Ups and Downs

Fortune is a fickle force. The day after Puntitas’ cartwheels of celebration, she received a rejection (form email with her name), and she received news that she did not get very far in the selection process of a job she’d expected to interview for. Then today she received birthday flowers though her birthday was several weeks ago. Ups, downs, and ups again—good thing chocolate is both a reveler and a consolation.

Puntitas has been knitting socks, Three pairs in a two-week period. She wasn’t feeling particularly poetic, so she couldn’t get up the nerve to read her latest set of revisions. Today, in a moment of heel annoyance, she pulled up a file and discovered a burst of poetic mojo.

The incoherent poem she’s been revising is pretty much done now, after more brutal trimming and lots of editing. She used the search-and-replace feature to strip out the hard returns and put pipes in their places. Then she edited as if she were reading prose, and used search-and-replace to turn the pipes into hard returns again. The poem is still one or two readings away from official “finished” status, but Puntitas doesn’t think the future changes will be significant. In fact, she went ahead and put today’s version into the book-length manuscript.

She also read another poem, the one she recently added to one of the books. She made a few minor changes, more editing than revision, and one change that is significant indeed. The literal situation described is one person helping another. Puntitas has worried that, given other details, the person being helped will be perceived as helpless, an interpretation which can obscure the point of the piece. Today Puntitas found a way of redirecting the reader’s perception. She named the character after a well-known literary figure, a truly inspired decision since the character in the poem is doing the sorts of things the literary character is known for. She’s feeling much better about that poem now too.

There’s only one more poem (already in the books) that Puntitas wants to reread and significantly revise, and there’s one draft and one idea she’d like to develop for these books, but she’s feeling comfortable about sending the manuscripts out as they are.

Puntitas reads _The Shadow Wife_ by D. Eden and more of _The Art of Setting Stones_ by M. P. Keane, which is beautiful, but too slow for someone who is often sleepy.

Celebration and Perplexity

Puntitas sent out her first chapbook in years and got a prompt rejection the following day. That same day, of the five hours spent submitting, she also sent out two poems she really likes and hopes to find homes for. The day after the chapbook rejection, she got a nibble from the journal that received the two poems:

The editor liked the language in both, but found the line breaks distracting. If Puntitas would be open to resubmitting them as prose poems, the editor would love to reconsider them.

Puntitas does not know what a prose poem is. She’s read a few, and she knows they’re all the rage, but the hammer-and-nails part of her brain doesn’t know what to do to a piece of writing to make it a prose poem.

The news was frustrating for Puntitas, so in typical Puntitas style, she sulked, whined to a friend, sat inertly at her keyboard, had absolutely no idea. Then admitting herself desperate for publications and further admitting that she especially wanted these two pieces to thrive, Puntitas pulled up the documents and used the find-and-replace-all command to brutally substitute hard and soft line breaks with regular spaces (after copying the file in case some other editor liked the work as Puntitas meant it).

Sans line breaks, Puntitas read the poems again, only this time she did it the way she reads prose, and what she discovered is that a few of her long, involved sentences collapsed in their own complexity. She fiddled here and there, nothing that anyone would notice, and she put a blank line in whenever she started a new idea. She didn’t think the pieces were any more or less comprehensible, but she did resolve to go back to other poems to read them this way for editing.

When she finished, she resubmitted both pieces. A day or two later, the editor wrote back to say she was prepared to accept one of the poems if Puntitas agreed to a few changes. CHANGES? Who dare talk to a writer about CHANGES? Puntitas read on with a mixture of anger, fear, and shame (not really sure why).

The changes were surprisingly … great. As Puntitas wrote it, the poem is a long fragment, a series of gerundives that suggest a nonstatic moment. Each idea is separated from its neighbor by a semicolon and developed and expanded with commas. There were also lots of and’s to create a rhythm. The editor, got rid of most of the commas, replaced the semicolons with commas, and stripped most of the and’s. The experience of reading suddenly reflected what Puntitas had been trying to do in the language, and Puntitas moved one step closer to understanding what a prose poem is. She’ll have to think about how another one of her pieces may benefit from this form of decluttering.

