Friday 17 August 2007

Editing, MATs and piles of paper

Most writers, in fact surely all of us except those with humungous sales, earn their living by doing something else (obviously not by MATing).

I earn mine by editing other people's non-fiction, and/or proofreading it. I have just quoted for a piece of editing work and while I am waiting for the editor at the publishing house to say whether my quote and the length of time I've said it will take are acceptable, I MATed (just a bit) on the net, and I found this while searching for a solution to my horrible when-I-add-a-picture-or-a-quote-the-line-spacing-on-my-blog-goes-single problem. (I know, they hardly seem related, but you'd be surprised):
cartoon from www.weblogcartoons.com
Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

The third pile of paper accurately represents the state of my writing room (mostly piles of editing in varying states of completion, but also one novel pile and one short story pile - writers of novels and short stories have to research, you know, and research often leads to paper). Anyway the cartoon made me laugh while I was trying to solve an irritating problem (which has been solved HERE, if any other Blogger is suffering similar symptoms), and there are lots of Dave Walker's cartoons on We Blog Cartoons (link above) that you can copy into your blog for free, if they appeal to you. Dave Walker says he lets us do this because:

The more people who enjoy my work the better, and life is generally too short not to give things away.

I, uncharitably perhaps, shall not be giving any of my editing work away.

3 comments:

Dave Walker said...

Thanks Angela - glad the cartoon was a help.

There is of course a lot of my work that I don't give away!

BooksPlease said...

Angela, did you solve the line-spacing problem? I find that adding a photo moves everything down the page and have given up trying to use the quotes button. The whole thing drives me to distraction sometimes. Is there a cartoon to illustrate that do you think? I'll go and have a look.

Angela Young said...

Dear Booksplease, YES, I did, thank heavens. But I obviously didn't make it clear in my post, so I've highlighted and put in capitals the link to the solution: HERE in the paragraph underneath the cartoon. Click on that and you'll find that that blogger gives you new html for your blogspot template, which you'll need to write into it and also delete a bit. It's quite simple, if a bit terrifying, but if you have trouble I'd be happy to help. But perhaps you, unlike me, are an expert html-er?