Not tryin' to save anybody's life here
But it’s damned annoying.
Dunno about any of you, but I kind of have a clock in my head (it takes up more mental space the older I get, but that’s a confession for another time). The clock is multi-functional, tracking hours, days, years, and regret…yes, I had to pay extra to get that feature installed.
Regardless, yesterday I was printing a copy of my next, as-yet unreleased novel (The Auditors of Doom) for my son to read and I happened to notice that the formatting on the internal dialogue was incorrect. It should be in italics, but most of it was in normal text.
For what it’s worth, it turns out the cover image for Book Two (below) was strangely prescient in capturing my reaction to this relatively horrifying discovery.
I’ll let my readers decide which of the two images was actually “me.”
I am pretty sure how it happened: the Curse Of Bill Gates, expressed as “Styles” in Microsoft Word. I think I updated a style, and it propagated through the entire document wiping out a bunch of the italics I counted on to make the story more understandable.
And there is a lot of internal dialogue.
I was planning on working on book three (The Breakroom of a Thousand Nightmares), but know myself well enough to not even try. My OCD will be yelling about fixing the manuscript from one part of my brain while the Clock will be shouting right back about finishing the work-in-progress and to not be a slacker (because I have other stuff to write, as well, to say nothing of the laundry room renovations that await me whenever I step outside of my office).
No useful creative work can happen in that kind of mental dogfight between my warring obsessions. So this morning, I’ll do the donkey work of correcting the formatting and hope my subconscious continues to ponder the novel on its own.