The other thing that happened when Puntitas read the final version—still no line breaks—is that she was disoriented and unmoored from her own concept of poetry writing. Puntitas wondered, not for the first time, what a line break is supposed to do. Her understanding is that it should create a subtext of its own; draw attention to words, images, and relationships; and make the reading easier. She wondered what other poets think line breaks should be or do, And she wondered whether the line breaks have been a deciding factor for other editors.

For Puntitas personally, one of the functions of the line break is to establish that what she is doing is writing poetry. For her the distinction among creative nonfiction prose, fiction, and poetry is nebulous, and the distinction between such forms as prose poem and flash fiction is too confusing to ponder. So writing in line breaks and attending to their meaning makes her mindful of the need to compress language and convey abstract meaning through sensory experience, evocative action, and physical contour—what the sighted world summarizes in the visual metaphor of the image. Hence her reluctance to instantly do away with all the line breaks she’s worked so hard to develop).

One or two days later still, Puntitas received another acceptance. This one was in the form of a letter that was both sharp and funny, the sort of missives cranky old nuns fire off in novels and on TV. This editor was also inclined to accept a piece if Puntitas allowed her to make changes, like capitalize a proper noun, correct a spelling mistake, and remove a lone parenthesis. Puntitas actually fought the urge to bow her head and whisper ma’am when replying to the message to agree to the changes and apologize for her slovenliness.

She’s contacted the other journals about the acceptances, but she’s a little nervous about it since the pieces aren’t actually in print yet.

Puntitas reads _Garden of Lies_ by E. Goudge plus the two knitting books. She’s found a couple more knitting books that she can’t wait to get through.

HURRAH! HURRAH! HURRAH!

AT LONG LAST, THEY’RE DONE!!!!!! The final page counts are forty-eight for the first book and fifty-one for the second. Each has four sections, and my publications are fairly evenly divided between the two.

I assembled the second book yesterday afternoon. It was fifty-one pages long, so I moved a one-page poem to the first book, bringing the page total for the first book from forty-seven to forty-eight and for the second from fifty-one to fifty.

The funny thing is that deciding which poem to migrate was not that hard. When I realized I had enough pages to move a poem, my initial happiness was momentarily tempered by the matter of which one. In typical Puntitas fashion, I put off thinking about it while I dealt with a few glitches in the table of contents. Then as I jumped through the manuscript to fix and double check, I noticed that one poem was a little too similar to two others. In one case, both poems end with a female clutching fistfuls of grass. In the other, both are about suicidal thoughts. Oddly, the poem wasn’t a rehash of the others. The closing images have different values (clinging to life vs. fear of change/transcendence), and the reflection leads to different conclusions (pushing a suicidal thought away vs. toying with it). So I didn’t feel that I needed to get rid of the poem altogether, but I did think that moving it to the first book would be wise. Knowing where to move it was also fairly simple. The first had a dramatic gap between two poems, and this one seemed to be the right kind of piece to fill it.

Anyway, about assembling the book in general, the second one went faster than the first (three hours as opposed to four). The process reminded me of sock knitting: making the mate goes faster because it’s more a matter of remembering than discovering.

George (my computer) was well rested and cooperative too. I corrected the page number formatting issue in the first book without any problems, and I went through both manuscripts to make a few minor changes. There were a couple of poems I’d meant to work on, but never got around to, so I read them over quickly, tinkering with a line or two, where necessary.

Though I’m not completely sure, the discrepancy in the number of pages seems to have been caused by the widow-orphan protection feature. In the individual poems, I used soft line breaks (shift+enter) within a stanza and hard line breaks (enter) between them. Because of widow-orphan, stanzas got moved to the next page if a specific number of lines didn’t fit on either side of the page boundary. When I put all the poems into one file and stripped the formatting, the soft line breaks turned into hard lines, so page breaks happened wherever the page happened to end, unless I forced it with the enter key, of course. The reason I’m not convinced that this is the cause is that a couple of poems took up one entire page in the book, but crossed over to the second in its own file.

Today, I returned to the books to do some last minute work. I added a dedication to a couple of poems, and I reread one more poem from the second book to make sure the revisions I made last summer worked. I realized I’d never gone back to double check. After some tinkering, the poem grew by about sixteen lines, crossing a page boundary and getting the book back to fifty-one pages. The amazing thing is that both that poem and one other improved A LOT from relatively little revision. To today’s poem, I added two short stanzas (eight or ten lines) to the thesis version, and to the other one, I added a few (four to six) strategic lines. I made other less noticeable changes as well, but those key additions gave both pieces depth and complexity, bringing to the reader what was in my head when I wrote them.

