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Medicinal Editing

May 11, 2009 in Blogs

It would be a breach of the privacy of members of my family for me to say more than that I have had to spend extended time at two different hospitals in recent days.  Indeed, I do not really have the time to write this now, as I ought to be visiting those people again–but I am awaiting a call from a doctor concerning one, so I have to stay near the phone anyway.

One advantage of sitting in waiting rooms is that one has the opportunity to read–or to edit, provided one has had the foresight to carry materials to read and edit.  I did have this foresight, and so managed to complete a pass through The Third Book of Worlds.  Unfortunately, I found numerous spots that are going to require me to work here in my office or with rule book and papers in hand–calculating how to make stats work on NPCs and monsters, expanding the magical abilities of elves and orc shamans, and other detail work that makes these things so time-consuming.  However, progress has been made.

I also finished a final read-through edit of Do You Trust Me?.  Most of the corrections are simple punctuation oversights in the footnotes, but there are a few items that mattered.  I will have to update my copies and upload the corrections, but there are some rather more pressing matters at hand, which should be obvious.

So I have not been completely inactive during this time; I just have been using what time I could as well as I could elsewhere.

–M. J. Young

Ubersteps

October 27, 2008 in Blogs

Several positive things were done over the weekend.

The big one, most of you know, is that I was again a guest at Ubercon XI.  Of the many familiar faces I saw I will mention only C. J. Henderson, whose Teddy London series I have thoroughly enjoyed so far.  No, the third is not yet back in print, but I did pick up a couple of things from him that were connected to some of the things I’ve already read.  I’m adding these to my reading list, which is of course already quite substantial, but looking forward to them.

The fact that a few books were sold is encouraging; the fact that I rarely make a profit on conventions is on one level less important.  A significant number of new players adventured in our worlds, and several are quite excited about it.  I expect some will arrive on the forum here (and may have already done so).  We also had a well-attended referee training session, and I’m looking forward to hearing about games being played elsewhere.

I returned to find a post waiting on the Corinthians study list.  Of late my end-of-week postings have been comments–something less than reviews–on books I have read over the years, but I had posted early last week that I would not be posting one on Friday because of the convention.  One of the list participants took advantage of my absence to post thoughts on my next book (he got an early release copy) Do You Trust Me?, and the comments were very favorable.  (You can read them at this site, but it is a Yahoo!Groups posting and you probably have to log in to Yahoo to access it.)  This is particularly encouraging, because I wanted to put some glowing quotations on the back of the book for its official release, and these will be ideal.

I am running late today, but that’s par for the course particularly after a working weekend away.  Let’s see what I can do next.

–M. J. Young

A Delayed Report

October 7, 2008 in Blogs

I am apologizing for my recent absence.  I attempted to post on Sunday, and again yesterday, and some glitch between the site and my computer blocked my access.  It has taken a couple attempts to resolve it, and I am hoping that the problem has been eliminated and this post registers.

My impetus for posting has little to do with Multiverser, though; it has to do with some of my other writing.  I received the proof copies of Do You Trust Me? and read through one; I found four errors, the biggest but least evident of which was that I never actually included the artist credit for the cover, and the most difficult that I have in a footnote a reference to a book I have not yet published and thus for which I am not completely settled on the title (my Romans commentary).  I will either have to settle the title in my own mind or rephrase the note to refer to the forthcoming book without mention of the title.

Now I’m bothered, because I know that the post that did not go through on Sunday contained other information, and I cannot recall what any of it was.  However, it’s good to be back, so let me deal with everything else that has been awaiting my return.

–M. J. Young

Trust Pre-release

September 24, 2008 in Blogs

Those who are not interested in posts not related to Multiverser can skip this one.  It is entirely about one of my Christian books.

I have hemmed and hawed and dithered and dallied since receiving the cover art for my new book, Do You Trust Me? Part of the delay is that I had intended to put a couple of quotes on the back from people who had given favorable responses to copies of the draft, but I lost their comments and couldn’t find them.

In any case, I have posted the book and ordered proof copies, so I can spot any bugs that escaped me to this point and make sure the cover prints well.

I have also decided to make these pre-release copies available to those who have encouraged and supported my ministry, by announcing their availability through Lulu. The printed copies are currently priced at $8.97 and the PDF at $4.49. Once the proofs are approved, the book will get an ISBN and go into general distribution at prices closer to $12 for print and $6.00 for PDF, so it’s a 25% savings now. There might yet be bugs in the book, of course, and the ISBN is not printed on these copies (because it has not yet been issued), and I admit that I am still hoping to get a few positive words I can post on the back cover and credit to people who don’t sound like they’re my relatives.

Anyone interested can obtain either print or PDF at http://www.lulu.com/content/4225728.

Thank you.

–M. J. Young

Format and Queue

September 2, 2008 in Blogs

It’s amazing how quickly that step actually went, and particularly since it could have gone so much faster had I known what I wanted to do before I started.

