Recently, I finished the first manuscript to my first book. As you can assume, I was proud of myself. I wrote a book! How many people do you know who can say that? You would think that this would be the highlight of my day, the point where I could sit back and say to myself: "James, unless you find a winning lottery ticket, your day has peaked. Go to bed."
You would be wrong.
No, my day of fantastic was only getting started. There is a lot of work that goes into a manuscript, for those of you who have never written anything longer than a five page essay. Mine, for example, is over 450 pages long. It has over 100,000 words and it took the systematic slaughtering of about half a forest to print.
Before all this can be done, however, all the information had to be transferred onto a single document with one inch margins and 25 lines per page. That is how I totaled the 450 pages. This is where the story gets great. Somewhere around page 200, Word randomly froze. For about fifteen seconds, it sat there contemplating what to do with my document. Then, an error message popped up. It read: "Document too large to correct grammar and spelling". I had done it. Years of work, and I had finally done it. I had beaten Word.
If that weren't enough, at that exact moment, the heavens opened up and a single beam of light shone down onto my computer with a choir of angels singing about my victory. Okay, that's a lie, but I did beat Word, and it was amazing.
When was the last time you beat Word? Don't lie. Nobody likes a liar.
1 comment:
Way to go! I have a rejection letter to my credit :)
I recently found a web site that's pretty good, and it looks like the industry is actually moving away from unsolicited MS.
If you want to see what a rejection letter looks like, I blogged it. Search for rejection.
This the best site I've found for a comprehensive quick-look for pubs.
http://www.ralan.com/
On the right sidebar, "book publishers." I do sci-fi/fantasy, too, so I was looking specifically geared for that.
Good luck!
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