As a technical aside, I learned yesterday that tables of contents in Word 2003 don’t update automatically. What I’ll do when I’m in an editing sort of mood is add information about that to my post on how to make tables of contents in Word.

The next step is to print the manuscripts out and make photocopies. I’ll do both tomorrow. Most likely I’ll have little or no work on Wednesday, so I’ll work on putting them in the mail then.

Puntitas reads _El llanto de la comadreja_ by E. Navarro.

First Book Just About Done

I just finished assembling one of the books. The work was so tedious it almost became relaxing. I say, “almost,” because I kept expecting it to, but it never did. The only way I got through it was by reminding myself that finishing today meant less work on the other book tomorrow.

The actual steps were few. First, I made sure the note cards were in the same order as the table of contents. Next, I used the cards to insert the individual poem files into one large book file. (In Word 98 to 2003, you insert the contents of a file into an open document with ins+I, l.) After that, I stripped all the formatting out of the compiled book. Then I went back through and inserted the prefatory material (title page, TOC, Acknowledgements, Dedication), put hard page breaks in at the beginnings of the poems, and marked the titles and section breaks for the contents. Finally, I went back to the TOC page, which was blank except for the words, “Table of Contents,” compiled the table, and double checked it against the note cards to make sure all poems were present and accounted for. The process took four hours. The only thing left to do is to write up the list of acknowledgements.

Two issues have come up. One is a technical glitch that doesn’t concern me too much. The other is plain disconcerting.

The technical issue involves page number formatting. I divided the document into three sections: the title pages, the prefatory material, and the book itself. I restarted page numbering at the beginning of the second and third sections and changed formatting to go from Roman numerals to Arabic numbers. The problem is that, when I changed the formatting in one section, it also changed in the other, regardless of which section I worked with first . Whatever I did, they were both either Roman or Arabic, but not one in one section and the other in the other. I’ve checked the help files, the official site, and a few other places on the web. I’m doing all the right things, but it hasn’t worked yet. I’ll have to try it in the morning, when I’m less exhausted.

The disconcerting thing involves a mysterious page discrepancy. According to my note-card calculations, the book (sans title pages and prefatory materials) is fifty pages long. When I actually compiled it, it was only forty-seven pages, one page too short. I checked both the poems and the table of contents to make sure all page breaks and table entries were as they should be. Everything was fine until I checked the last poem of the book, which is long enough to be its own section.

Existing on my hard drive as a file, the final poem is ten pages long. It’s nine full pages, with six lines bleeding over onto the tenth page. When that same file was inserted into the book, the poem suddenly shrank down to eight pages, seven full and one half. Neither the font nor the margins have changed; none of the spaces between stanzas has changed; no hard page breaks were accidentally inserted into the original. I read the book version, and no text seems to have been lost. Tomorrow, when I’m fresh, I’ll compare the two to figure out what happened.

Yes, I did panic when I noticed I was a page short, and no, I don’t expect that going through the long poem will actually result in an extra page or more. What I’m doing right now is not thinking about it. Tomorrow I’ll assemble the second book, using the same procedure. It should be fifty-three pages long. If it’s at least forty-nine pages, I’ll get one poem to migrate from that book to this. If it also turns up short, I’ll go through my fragments, drafts, and ideas to try to come up with something. Obviously, the tribute to Dickenson is staying put.

Oh, I submitted another set of poems electronically today, bringing my submissions to three. All journals acknowledged receipt, citing a six-month response window. Good thing most lit mags now accept simultaneous submissions.

Puntitas is almost done with _Blood Ties Book 3: Ashes to Ashes_ by J. Armintrout.

How to Make a Table of Contents in Word, Using the Keyboard Alone

Now that I’m just about ready to compile my books and their tables of contents, I’ve checked the Microsoft FAQs to learn to do it with the keyboard alone. I’m running Word 2003 and Windows XP, and I’m using the easiest method described. This post is a revision of the original.

This is a two-step process.

