Gremlins

I tried, I really tried to hire someone to do this part.

For the past several days I've been crawling through the manuscript, looking for every place where I've changed the capitalization or punctuation on a Belle Époque somewhere -- or worse yet, forgotten the stupid diacriticals. And checking things like whether opening and closing quotation marks are italicized properly.

French...is difficult. I don't know why so much of our modern machinery can't handle the stuff, but my various spell checkers and grammar checkers just have no sense about getting the spelling of French terms correct.

And then there's those choices...my grammar checker insisted that it is Art nouveau. Wikipedia prefers Art Nouveau and there is better source for this. This is why I laugh in the face of grammar pundits, worse, those cranky ones who leave a negative review because "they found a clear typo in the first chapter."

Dudes, why is there an MLA, an APA, Chicago, NYT? The fact that there is more than one house style in publishing should tell you that there isn't always one clearly right answer.

I did solve my formatting woes and I've finally got the chapter epigraphs sitting correctly. A lot of weird work-arounds to get it so the clue poems are set out correctly below the chapter heading, then the actual text begins with the zero-indent, three capitalized words format. With luck, given the changes Scrivener has made in Version 3, I can translate most of this to the pdf as well and not have to start from scratch.

At least I can sort of think clearly. I'm home recovering from surgery and the bleeding isn't anywhere near as annoying as the weakness. The main thing I'm short of is the attention to keep staring at text which has gotten far too familiar.

So maybe it is time to spruce up my factories and take pictures of them before Satisfactory 1.0 breaks them all. (Like most players, I intend to start a new world when 1.0 releases.)