I thought I was being very impressive, trying to learn Scrivener and all. But now one of my publishers is asking that we begin using Word stylesheets for our manuscripts. Had I not started learning these a few months ago I would, frankly, be Freaking Out, because they do not seem intuitive to me. They’re not actually hard, as it happens, but if I hadn’t had a good basic primer (thank you, LJ Cohen, for your e-book formatting primer. Again. :)), yeah, flipping out.

Instead it’s actually already become pretty clear to me that it’s going to be much easier to use stylesheets from the get-go than try to retrofit material for e-and-POD-pub. And to that end I have discovered, albeit a bit grimly, that one *can* set a new default template in OpenOffice, and macros for italics and whatnot, so I’ve just got to…do that. Learn to do it. And all. *grim*

In the meantime, I’ve scraped up the bubbled paint, sanded it down, and filled in the cracks and holes in the kitchen walls. I was going to put masking tape up, but I’ve lost heart. Mom says she never masks anything anyway, and it’s hard to argue that it would be messier when I’m done than it was before I started, so maybe I’ll just go for it.

Also, I got Sarah Rees Brennan’s UNSPOKEN (although I have been advised not to actually read it until the second book is out because apparently there’s an OMG ending), and I have her other DEMON books, and I’m going to sit down and read SRB until I have absorbed her ambiance and am an awesome, wonderful, heartrending, laughter-inducing YA novelist like she is.