This was yesterday, before we got an inch of rain that cooled things down. That’s a real LOL statement right there. This minute I’m having a dilemma. I have not had my sufficiency and fanciful of coffee yet. But the thought of hot liquids is not appealing. Time to switch to iced coffee.

The book formatting is coming along; I’m getting the hang of Word. I decided the book needed an index to the extra-book material (Missy’s malapropisms, Gilbert’s unattributed quotes, and the Old Things & Ways supplemental material).

I will fiddle with the subheading. I’m having real issues with Word’s spell check. I can kinda sorta see that foreign language phrases may come up. But qualm and quash?

Quite a while ago, I took an online class on book indexing. I have a completely filled notebook, and even bought the book! Who knew it would come in handy?

Here’s a question for all y’all. As you can well imagine, there are rules for indexing. The most fundamental is this:

The order of characters is

spaces; true symbols; numerals (0-9); letters (A-Z)

HOWEVER!

There are two schemes to indexing, letter-by-letter and word-by-word. Letter-by-letter violates this fundamental rule, because it ignores the primacy of spaces. For example, if you look at the entries under “I,” word-by-word arrangement would be: I bid, I could, I would, It isn’t. I’ve arranged the index letter-by-letter because I am assuming that middle school kids have not yet been exposed to the rules of indexing. Does this sound reasonable to you? I also appreciate that grownups will be more likely to look at the index. But again, doesn’t letter-by-letter seem more intuitive, especially in an index that can be taken in with just a glance?

And yes. I have gone off into the weeds.

(I just corrected a mistake in the index. If you see others, please let me know!)

Drudge work Monday awaits!