Holy Format Batman!

I seriously thank the writing Gods for letting me 'just write' all those years.

It's now Thursday & all I've done this past week is read, learn, re-read & format. I sure earned that 'your format sucks' comment from that critique. It's taken me a few days to indent, yes indent can you believe it. I'm sure there's an easier way to indent paragraph's but I'm not Word savvy, so I'm stuck w/ indenting endlessly.  But that's just the tip of the iceberg.  Turns out that I managed to somehow write a book that includes dialogue that complicates things. (Of course I did!) I have two foreign languages in my manuscript, Spanish & Calo. I write in Spanish fairly well so that should make this new found knowledge easy to maneuver, but I don't speak a word of Calo cause I'm not really a Gypsy.

Gasp! You're not a Gypsy & yet you're writing about one. Yeah hate to break it to you but I'm not.  I'm sure JK Rowling wasn't a wizard either, so I think I can be forgiven for not being Gypsy.

Anyway, turns out that there are specific ways to include/write foreign languages into a manuscript. I'm not a complete idiot, I figured there was & would have to address it at some point but it's trickier than I thought. But it's fine, I'll get through it & clean it up to make it work. I can't get rid of my foreign languages, it would strip away from the heart of my story. They're staying. (That is until an agent/publisher tells me it's gotta go but those are worries to be addressed later.)

Then there's internal dialogue (what the character thinks) turns out that there's also a specific way to write that. It has to be done in a way that it doesn't become distracting or take away from the other writing. That might be trickier to get a handle of but I'm sucking it up & getting through it.

So (sorry C) I've managed to write a book that has some funky rules I need to follow. Of course, if I had a writing background I'd know a lot of this already BUT again I have to say I'm glad I didn't know it because it would've really hampered my writing. I give credit to those that can edit as they write. I don't know if I could ever do that because I'd be second-guessing every word & never get my story out.

Thank goodness for my side-kick, we'll call her C (my sister). She's right there battling it out with me. I send her endless links to read that will help my writing. She has the capability of retaining better than I when it comes to the technical stuff. Phew!

Here's a link to a site that I think I'll be referring to a lot to help with my formatting & other details. http://www.annemini.com/?p=4241

Thanks for stopping in. Would love to hear from you.

Gigi ∞