For convenience in locating specific sections, my Romans notes were written in table format.  Each chapter of the epistle was a new “section” in the word processing software, and each section was comprised of one three-column table–the leftmost column for the verse numbers and broad outline, giving the point and parameters of each paragraph, the middle column containing my translation of the text, and the right-hand and widest column giving the detailed analysis.  I had considered publishing it in that format, printed “landscape”, that is, eleven inches wide by eight and a half high, probably bound on the long side such that it would be more like a flip chart than a book. However, there was more white space than I wanted, and even with the idea that users might wish to make notes I could not justify the expense of such a long book.  Instead, I decided to reformat it more traditionally, to a “portrait” layout, losing the tables and placing the outline, numbering, and translation between the sections of detail.  In doing so, I reduced the page count from near a thousand to under six hundred, so I obviously eliminated a great deal of white space.

There were several time-consuming aspects to this.  In particular, I wished to convert the tables to text such that there would be a double paragraph break at each cell break, but that was not an option of the conversion.  The simple solution was to choose a symbol which was not used anywhere in the text, use that symbol at the cell breaks, and then do a global replace of that symbol with the double paragraph break.  It worked, but at one point I forgot which symbol I was using and used one that was used in a few places in the text, so I had to return and correct those places where the replace should not have been made.

The other was that after I had reformatted all the tables to text, I realized that the verse numbers and translation text were not so easily distinguished from the commentary detail.  I thus had to go through and, verse by verse, reformat these.  I had to do some other reformatting at the same time, adjusting the line breaks, so I would have had to have done the verse by verse work anyway; but it would have saved several keystrokes on each verse had I reformatted that text while it was still in table layout rather than after the fact.  I made the decision that the table-to-text conversions had taken long enough that it would not be worth reversing them to save the time on the text formatting, but still spent quite a bit of time on it.  For what it’s worth, Romans, the longest of Paul’s epistles, has four hundred thirty-one verses plus a subscription (in the Greek manuscripts, the title and authorship and related information are appended to the end of a book), so I was at this for a while.

The result of this is, with the addition of a title page and the drafting of a brief forward, the Romans book is finished.  I will have to do the conversion to PDF, and upload it to the publisher, and design the cover (although being more on the lines of a “scholarly” work, a simple faux leatherette look with the title and author will be sufficient, so I need not hassle with cover art).

Of course, Do You Trust Me? is also waiting to be published, so I face the question of which to publish first–or whether to launch both at once.  That, though, is a decision that will have to wait until there is money in the bank, something that doesn’t happen easily in the beginning of September when school expenses hit.

–M. J. Young

A Project Transitions

August 31, 2008 in Blogs

As I have mentioned before, I publish a daily Bible study under the auspices of the Christian Gamers Guild, being its chaplain.  It is not your run-of-the-mill study, more on the order of an undergraduate course in Biblical Studies; and its subscribers include a fair number of ordained clergy and educated laymen.  At present we are working our way through I Corinthians, and you can learn more about the list on my site, if you’re interested.

The study began several years ago with Romans, for which I have copious notes which I have been editing.  The originated as preparations for a course I had hoped to teach which never materialized, but when I had finished the postings on the Bible study list I was encouraged to put them into book form.

Over the weekend I reached the end of the editing of the last chapter of those notes.  The edits need to be incorporated into the text, but that is more than half finished at this point.  The text will then have to be reformatted for printing, but in all it looks like the exegetical and logical study of Romans might well go to print before the end of the year.

Of course, I still have to get Do You Trust Me? in print, and I don’t have the cash to launch that formally at the moment (I don’t have the cash at the moment for a family barbecue, and am not certain how I’m going to get enough gas to get my mother-in-law to the store tomorrow, but that’s the way it is sometimes).  It won’t be that way forever, though, so I’ll line up the books and see what works.

I’m also giving serious consideration to doing an abbreviated study in Romans, something which covers the structure of the book without going into the sort of detail the full study does.  That’s a bigger project, though.

–M. J. Young

File Under Problems

July 13, 2008 in Blogs

I managed to hear half of my Quick Word radio show this afternoon.  It was not the show I had recorded for today; that suggests that the radio station had trouble downloading the programs, probably because of the file size problem.  I’m going to have to go back and see what I can do about that.

Speaking of file size problems, I ran into one in connection with the cover of Do You Trust Me?  Yes, the good news is I have the front cover; I’m working on the back.  It was delivered to me last night on paper, and I scanned it this afternoon.  I used the very best quality scanning my scanner would provide–and the result was a file so large than none of my art programs could resize it.  I wound up scanning it again at lower resolution, and it is now ready.  I had a couple of quotes I wanted to include on the back from a couple of ministers who read it a few months back; I’ll have to hunt for their letters.  I have been getting eager to the point of antsy to get this in print.

