Yesterday morning I decided I'd make some notes for Penny's birthday party, just to make sure we had enough stuff for the goodie bags, and to plan what food we should get in addition to the cake and ice cream.

So I wrote down the names of everyone who was coming, and added them up.

And realized that we're going to have four children and somewhere between eleven and thirteen adults. (Well, five children, actually, but I don't think Sarah's going to make much of a dent in the food, as she's only five months old. She might have a few spoonfuls of ice cream, but that's about it.)

A minimum of fifteen cake-and-ice cream-eating people. Maybe seventeen. Those are some mighty thin slices of cake. And some pretty pathetic scoops of ice cream.

So Matt and I decided that we'll need a second cake, and another box of ice cream.

And there's the cupcakes for daycare to make, as well.

That's four - count 'em - four boxes of cake mix and four tubs of icing that we're going through. In two days.

I think I need to start making up a list of things that need to be done, and figuring out exactly when I'm going to do them.

In other news, I'm an idiot.

When I finished my edits of Willow Bough, about a month ago, I gave it to K.T. and Karen to read, to ask for advice and input. Karen, especially, was very helpful, because she's not as familiar with the world and the setting I used, so she pointed out some things that were confusing or unclear, which was nice.

Both of them recommended that I take some time to expand one of the relationships in the book, and also to tell a little more about some of the secondary characters. Which is something I'd thought might be necessary, or else it might have been overkill, so their input was great.

So here's the thing. I'd put the whole novel (novelette, perhaps, as it wasn't even 40,000 words long, and 50,000 is the usual demarcation for a novel, though there are exceptions)... where was I? Oh, yes. I'd put the whole thing into a single Word document. I did this for several reasons.

For one thing, having it in Word would provide a more accurate word count. My word counts in HTML included, for example, all the HTML tags. There turned out to be a difference of nearly 5,000 words, when I made this switch. That's a whole chapter!

For another, I wanted to be able to print it out in a variety of formats - with page numbers and headers, or proper manuscript format, etc. - without having to go through a huge pile of hoops.

So putting it in Word was actually not a bad idea.

The bad idea was that, after I'd gotten input from K.T. and Karen... I made changes directly to the Word document.

Spectacularly bad idea, if I wanted to be able to re-post it in HTML.

Going from HTML to Word isn't too hard. You have to sacrifice a black chicken that was hatched under the full moon in order to get the formatting to behave, but after that, it's smooth sailing.

Going from Word back to HTML... Well, that's another story.

Option 1: Copy/paste from Word into the HTML. The problem here is that I then have to go back and add all the necessary tags. The <p> and </p> tags around each paragraph - which was do-able with a couple of clever search/replaces. The <blockquote> tags around the long flashback scenes, which wasn't too bad since there are only a couple. ...The <i></i> tags around all the italicized stuff. Of which there is a lot, because every foreign word is italicized, and the short memory/flashbacks, and emphasized words. And there's no easy way to find them except going through by hand.

Option 2: Let Word do the conversion, and then strip out all the utter crap it sticks in an HTML file. This actually worked fairly well for the long stretches of text that I didn't change much. Word stuck in a hard return at the end of every line, which was quite annoying, but a couple of clever search/replaces took care of that in most cases. The awful bits of this were the sections where I'd written a lot of new stuff.

Because everywhere that I'd put two spaces after a period (which is technically what you're supposed to do), Word had done this particularly horrible code to get them both to display. Gods forbid the code just add a &nbsp; where the extra space would be. No, Word stuck in this huge long bit of code, every time, just to make sure both of my spaces showed up.

I wound up using a combination of the two options. It took me almost two hours to get Willow Bough back into HTML format.

I'm an idiot. From now on, I do all my writing in HTML, and only slap it into Word for printing purposes.

Sheesh.

(All of which is certainly way more than you ever wanted to hear about my problems with Word, I know.)

A Penny anecdote, to clear the cobwebs.

Penny is still very firmly Daddy's Girl... except when I'm in the shower. When I go take a shower, Penny really very much wants to join me. This morning, just as I was getting shampoo in my eyes, I heard her perfunctory little knock on the bathroom door.

She can't open doors yet. I said, "Hi, Penny!" and went on washing my hair.

And then there was a bit too much light in the shower, and I looked down to see Penny pull aside the inner shower curtain and blink in surprise when she got splashed with water. "Mommy! Water!" Guess I hadn't closed the door all the way. Or else she figured out how to open it.

Matt, at the bathroom door: "Penny, sweetie, you want to come with Daddy?"

Penny didn't even look over her shoulder at him. "Mommy!"

--Liz