It’s shaping up fast. I’ve hit the really thorny bit, where there’s good stuff and not-for-this-book stuff about equally mixed in every line. This is the hard sort of thing to sort out.
First you copy the entire ‘old’ file, and rename it, to save a ‘fair copy’ as it used to stand.
Then you rename the file you’re going to turn into the Revised book.
Ultimately, you create a second ‘old’ file, and rename it Second REvised BOok, and erase from it everything you kept from the Revised book.
So One Book becomes book A and book B, with a lot of A and only scraps of B. It’s not that I was totally wrong, it’s that B was getting into A and totally diverting it off course.
My brain hurts. But it’s working. I’m actually enjoying this a lot more than I have enjoyed producing 97 pages that weren’t working.
Jane’s got the office looking splendid.
I found out what was going on with the tax return: it’s good. I was reading a copy of the Federal report that goes into the Nonresident report, and they owe me money, not the way around, because there was a withholding on stuff that shouldn’t have been sent to Oklahoma in the first place. It has to do with income from part of the farmland I inherited, and that’s all good: I now know what’s going on.
pleased that you are both doing so well (and the kittehs as well of course)
Glad you got it sorted. I do not want to get involved with the Eternal Revenue Service, state or federal, in any way, shape or form. No how, no way. It’s like having a tiger by the tail, only worse.
Glad you’re both doing better. I’m also having to fill in a tax form this year. First time in several years but I can’t really complain. It’s because I found a discrepancy in the five or six years since I last filled one in. On the plus side I got a refund of a couple of thousand pounds earlier this year. On the negative side I now have to fill in a tax return. It’s not as complicated as yours though. I only have to give them about half a dozen pieces of information but some of it comes from my employer and they are tardy about providing it.
oh, not for THIS book – that sounds exciting!
self employed and taxes – a nightmare … I spend £ 2000 a year on accountants, and £1000 on a book-keeper. that’s because I am incorporated, and I think I have to go back to sole trader …
So very glad that the book is becoming itself. It feels so good when stuff falls into place and provides the impetus to keep going. 😀
I can’t imagine what it would have been like if you were using a typewriter, say an old Remington, and having to use carbons. Where would you have kept everything, and how would you have found things in those files you needed to find in order to either add things or take away.
Very good to have an electronic filing system that you can use to quickly call up the other files. Otherwise, you’d be pulling your hair trying to find everything you were looking for.
In high school and my early rounds of college I found scissors, clear tape, and white out invaluable aids to writing papers! 😉
You got it. Back in the old days, screw the carbons, which I only kept on final draft, scary thought…you got a lot of tape, a ream of paper, and a pair of scissors, and you literally cut and pasted things into order. The last book I had to apply that method to was actually written on a sort of computer, a Cellwriter, which stored a hundred mini-files, and could actually regurgitate those on call—but—if you had to change the order, or insert, it was a real headache. You had to map a new order of cell-calls, and then still cut and paste to do an insert. When I got an editorial request to do universal time/date/place stamps on hundreds of chapters, I cut and pasted all those, so the original DBS ms. was a shaggy mess of cut and paste. Xerox cost a dime a page, so that would add up to a sizeable price, for a 350 page book, and was clunky and slow, so I didn’t do that much at all.
I’ve got some bits that I’m going to have to fill-in, e.g. names, that I don’t want to get lost. I’ve put a placeholder there and made Word(97) put a (cyan) colored background on it so it really pops as one scrolls through the document.
After saving the archive copy, perhaps one could use something similar on that first “parting of the sea”. On the copy from the mixture, highlight the blocks that seem to belong to A and put the background in ‘yellow’, and the bits that belong to B in ‘cyan’. (Neither is very dark.) Flip ’em back and forth until satisfied it’s well and truly divided (may take more than one pass thru), archive that, then cut and paste until one has a yellow file, a cyan file, and an empty file. Then it’s trivial to turn the backgrounds back to white/null.
(Just because I’m touched by a bit of Asperger’s doesn’t mean I can’t be clever.)
Heyyyyyyyy …. Book A and Book B! *bounces because this means another Bren-book potentially in the works*
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, yep. Ain’t goin’ to all happen in this one.