The Great Formatting Fix of 2009

Okay, maybe the title is a bit over-dramatic, but it seemed like a major project to me. See, I first wrote my novel Zion Rising eleven years ago in Wordperfect, and converted it to a Word file somewhere along the way. I also set it aside and forgot about it for ten years. Last summer when I recovered the novel (perhaps the subject of another post) and started to revise it, I noticed that while I could get it to look okay, whenever I tried to do anything like add a header, change the font, or copy and paste a couple of chapters into a new document, there seemed to be some major hidden formatting problems. Last week, I decided that it was finally time to bite the bullet and do somthing about it. But what to do? I saved the document as plain text, so I could see where there were extra spaces, line breaks, and other things that looked like they didn't belong. Then I went through the entire novel, and took all those out. I deleted all spaces between paragraphs and put in just a line break. This took my proabably four or five hours over the course of five days, but it was worth it. I copied the cleaned up plain text and pasted it into a new document, changed the font, margins, paragraph indents, spacing, etc. into standard format, and it worked! I was very happy. When I created the header, and it added it correctly for every page of the novel, I wanted to kiss the monitor. I didn't, though. The monitor is covered with grimy handprints and who knows what disgusting germs. Then it was just a matter of centering the chapter headings and section breaks, and adding the underlining back in. Actually, I just made it italics, since that seems to be the standard nowdays. I thought that might take a while, but I didn't overdo the italics, so it didn't take long. There was just one more problem. I recently learned that standard formatting calls for only one space after sentences instead of two as I've always done. Who knew? I was worried about how to fix that, until good ol' Suzette told me I could use the find and replace feature to do it for me. It took only about a minute to fix it. Now I just have to get used to typing only one space after sentences. This clearly falls into the "teaching an old dog a new trick" category, but I'll get used to it eventually. So, now I have a clean, properly formatted copy of Zion Rising to send to publishers. All I need now is a publisher who wants to read it.