Multiple Repairs

June 29, 2008 in Blogs

I fixed a few things since Friday, mostly yesterday evening.

The big one is probably the Collision MySpace.  After a fair amount of hair-pulling, I managed to pull the black background out from behind the black print, so the site can now be read.  I also sent some friend invitations (to people who already know the band, so that means locals), added a brief history (which needs some editing), and uploaded the lyrics of our first song to the blog (since I didn’t see a place for lyrics).  I sent Baxter and Brittany notes alerting them to this.  I also took note that our MySpace site name is CollisionAtHopewell.  Checking in briefly now, I note that we’ve had positive answers to two of our invites.  If I tell you that they are from my son and Baxter’s sister, I hope that doesn’t make you think less of us.

The second repair job, which I actually did before that, was on the Temporal Anomalies site.  I proofread my response to Vazor’s blog, made a few minor corrections, and then redid a piece of the directory structure for the site, changing the section name that was “Correspondence” to “Conversation“, adding to the subindex of that section the new page plus the four pages which were responses to questions on another site years ago, and redoing the links on all the pages in that site to include those five along with the two dozen letters.  Hopefully it will make site navigation a bit easier.  Meanwhile, I note that Vazor has thanked me for my response, on his blog, and promised a followup post; I will have to keep alf an eye there, although I have asked that he notify me when he posts it.

The third thing that got repaired is really the first.  I started once more reading through the book Do You Trust Me?, and fixed two or three spots that could have been said better.  There is a rule in this business that if you wait until something is perfect it will never go to print, and I can feel the pain of that rule with this book; however, the reason for my delay is entirely that the cover art is not ready (which seems to be a reason that delays most of my books at some point), so the fact that I am still tweaking the text is not an issue.  I do have to format it to page size and add the page numbers to the table of contents, but that will come soon enough.

I have been giving serious thought to combining the three books, Do You Trust Me?, What Does God Expect?, and About the Fruit, into one volume, tentatively entitled A Christian Primer.  I could sell the one book for less than the three individually, and I think that they fit together in a coherent package.  I am minded in this that C. S. Lewis originally published the three books we know as Mere Christianity separately–somewhere I have a copy of the second, Beyond Personality–but that combined they make a coherent whole.  From a marketing perspective, the single volume would probably cost the reader less than the three books separately without impacting my profit.  I would keep the individual books available, though, because someone interested in only one would still be able to buy it (and then come back for the other two eventually).  Anyway, it’s on the table for consideration.  The Trust book has to go to print before anything will be done on combining them.

I accomplished something.

–M. J. Young

Fighting Forward

March 6, 2008 in Blogs

My thanks to those who have encouraged me to get some rest. I slept reasonably well last night and this morning, and although I am fighting occasional hints of queasiness I am not certain whether it is from the early stages of being sick, or merely from thinking about it.

I am considering cancelling tonight’s Collision rehearsal. I am loathe to do it, as Baxter missed last week, and Brittany’s mother will be going in the hospital mid-month which will put sufficient demands on Brittany that she will probably miss a few, and we are nowhere near as far along as drummer John would wish us to be. I think I will not cancel; but I will have a lot of work because of that. The man who loves to cook is fighting the illness, and last night was losing, so I have already started working on dinner in the expectation that he will not be able to manage it. I’ve already told Adam that I will want to practice with him even if no one else shows, as we are badly behind and he’s missed a few rehearsals himself.

I received an encouraging letter about the forthcoming book, Do You Trust Me? I had sent electronic copies to a few people in ministry I know (I had asked on a private list whether anyone was willing to give it a once-through and let me know if it was sound, and these people wrote to say yes, they would read it). One has responded, praising the work. I guess I should pressure my daughter-in-law to move forward on that cover art.

If I’m to accomplish everything, I must keep moving, so here I go.

–M. J. Young

Musical Dominion

January 31, 2008 in Blogs

It slipped my mind yesterday that I had accomplished something, of a sort. I have been making practice cuts of the Collision repertoire, and I finished a song (I Use to Think) and forwarded it to the drummer last night; I finished another, Free, this afternoon, partly because I’d started it before I I finished the other one, and partly because I’ve become rather facile at the midi composing software so I can crank them out pretty quickly. They’re not supposed to be particularly good, only reasonably accurate representations of the arrangements we’re doing so the band members can figure out their parts and work with a recording.

We also had a decent rehearsal tonight, with Baxter, Brittany, Adam, and me. As of tonight we have learned six of the eighteen songs, and we have tentatively agreed on seventeen of them which means there’s one slot left to fill in the repertoire. That’s a milestone, I think.

I’ve also e-mailed the text of that next book, Do You Trust Me?, to a couple of people whose opinions I respect, to get some preliminary feedback before I go to print. Now I’m going to have to practice patience while I await their responses.

Meanwhile, it’s all put me behind a bit behind tonight, so I’d better turn my attention to catching up.

–M. J. Young