No, I haven't landed that £1m book deal, but I have managed to figure out how to print index cards! It took a bit of faffing about, but I finally succeeded by using the labels format and setting the dimensions manually. Is it only me who gets unbelievable satisfaction from solving computer problems?
I've also had a bit of a breakthrough with the old plot analysis I mentioned in the last post. I had been writing the story with the wrong main character. Instead of the haunted female, why not make her love interest the lead? Tell the story from his POV and make his character arc primary to the story?
I took a couple of days to break it down and dammit if it doesn't fall into place. Not only that, I'm feeling a bit of the old excitement rising - he is a much more interesting character to play with and there's more scope for tension and mystery.
Hence the need for index cards. In sorting out the plot lines, I need to have the beats in front of me. You can invest in software for this (I know because I've road tested most of it) but nothing beats a 2x4 board and some 3x5 cards stuck on with blu-tak. You can move them around, shuffle or discard - even in a power cut.
But handwritten cards are hard to read and don't carry enough info. Printing is best. So you can imagine my delight at figuring out my little computer conundrum. Result!
4 comments:
I can relate to that.
Today I discovered the optional hyphen, and how to do it. It gave me a foolish amount of pleasure.
Optional hyphen? What's that, Lexi?
When you are formatting in Word for printing a book, and manually fine-tuning, you may decide to put in a hyphen to improve the spacing. If you press Ctrl and -, you get an optional hyphen which will disappear if, say, you change the page size so it is no longer needed.
Ah, live and learn! :-)
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