welcome, my own dear troll

My daughter tells me that people who lurk on the internet saying unpleasant things are called trolls. So lucky me, I have my very own troll, who seems to take pleasure in reading a blog he or she so obviously dislikes and making a snide comment about once a year. Well, whatever gets you through the night, Mr. or Mrs. Troll. Glad to be of service. Hate away.

It was a fraught evening. Yesterday the publisher sent me the writing book manuscript in Word form, because I want to post bits of it here and cannot do that from the print-ready PDF file. But the Word file was full of errors, and not consistent ones, which would have shown me that it was simply a formatting issue - odd words wrong throughout, so I spent hours last night proofreading. Worst of all, there are a lot of quotes from famous writers, and almost all their names were suddenly in lower case. Most, but not all, so I thought someone had simply decided to switch the names as a design issue and had done so sloppily.

I would never presume to include writers I admire and print their names in lower case: alice munro. wayson choy. ernest hemingway, for God's sake! I hit the roof and was hysterical. The publisher was on a train and did not understand the extent of my concern, so left me languishing in despair till midday today.

It's all fine, apparently. Formatting. Incomprehensible. Alice, Ernest, Wayson are fine, and I am recovering, after wasting much of a day and a lot of energy. I know, it's a tiny issue to any normal person, but writers are not normal. As perhaps you've noticed. As you have certainly noted, dear troll.