Just finished editing: The Downtown Deal by Mike Dennis

Another dose of Vegas Noir from a writer who isn't far off being a great writer. What I love about Mike's work is his sensitivity; his characters have an emotional depth that is typically missing from thrillers and detective fiction, and is almost characteristically absent in Noir. If you like this sort of thing, Man Slaughter is a true gem, go read it now.

The Downtown Deal follows on from Temptation Town and Hard Cash, and continues to follow the, ahem, fortunes of ex-PI Jack Barnett.

Working for Mike is always a pleasure, not just because his books appeal to my personal taste, but also because he always gives me an intellectual challenge. The Downtown Deal will give you some thinking to do, and you will have to pay attention to follow the details of the "deal" in question, but doing so is very rewarding indeed.

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I started work yesterday on TBA (it has a working title but I don't normally reveal those) by new author Jarmila Zaricka.

"Cleaning" a document prior to editing with MSWord

It really doesn't matter what text editor or wordprocessor the author used to create his manuscript. Before editing I always have to clean it, map it and format it as I like it to appear both on my Kindle and on screen.

My aim is to finish with a document that has no more than three different character/paragraph formats, has no manual page breaks, has numbered chapter headings with an outline level, a table of contents, and page numbers.

To do this, these are the stages I have to go through:

Redundant characters are mostly in the class of characters called "print controls". These are tabs, multiple paragraph marks, new line (and sheet feed), manual page and section breaks.

a. remove the tabs. Manually, this is done using find/replace (ctrl+h). In the search box you enter ^t, and you leave the replace box blank. And you click replace all.

b. replace any new line or sheet feed characters with paragraph marks (see below). You can enter these characters by accident with certain key presses, and they can creep in when switching formats from other software. I could go into why, but I won't. Also some users have noticed that paragraph styles don't get automatically applied to the paragraphs that terminate with a new line character, and so use them as a sort of workaround. The sort of workaround that you discover you don't need if you read the manual.

find/replace (ctrl+h). In the search box you enter ^l and in the replace box you enter ^p
click replace all

c. replace section and page breaks with paragraph marks.

find/replace (ctrl+h). In the search box you enter ^m and in the replace box you enter ^p
click replace all
find/replace (ctrl+h). In the search box you enter ^b and in the replace box you enter ^p
click replace all

d. remove multiple paragraph marks. I will explain this.

find/replace (ctrl+h). In the search box you enter ^p^p and in the replace box you enter ^p
click replace all
repeat until it stops finding them


e. reserve italics.

reserving italics is creating a begin block and end block for italics, and putting it around every instance of text in italics. I use the BBCode for italics, so that any text currently in italic will be surrounded by [i] and [/i].

find/replace (ctrl+h). leave the search box blank, but from the "formatting" button select font, and from the dialog box, select "italic". In the replace box put [i]^&[/i]
click replace all

f. delete headers and footers.

go to "file/page setup" and open the layout tab (in Word 2010 this is the design tab under Header and Footer tools) and make sure that "different first page" and "different odd and even pages" are unchecked.

Open the header on the first page. Select all (ctrl+a) and press delete. Go to the footer, select all, and press delete. Close the headers and footers (doubleclick on the page).

g. clear all styles and formatting from the document.

there are a number of ways to do this, but the most sure is as follows:

anything up toWord  2007: from the style selector in the formatting toolbar, OR from the menu format/styles and formatting, select EITHER "clear formatting" to remove all styles, formatting and decorations from the text OR "Normal" to apply the default style to the whole document. The former will strip decorations (bold, italic) from the text, but the latter will not.
anything from Word 2007: from the Home menu select "clear formatting" or "Normal" from the styles section.

Wait until MSWord has finished "repaginating". You can force this by scrolling to the end (ctrl+end) and then waiting for the last page, complete with page number, to appear.

In all versions, you can add a button to the formatting toolbar to clear formatting or to apply Normal style.

If the "Normal" style applied in the document is not your "usual Normal" you will still have to cut and paste the entire text into a new blank word doc. If you didn't write the original document with the copy of word on the computer in front of you, I advise you to do this anyway.

AT this stage I now have the body text formatted exactly as I want it for editing; Times 11pt, first line indent of 1.27cm, 6pt spaces between paragraphs, 1.5 line spacing, justified. Three stages remain:

H. put the italics back in.

this has to be done in two stages. first we find the marked blocks and italicise them.

find/replace (ctrl+h). In the options, check "use wildcards". In the find box type \[i\]*\[\/i\]. In the replace box type ^& and then click "formatting", select font, and select italic.
click replace all

find/replace (ctrl+h). In the options, uncheck "use wildcards". In the find box type [i]. leave the replace box blank, and BE SURE to click "clear formatting" while the cursor is in the replace box.
click replace all


find/replace (ctrl+h). In the options, uncheck "use wildcards". In the find box type [\i]. leave the replace box blank, and BE SURE to click "clear formatting" while the cursor is in the replace box.
click replace all

I. style the chapter headings.

Not all authors even put chapter headings. If there's nothing there but a manual page break, I will have numbered them before I got rid of the manual page breaks! In that case it's dead easy, I do a find replace for "paragraph-mark any-digits paragraph-mark" and apply my custom chapterheading style. In any case I usually have to do this manually. The chapter heading style has two critical elements: Outline Level 2 (so that it can be mapped for quick navigation and the table of contents can be inserted),  AND Page Break Before: this is found in the paragraph properties. In Word 2003 you go format/paragraph/line and page breaks, and check the box "page break before" when defining the style. I don't know how you do it in Word 2010.


