Justification.

That's a rubber band stretched down the side to check indents...

by Louis Bertrand Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved


I am starting off the year with a little bit of back pain, and the sort of fuzzy, nagging headache that goes on for days or even longer.

No, I am not hung over from New Year's celebrations as I did not drink. I paid off my credit card last month, and thus will be going completely without money for forty long, dark and cold days and nights.

But it's all in a good cause, namely and to wit, balancing the massive provincial deficit on the backs of the most vulnerable people in the nation. And a little justification goes a long way, which is one reason I'm always so rude to the government. 'I feel your pain.' And I sure wouldn't want you to have no justification.

So anyway, I have the right hand margins of 'The Case of the Curious Killers' er; 'justified,' as it were, and of course now the left indents have gone all kooky. I've noted this sort of thing before, when working with an old file that has been through three or four random computer crashes and the changes from Word '93, Word 97, Word 2003, .doc to .docx. It is 'the usual thing.'

Now I am engaged in the painstaking and painsgiving process of combing the work one line at a time. Each of the indents must be as precise as I can make it, for we are all aware that as a writer I will be judged by the typesetting, among other things.

Other artists will tell you, it is extremely unwise to have your work condemned by those who refuse to read it...

For the record, I took an old 'smashfile,' although perhaps not the most current and upt to date one; and saved it as a .txt file. Then I imported or pasted it in to the Open Office program. But more experience editors have noted problems with right margin justification in the past, and Microsoft Word was specifically mentioned.

There is no end matter at the far end of the book. There will be a blurb just inside the front cover. I still need to do the cover design again, for the e-books had no real outer back cover.

I should throw another couple of blank pages in there and dedicate it to my mom.

Other than that, it is just a matter of finding the time to work on it. I only checked about thirteen pges today, and now I really need to get out of this chair.