Acknowledging my limitations

In the introduction to my book I acknowledge that I am not an academic or an intellectual, and in the epilogue I try to argue that these facts should not disqualify me from speaking on the subject of Christianity. However, having received my proof copy of 'unbelievable', and having started to go over it, yet again, checking for errors, it is obvious to me that I am not a writer either. In fairness there is not that much in the way of alterations that needs to be made - an oversight in formatting here, a slight change of punctuation there - it is just that the prose itself feels clunky and amateurish.

I have been here before of course, many times. I remember reading a blog of an established author, commenting on his latest project, and he said that he went from thinking that his typescript was the most insightful and elegant piece of work ever produced, to worrying that it was the most disastrous drivel imaginable. That is what I am doing, and have been doing over the course of many months. Only time will tell which of these evaluations is nearest the mark.

I have nearly finished making the final adjustments to the proof copy and over the next day or two I will resubmit for publication. I will probably request another proof copy, but I have promised myself that barring a major cock-up in formatting, these will be my final edits.

Incidentally, I have recently had something of a breakthrough regarding the formatting of the typescript. When I started writing, I think I was still using MS office, but some time ago I switched from Windows to Linux and so began using LibreOffice, or OpenOffice as it was then. I saved my documents as .doc's rather than LibreOffice documents as that format can be used by both systems. When I came to format them properly for publication, I found that I had a hell of a job with things like headers and footers and bullets and things, and particularly section breaks. Sometimes, alterations to these things did not 'take' and I would return to the documents to find that the alterations had not saved. I had to make the alterations again and then export them to a pdf in order to save them. Most bizarre. I put this down to the fact that the documents must be riddled with hidden artifacts from each of the two Office programs, artifacts that are only compatible for one system or another. Yesterday however, I discovered that if I save the documents in LibreOffice's native format, all these problems go away. This will make it much easier when I come to format my final draft in the next few days. Hurrah!

This is quite a long and rambling post and I'm not sure if anyone is ever going to read it. Nevertheless, it occurs to me that I have not yet explained exactly what my book is about. I shall try to remedy this in my next post.