Journal mcgrew's Journal: Nobots Chapter Ten 8
Not a whole lot has been happening. I took Wednesday off because they forecasted sixty degrees, probably the last time I'll see weather that warm before I retire.
I got stoned and wasted the day working on my books. I have the paperback version of Nobots formatted to the smaller page size and typeface up to chapter 31. I got a postcard from a printer in St Louis that probably spams everyone who buys and ISBN, and their prices are more reasonable than Lulu's, but you have to buy in bulk and I'll have to call or email to find out if they do 4.5x7 inch newsprint paperbacks.
I got The Paxil Diaries mostly formatted, but converting the dumb quotes to smart quotes may be problematic, since "replace" in Open Office replaces a dumb quote with another dumb quote, even when you paste a smart quote into the "replace" field. There's surely an easy way, I'd hate to have to do it by hand. And it's twice as long as Nobots.
I haven't touched Mars, Ho!. I'll have to re-read what I've written to write more of it. I may try to stretch it to 100,000 words (20,000 more than Paxil) and see if I can get Baen to publish it when it's finished. 100,000 words is their minimum book size.
I worry that making it that long may make it boring. I don't want to write an All the Lives He Led, I returned that book to the library when I was only half finished with it. Was Pohl getting paid by the word, or was he trying to write a futuristic Lord of the Rings?
My new cleaning lady is supposed to show up in an hour, but I won't blame her if she doesn't show. It's only nine degrees out there, that's roughly -13 C.
I sure don't want to leave the house. I think I'll watch Christmas movies this afternoon -- Die Hard, Die Hard Two, Lethal Weapon, Lethal Weapon Two...
Nah, I'll work on the books.
Smart Quotes (Score:2)
Apparently you're not the only one with the problem: https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=39902 [openoffice.org]
You'll have to replace them with the "start quote" and "end quote" characters separately, but the power of regex shall persevere.
(You'll also probably want to replace them individually to make sure it's matching the correct side of the quote.)
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What I'd planned to do (which obviously didn't work) was to replace all quotes with end quotes, then replace all quotes preceeded by a space with a start quote. Easy, simple, but...
I can't solve your curly quotes (Score:2)
But I CAN recommend watching "48 Hrs" over Lethal Weapon. It's the template.
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I saw Lethal Weapon last night, tonight it's Loaded weapon... [wikipedia.org] (I scored today, I'm loaded).
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Merry XXmas.
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No, they're rated R. Now, if Fritz the Cat (the only feature length cartoon to ever get an X rating from the MPAA) were a Xmas movie...
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I meant like XX for Beer, XXX for whiskey. ;-)
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Go to the link in my sig, look for "Grandpa Got Dismembered By A Shambler"