The Queen of Crows: Available 3/1

Today, The Queen of Crows was unleashed on an unsuspecting world. (I don't mean you, of course. You are obviously the handsomest and cleverest of all pandas, suspecting things left and right, hither and yon! It must be so, if you are perusing Monica's blogs over breakfast, and chasing down your evening snack with my own humble little scribblepad.)

But what is The Queen of Crows?, ask the poor, confused pandas who have just wandered in from the bamboo forest.  It is, of course, a digital-release short story by my good friend Monica Valentinelli. The story is full of magic and bones and fire and revenge, set on the eve of the real-life horror known as the Navajo Long Walk, and it is delicious.

In addition to the story, Monica has packed a selection of other goodies into the PDF: an original portrait by artist Leanne Buckley, author's notes on the story inspiration and her concerns on writing historical fiction based in another culture, a brief discussion about the main character, a crash course on her Violet War setting, and more.

Plus, you get my fabulous cover! And interior layout. And editing. Yes. So be a good panda and go download The Queen of Crows, won't you?

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So tired...

It's been an exhausting week, and today was the worst of it. The snow-madness outside isn't helping much. I was ready to crawl into bed when I got home from work. However! The Monica has asked me to help out with a story she's going to be posting for sale soon.

Hurray for layout projects! They are my favorite. To me, text formatting is like ... a crossword puzzle, of sorts. Relaxing, finicky, tricksy and a good excuse to exercise the channel all the typesetting-perfectionist tendencies I try not to unleash on dissertation students. (I'm not sure they'd believe me if I told them that, though...)

The Monica has also asked me to assist with graphics and cobbling together a cover. This sounds fun, but is Very Hard Work when you're falling asleep and thinking half-awake thoughts about yetis and cookies (not necessarily in that order) as you peruse stock imagery sites. Hm. Perhaps I should put the perusal off until the weekend...

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Geek Glee: LaTeX

Despite the deadline madness, I was able to attend the free workshop day of TUG 2009, the annual TeX Users Group conference. There were issues with the computer setup, so the presenters didn't have a working build of LaTeX to demonstrate for the first half of the day -- but that was okay, neither did I. Rather, I had the editing program but not the add-ons that allow you to actually "TeX" and view your formatted document. Still, after all the glitches, I did manage to get a full build on my laptop after lunch and then finally got to see what the coding I'd been faithfully copying down actually produced.

I am impressed and a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of tags and such in the language. One of the presenters made a point of commenting that LaTeX is much better at handling auto-numbering for sections and subsections than MS Word, but I'd have to dispute that point -- they both seem to work equally well, if you know what you're doing.

Another staffer of one of the academic departments attended the workshop as well, much to my delight. I don't generally have much contact with them outside of answering dissertation questions and fishing for publication updates. She offered to send me some files to practice my TeXing, so I'm looking forward to that. I'm also looking forward to deconstructing the dissertation class files and such that we have posted on our website to see if I can figure out how to fix the most common glitches. Better hurry on that though -- I have a standing offer from one of the presenters to try to catch her over the next few days for help if I can't figure it out on my own.

Also: I've been reading up on Visual Basic in MS Office and dang ... I think I've found my next project. Apparently I could write a macro to auto-format all the tables in a given document.

Glee!

In other news, going to see Harry Potter tonight with Edige and his sister. Should be fun!

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Oh yeaaah ... I'm an editor!

I received the files for a freelance job today, due by the end of the week. Woot! Both content editing and formatting, this time, for a dissertation meant for a different university. Nice. Here's hoping I can keep the taint of the internetz out of my editing long enough to get through the document.

This also gives me a chance to compare our formatting guide with the other school's, and our MS Word template vs. theirs. I'm already jealous of their fabulous formatting guide cover. (/sigh) My client pointed out some problems with their template that I managed to address with ours, as well, so I'll have to take a closer look at that as I go.

I also recently discovered that one of the changes from MS Word 2003 to 2007 seems to have perma-glitched my template's subheading settings for 2007 users, unless they use exactly what I've programmed into it and don't deviate from that at all. Which isn't very helpful, IMO. The previous system was incredibly intuitive, and the new version seems to have taken a perfectly reasonable, concrete setup option for programming subhead numbering and zapped it into a fine mist that permeates the program in a decentralized miasma.

Microsoft, I shake my fist at thee! Grr!

Also, I signed up for the TeX Users Group free workshop day for LaTeX. /happy dance!

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Geek-glee!

I finally hunkered down and installed MikTeX and TeXnicCenter on my XP machine at work yesterday, so I could start figuring out this LaTeX typesetting program. I expected it to be similar to HTML. As it turns out, it's more of a programming language than anything resembling a word processing application. I mean, it even has a compiler and everything -- I can't remember the last time I had to use a compiler. College, definitely. C++? Pascal? Hm, strangely fuzzy, that. Anyway. It's going to take a while to really get the hang of this, but it's already starting to make sense in small pieces.

And then! Imagine my reaction when I discovered, on the very next day, that the TeX User's Group is having their annual US conference at Notre Dame this summer. With a day of free workshops and everything! Glee!

Seriously, I literally giggled out loud with happiness and it took everything I had to not go to tell IT Guy the exciting news. I felt like such a geek.

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