Yesterday & Today: 21st July

Did a massive stint yesterday on New Contexts: 5. Having finished the shortlisting process, the next step is to pull together the first draft of the book. This means copying all the selected entries (79 of them) into one master document, and then begin the formatting process to ensure that the fonts, spacing, page layouts, look and feel etc. are consistent.

It’s a part of the making an anthology I especially enjoy.

Having said that, it is also a stage which surfaces a personal frustration: you would be surprised how many people who write so much, know so little about how to use their word processing software (and in the main it’s MS Word). So the process isn’t merely ‘copy and paste’ and change a few fonts; it’s about deleting hundreds of blank lines or spaces that have unnecessarily or unknowingly been entered, finding all the hidden Word formatting characters and removing those, inserting tabs rather than multiple spaces to ensure consistent alignment etc. etc. Perhaps counter-intuitively, odd rogue spaces can be the hardest to track down, especially when there are two and should only be one. ‘Find and replace’ can be more dangerous than you might think!

So there will be more of the same today, this stage also including the fine-tuning of the formatting plus identification of where minor edits might be beneficial.

This is a morally tricky area. If the change is the odd piece of punctuation for consistency’s sake, or perhaps correcting a typo, then I’ll go ahead without consultation. But sometimes I might want to remove or change a word because I think the piece will benefit from that; in such cases I will contact the author directly for approval.

I confess I’m not sure what the ‘standard’ rule might be, but my approach seems to have worked so far across four volumes of New Contexts.

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