J. finally I insert a table of contents at the top.

Paragraph Marks

MSWord uses the traditional symbol ¶ to indicate that a paragraph has been terminated. In fact, word concatenates a carriage return with a line feed to make a special character (the infamous CRLF). In order to use Word as it is intended, you need to know that this symbol, visible when you click the "Show/Hide ¶" button on the toolbar, exists to tell the wordprocessor that a paragraph has been ended. It also tells it that all style and format applied to the ¶ should be applied to the whole paragraph.

(In MSWord, styles can apply either to characters or to paragraphs. You will not normally need to know about styles that apply only to characters - unless something goes wrong!)

The ¶ is inserted whenever you press enter on your keyboard. So whenever you press enter, you are telling MSWord that you have just finished a paragraph. THIS IS WHY you should not press enter multiple times to create space.

Space between paragraphs is achieved through the "spacing before" and "spacing after" options in the paragraph properties (format/paragraph). This is exactly the same as the fact that tabs do not exist so that you can indent the first line of a paragraph. First line indents are achieved from the same paragraph properties dialog.

There are good reasons for this, the main one being that (as you will soon discover), it is very easy to change the layout and format if there are no unnecessary print controls - like multiple ¶s or manual page breaks.

What about laying out my title page?

Lots of people use multiple ¶s to space out the text on the title page. This is exactly the wrong way to space out the text. Text with big spaces between should be done using "text boxes". Text boxes are drawing objects which act like mini documents within a document, so they can be formatted individually and moved around as needed without affecting the rest of the document.

The best Blurb.

Guardian Mortal Instruments Review

Watch the video. Then read the review.

I have strictly nothing to say about the Mortal Instruments books, just as I have strictly nothing to say about the Twilight books. I haven't read either and (as my clients will attest) I don't give a tinker's cuss about originality. I only care about whether a book works.

Disclaimers out of the way, I intend to make a serious point about communicating with your audience. We'll see if I succeed.

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I was looking for a movie to go see with the boy. We're pretty catholic in our tastes, so I look at the trailers of pretty much whatever is on at the nearest multiplex (Saint Dizier). I think we'll probably go see the new Cruiser vehicle. Since the absurd (but not wholly dreadful) Knight and Day (2010) and the even less dreadful Tropic Thunder (2008) where the presence of the consistently terrible Mr Stiller is more than mitigated by Messrs Black, Downey Jnr, Nolte and indeed, Cruise, I have discovered that I actually don't hate Cruise any more. Feel free to miss Knight and Day, but if you haven't seen Tropic Thunder, rent it even if you hate Stiller as much as I do. Which is a lot.

Excuse my digression. So I came across the trailer above, and was so impressed with how little I wanted to see the movie that I decided to do a little research which resulted in (the above disclaimer, and) the discovery of the Guardian review linked above. This is actually a review of the trailer, and is, I think, intended to be "light-hearted". Poor fool. Does not know not to mess with teen fandom. And here is a movie made from a book by a writer who started out writing fanfic, and who has a significant following as a fanfic author.

I rather enjoyed the review, as much for what the comparison with the Twiglets says about the Twiglets, as for what it says about this movie. But the Guardian review of the trailer of a teen movie made from a series of teen "dark, urban, edgy teen fantasy" written by an author of fanfic (about whom there may or may not be a pre-existing controversy) is entirely by the by.

Go back, watch the trailer again.

That is the essence of a great trailer, which is also the essence of a great blurb. Less than 10 seconds into the trailer I knew beyond doubt that I wasn't going to go see the movie. Not even if the boy wanted to. (He doesn't.) 

A good movie trailer makes you think: "hmm... I might check that out." But only a great movie trailer tells you in no uncertain terms "man, this movie ain't for you."

And that is exactly what a great query letter does. And that is exactly what a great blurb does.

In your Blurb you DO NOT WANT to convince everyone to try your book. If you succeed at that, you know what you're going to get: one star reviews from all the folks who hated it. Who were disappointed. Who feel you failed to deliver on your promises. Who wanted a romance. Who wanted a thriller. Who wanted a dark, urban, edgy teen fantasy. 

If you get your blurb exactly right, then the ONLY people who read your book will be the ones who love it. Will be the ones who give you gushing five star reviews or sensible four star critiques.

Each line of your blurb should pare away some of the wrong readers, so that the only ones who read the blurb all the way to the last line will be the ones who will love the book.

Here's the blurb to In Our Hands the Stars (1970) by Harry Harrison.

"THE DALETH EFFECT

The key to the stars?

A weapon of mass destruction?

Klein knows he is on to something big when his test bench disintegrates.—Too big to leave in the hands of a nation at war.

But even in a neutral country the terrible secret becomes the focus of

A DESPERATE POWER STRUGGLE–WITH EARTH AS PRIZE"

This blurb excludes the following readers in the following order:

readers who...

... don't like made up science

... don't like spaceships

... don't like doomsday devices

... don't like scientists as heroes. don't like male scientists as heroes 

... don't like national and international scale jeopardy

... don't like having to save the Earth... again.

Of course, I'm not saying this is the only way to do a blurb. Maybe it's a bit too defensive for you. But don't forget, the blurb is supposed to help the potential reader to choose his next book. It isn't supposed to convince him to read it.