7ryMJjyBMgowKMZdQ~~_7.JPG "cee-dee"){kind=avatar}
Strange request but somebody must have the answer. I'm trying to get a reasonably accurate distance between Cape Canaveral and Miami as the crow flies. Can anybody help? Somebody must have access to a map of America, namely Florida. Thank you in anticipation. Maybe a holiday brochure on Florida would help.
As some of you know, I'm a creative writer. It's for a full-length sci-fi novel I'm writing set in 2854 A.D. the only survivor of five year mission to fly at the speed of light. On his return he finds that by flying at the speed of light, not only had he been put into a different time zone so everybody is long since dead by the time he returns, but he also discovers, much to his distress, that man has not progressed but has regressed back into the dark ages as the result of the Fifth World War and that his lifetime's work and knowledge is of no use to him or anybody else for that matter and that he is now the unlearned one and he has to begin all over again. It's a heavy, brooding melancholy - Buck Rogers it ain't! 
. I've got about 35,000 words of it on my hard drive. It'll top 100,000 words by the time I'm finished with the possibility of a sequel.
My biggest problem is I still use imperial measurements as opposed to metric and being English I tend to use English idioms: as phoney as a nine bob note. B****rd as opposed to A***ole. Bloody as opposed to god-dammed. Biggest problem of all though is having to spell kilometre the American way - kilometer. All these though are minor problems. With regards to proofreading children are excellent at it because they tend to read slower, word for word. If you've written a short composition, your mind reads it as it should be. Thus said I am forever going over the same areas trying to improve on the plot, so any typos I pick up automatically. As you said, I could type in he as opposed to the or she and it wouldn't underline it in red. One spell check that tends to slip through in tabloids is the word "forever". It invariably comes out as "for ever" which is wrong! It gets right up my nose! It's not the journalist's fault. He probably types it in as one word, but it is automatically "corrected" as it gets typed out.
"In Him I Place My Trust" was written and self-published by me so I have the copyright. but it was a publication that never made any money. Far from it, it was a publication what cost me a lot of money, but although no more than fifty copies were ever produced, I still required official permission from it's contributors to publish and that their work was being given free of charge for me to use at my absolute discression etc.
Rudyard Kipling had to self-publish. Once he became established, publishers who'd rejected his work came crawling. He told them to kiss his a**e.
As my creative writing tutor told me - write it first, THEN worry about the legalities!
Microsoft Works - it "Works" for me, anyway Sorry about the delay in replying - I read your prompt on another thread 
Ha ha, I wondered if you'd cotton on.
I got on with Works just fine for some years but as I said above, it was people not being able to read or convert Works files that prompted me to give in and use Word instead.
I tend to do things longhanded. If people can't convert, providing it's not several thousands words in length I take quality photos of my MS and just download it as an attachment. If I'm doing it for pleasure I use Arial 14 point 1.5 line spacing. If it's going to an editor, then it's double spaced between the lines, again in 14 point Arial but with a one inch margin either side, so he can put in any comments or carry out slight amendments. The longer he has it the greater the chance of it being accepted. It's essential to read as many short stories as possible from the magazine you hope to get a strike with. What works with The People's Friend would be thrown straight into the bin if sent to FHM, and if the editorial requirements say 1300 words max and you send in an MS containing 1500 words, no matter how good it is, it'll be rejected. If you're writing a Christmas story, send it in no later than June. A fiction editor might get as many as three hundred Christmas stories of which about a third will never make it beyond the bin. His team will then read through them again rejecting more, until it's down to the last seventy. He'll buy forty, and maybe publish about eight. The remainder are filed away for future use. It's a cutthroat business. You certainly couldn't make a living out of it!
I used to belong to a creative writing class, but unfortunately most are beginners or intermediate. After five weeks the tutor at one of my classes pulled me aside and told me I was in the wrong class, that I needed advanced/editing for publication. as my standard of writing far exceededwhat she was teaching. She wasn't flattering me, but sincere. Unfortunately the clocest class of that nature was nearly twenty miles away. I'll send you a sample of my work some time. That is, if you want it.
