Book Writing Experiences and Insights

If you have had any college experience, chances are you have had to do a metric crapton of writing. God knows I have had my fair share of this. One of my more interesting writing assignments was to write an anthology of collected works. In this case the collected works were all poetry, from authors like Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and so on.

The anthology was very easy to write in Apple's Pages app, wherein I did everything from the first draft to the final product. Pages has a means of counting by characters, words, pages etc, so if you are keeping it at 70,000, this should be no trouble. Spell check was pretty straight-forward. You may want to check over your work (perhaps once per page) to ensure punctuation hasn't been typoed.

Finally, the only thing I can think of that you may actually want sighted assistance on would be cover art.

Just my thoughts. 😃

Hello,

Firstly, do you have any specifications for your formatting, EG, double line spacing, wide margins etc? In short, is there a style guide you are sticking to?

There are a couple of options here. The first is using Ulysses, which is a very useful app for composition as it allows us to use markdown and to break out sections into chapters and scenes, or what ever sub grouping that makes sense. Since you've already written everything, it might be a little work, but ideally you get the document into Ulysses and then you can export, using one of their 'Styles' to get the formatting you want. Alternatively, you can create your own or ask Ulysses themselves to make one for you.

the second way, though a little more involved, is using Microsoft word. Word has a couple of advantages over the Ulysses route in that its spell and grammar check are superior and, further down the line, there will be chat GPT integration. As it is, however, the spell check is very good. Formatting can be set in styles, defining headings font colour and size, spacing, centred titles etc. The down side here is you will probably have to do most of it by hand. VO T is your friend here as it will tell you what state the font is in under your cursor, EG, 12 pt times new roman black centred... And so on. The Ulysses advantage is it does it all at once, though this, as I'm sure you understand, means you can make one big error all at once too.

As for other things to look out for... On Mac use the VoiceOver commander, right command D, when you've turned on commanders, that is. This will help you seek out, not only misspelled words but extra white space between words and punctuation issues.

Finally, it's useful to create an 'editing' activity in VoiceOver, the main section being verbosity. You can have VO let you know about indentations, all punctuation, extra spaces and so on. It might also be worth switching to a different voice or, at least, slowing it down, just to make sure you're checking it well. The new voice can help to break the familiarity you've established, but can have other issues such as mispronunciation.

Once you've completed your first draft, you'll probably be looking for feedback. I ask my beta readers to supply a text document with overall impressions, issues etc but, instead of using Microsoft comments, though that is accessible, I ask them to use the syntax *this is a comment on the document*, which is then easy to search, fix and delete, as required.

I'll be honest, it's all a bit more of a struggle than it would be for a typical writer, but it is doable.

Please let me know if you want me to expand on any points here as there is quite a bit and I've just skimmed the surface of options rather than go into the how.

First, you are welcome. I have a degree in IT, but I did not take it to the PhD level. I shudder to think of how many essays I would have had to write, ya know, that had absolutely nothing to do with my field of study -- where I spent more time writing code than my own name.

Ah, university. Like a good woman, we all need them, and we never want to displease them... 😖

Second, I would agree with the points @The Oliver Kennett made, save for Microsoft Word on the Mac can be frustrating. Some people claim it works well. Others claim it is sluggish and difficult to work with.

Your mileage may vary..

to be fair to Microsoft word on Mac, the issue is inconsistency. Those who say it is sluggish, I think, are are probably not in print layout. All the other layouts cause it to choke up, no idea why. spelling shortcuts are also hit and miss depending what view you're in. It doesn't seem to work well in print layout, but does in draft layout and so on... In short, it's a mess. If you know how to use it, it works, if you're trying to work it out, it's unintuitive.

I've not had much experience with pages as it messes about with word formatting and I've not bothered to go down the route of working out just how it changes it or how to put it back into a word document that has the correct formatting.

Regarding how things should be laid out, headings are usually used to denote chapter and sub-sections. Headings themselves are defined by the size of font and sometimes if they are bold.

I think you are talking about footers and, not to be confused with headings, headers. Headers occur at the top of the page and can contain something like:

The Mystery Of Word by O.R. Kennett

Which will appear on every page aside from the first which will be the title page. Likewise, page numbers are at the bottom in the footer.

These are not set in stone and you should probably look for some guidance on what the house style is for the publication to which you're sending the manuscript. If this is going direct to readers, it might be worth asking them to take a look at a sample of the manuscript, containing headings, the header and footer, and ask them to say if the line spacing, margin etc is correct.

Unfortunately, without knowing exactly what you want to achieve, IE, the formatting defined by the style guide you're working to, I don't know if I can point you quite in the right direction.

I realise it is frustrating. Voiceover will read it the same no matter what, so formatting seems arbitrary. Added to that, checking your output is conforming to the requirements of your readers is a pain.

So, I guess my question is, what are you doing with the manuscript? Who is it going to? This should give us more of a direction in getting the manuscript in shape.