The first step is to go through the document to mark the items that will appear in the table of contents. In this case, I will mark the titles of the sections as Heading Level 1 and the titles of the individual poems as Heading Level 2.

To Mark the titles:

Very Short Way
(which Puntitas learned long after the fact)

1. Highlight the title, using the left-shift+arrow keys to select the text.

2. Press for Heading Level 1 or for Heading Level 2.

Long Way
(which Puntitas actually used)

1. Highlight the title, using the left-shift+arrow keys to select the text.

If you discover later that you’ve selected the wrong text or the wrong heading style, highlight the text again and follow the steps below. For example, if you selected Heading 1 instead of Heading 2, go back to the styles list. Instead of reading Normal in the box, you’ll read Heading 1. Down-arrow once to Heading 2 and apply the style.

2. Press ctrl+shift+s to go to the Styles dialog box.

3. Press alt+c followed by the letter a to move to the Categories combo box and select All Styles.

When I was learning the process on a mock table of contents, I had to type the letter _A the first couple of times to select the All Styles option. After a while, I noticed that it stayed selected. by the time I made up the real TOCs, I could skip this step.

4. Tab once to get to the actual style list.

5. Type the letter h and down arrow a couple of times to select Heading 1 for the section titles or Heading 2 for the poem titles.

Hitting _H once moves you to the first style that begins with that letter, but hitting _H repeatedly does * not * cycle you through the options that begin with the letter _H. You have to use the down- or up-arrow keys to select the specific style.

6. Press alt+a to apply the style to the selected text.

Pressing enter will * not * select this option by default.

After Step 6, you’re back in the document, ready to find the next text string to be selected and marked.

Incidentally, Heading 1 is bolded, 16-pt Arial, and Heading 2 is bolded, italicized, 14-pt Arial.

The second step is to compile the table of contents. If you’re using a screen reader, trust the process. The Table of contents prints up correctly, despite the disappointing link followed by a tab that appears on the screen.

To Compile the TOC

1. Press alt+I to go to the Insert menu.

2. Type the letter n to get to the References submenu.

3. Type the letter d to go into the Index and Tables dialog box.

4. Press ctrl+tab several times (if necessary) to get into the Table of Contents dialog box.

5. Tab through the dialog box to change the default format (using a combo box) and make other adjustments if desired. Then press OK to end.

Word takes longer than expected (five to ten seconds) to compile the table of contents, whether the document is short and simple (like my trial doc, which was less than fifty words long) or longish (like my manuscripts, which were over fifty pages long). My computer is fast enough that I rarely have to wait more than a second or two for it to do anything, the primary exceptions being loading web pages with lots of images.

the table of contents does not update automatically. If you add or delete pages to your document, change a title, or correct mislabelled text, you have to tell Word to make the necessary changes to the TOC.

To Update the TOC

1. Press ctrl+a to select the entire document.

2. Press f9 to go to the Update box.

3. Arrow down once to select the Update All Fields button.

4. Press enter.

That process happens very quickly.

<del datetime=”2008-11-20T20:26:43+00:00

Easy on the Wrists

During my seven weeks of silence, I switched to an ergonomic computer keyboard, the Microsoft Natural ® Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 to be exact. The primary differences between it and a standard keyboard are that a wedge of blank space separates the keys of the left hand from those of the right, that the rows of keys slant down from the spacebar, rather than up, and that there’s a broad ledge between me and the spacebar to wrest my wrists on, when I arrow, etc. It took me about a week to get used to it, and even now, I think I make more typos than with the non-ergonomic model, but I really notice and enjoy the effect on my wrists.

I highly recommend the Natural 4000 to people who do a lot of typing. At fifty to sixty dollars, it’s affordably priced, and there’s no installation beyond plugging it in to a USB port. Software is included to turn the function keys into hotkeys, etc., but anyone familiar with Microsoft’s extensive access and shortcut keys can move around and activate features without using the mouse very much. For example, Pressing the left windows key gets you to the start button. Tabbing from their gets you to the desktop. Pressing the first letter of any item on the desktop moves focus to that icon, and pressing enter on the icon is the same as a double left click.

But I digress.

