjusting the alignment or whatever had to be time consuming too.



Fun fact: Hemingway wrote standing up, at least in the morning. At lunchtime he'd go to the bar. There's something to be said for early drinkers risers. While there's no proof that typewriter foibles had any influence on his post-writing routine, I think we can see the truth.