Over the weekend I worked on the last minute translation I whined about previous post (I sulked and felt even sorrier for myself when I noticed it had been faxed to my contact on November 5). I’d say it was fourteen or fifteen hours worth of work, most of it done Sunday, with a three-hour stretch this morning before work. I felt no wrist pain at all while I typed, and afterward, the only discomfort was a mild ache inside my forearm when I put my weight on that wrist, like when I put my hand on the shower wall to scrub the sole of my foot with the other hand.

I don’t want to spend very much time at the keyboard today, and I haven’t done any knitting because I want to give the wrist time to recover. I’ll try combining the new keyboard with the wrist brace, which has also been very effective.

One of the things I noticed is that I felt happy and relieved to have such a pleasant typing experience. While I don’t think my wrist pain was severe, it was bad enough to make me put off typing till it was absolutely necessary. I hadn’t realized I was doing that until this weekend. I do feel an even fainter version of the ache now, hence the decision to take things easy for a day or two, but I’m not dreading more time on the book.

Another thing I noticed, with this and the last couple of translations, is that I’m much faster now than I was even a year ago. I think my translations are better too, but I don’t think I maintain the consistency of a top-notch translator when dealing with idioms and certain turns of phrase. Still, I suddenly want to try the ATA exam again, and I may try an online masters in translation I read about on a discussion list.

Now, to read something relaxing. The River Wife didn’t quite do it for me. It wasn’t a bad book at all, well crafted and organized around an interesting timeline both thematically and chronologically, but it didn’t work for me because it didn’t fulfill my expectations. The first fourth of the book or so set up a character I really liked and an interesting question. What do you do when you discover you’ve married a bad person? Because of a current work assignment, my mind clamped onto that and wanted to explore more, but the writer moved on to the offspring of that bad person and the question of what to do when dealing with good and bad seeds. That bigger issue was less compelling for me, and the characters, even the “good” ones, were less likable and generally narcissistic. I also didn’t quite get the various characters’ penchant for secrecy. My own experience is that people aren’t very good at keeping them, especially in families, where enough snatches of this and snatches of that leak out over time for fair reconstructions. Anyway, I want something different. I have the third book in the Blood Ties series to relax into and a whole bag of audio books that someone gave me last week to pick through. I settled on Virgins of Paradise by Barbara Wood. I’ll probably start with the former because it involves less mental effort.

Puntitas is about to begin _Blood Ties Book Three: Ashes to Ashes_ by J. Armintrout.

Two Tips for Editing with Word

This is one of Puntitas’ rare forays into practical information. Both tips definitely work with Word 2000 to 2003. A technophobe and PC user, Puntitas can not vouch for their effectiveness on Word 2007, with which she has no experience, but she thinks they probably work just as well.

How to Remove All Font Formatting from a Word Doc

This is for writers who go wild with the fancy fonts and styles, only to realize they need to cut back, whereupon they consider ending their careers rather than go through the document word by word to strip it clean. Font attributes are removed, leaving tab stops, capitalization, paragraph breaks, and other basic manual typewriter formatting in tact.

1. Highlight the entire document (with ) or the section you want to clean up (with ).
2. Copy the selection to the clipboard (with ).
3. Open a new document (with ).
4. Go to the Edit menu (with ).
5. Select the Paste Special option (with the letter S), and press .
6. Arrow up to Unformatted Text, and press .

The document appears on the screen without the additional attributes.

How to Make Word Think a Stanza Is a Paragraph

This is for poets who can’t stand going back through their stanzas to uncapitalize the first letter of each line, only to have to do it again, and then another time, and once more, and …. The added benefit is that Word treats each stanza like a paragraph When paragraph shortcut keys and paragraph styles are used.

1. Type the first line of the stanza in the usual way; do not hit .
2. At the end of the line, press .
3. Repeat Steps 1-2 until you reach the end of the stanza.
4. When you finish typing the last line of the stanza, press twice; do not press .

The stanzas appear to be ordinary stanzas, sans the annoying capitalization issue, which Word 2003 is a lot better about suppressing, but if, say, you hit to move to the previous or next paragraph, the pointer jumps up to the previous or next stanza.

Yes, Puntitas has been editing.

Puntitas reads _The Knitting Circle_ by A. Hood and _Sensational Knitted Socks_ by C. Schurch.