Subscribers will see that sometimes you aren’t the issue, not really. You’re married to an alcoholic and your problem is that you’ve enabled it. It’s Raw and uncensored, and I expect it will hit home for more men than it should.
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The manuscript is almost complete. I have to go through the book and address all the editor notes and comments, rewriting or expanding as needed. The cover is already complete, the next steps will be the desktop publishing.
If you don’t know what that means, you’re in for a treat. See a book is more than just a long essay or blog post. There are the words, and then there is the presentation and subtext of them. I was talking with Thomas P Seager, PhD two weeks back about the process of desktop publishing, or everything surrounding a book, other than the writing and the cover art.
Typography is a big one (you usually call this fonts) because this choice can alter your reading experience and you won’t even know it. Have you ever read a book that seemed like a slog to get through? Sure, the material wasn’t complex or densely packed, but you had to stop constantly, rub your eyes, take a breather, put it down and start again later? Yeah, that’s because someone didn’t bother to typeset their work.
I won’t get too technical, but there are a few concepts that are good to know, and once you see them in others you cannot unsee them. X height is the height between x and X. For physical printing it’s good to have an x height of 40%, or lower case letters being almost half the height of the capital letters. This allows your brain to read faster and easier. It turns out we don’t actually see letter, but we see words as if they are a type of hieroglyph. the contrasting heights allow you to see words (not w o r d s).
Serifs are the little chiselled areas around letters. Originally because the stones that Romans were carving text into would wear down words otherwise, they provide a connection to words that sans-serif (sans is french for without) lack.
Large amounts of text are harder to read without them.
The last aspect is white space. There is leading (or the space between lines of text) kerning (the space between letters and words) margins and borders. For your standard 8.5x11 sheet of paper held at arms length, your eye can comfortably scan about 4-6 inches across. Wider lines are harder to read, but lines shorter are also harder to read. It’s about minimizing movement.
At the same time, lines that are spaced too closely run into the problem where you accidentally read the same line twice, and lines spaced to far make the eye have to move too much, both cause strain over time. There’s a hundred little places for white space to give your eye an easy transition into the next place you want it to read, as well as create pauses for the brain so as to get ready to read a separate idea or different topic.
I know you didn’t sign up for a desktop publishing degree, but the point is there are so many small details that no one will notice if they are done properly, and everyone will notice if they are done poorly.
This is the part of writing that I love, and the part that so many very good and best selling authors ignore. Me and the doc were looking at a very prestigious book on cold water therapy and the cover was just phoned in nonsense, which tells the reader something:
If you ignored the first thing people see about your work, and they see a lack of effort, care or attention to detail, what other elements of the book are also phoned in?
Now no author is perfect, Amazon sends me user submitted typeo’s that have missed 3 drafts and 2 editing processes so I am aware I’m not perfect either. volume 1 had 23 errors when it went to print which have now been fixed. Each one of those errors took the reader out of their flow state which ultimately reduced their ability to enjoy the work.
So the goal isn’t perfection, but to remove as many obvious mistakes as one can, to make the reader never even notice the hours passing by, to pick up and put your book down in a single session, almost like it was absorbed and not deliberately read.
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So in a few days I’ll be done with the final edits and it’ll be about another week to desktop publish the thing. At this rate I expect a release date of November 29, so we are all working hard to give you the best book about sexual dynamics in the red pill for men in relationships possible.
And now for subscribers, a mental model about alcoholic women
So you married the adult child of an alcoholic
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Not every wife-captain is ultra-competent. It’s not so much about the power for her but the need for control. Some women are alcoholics, children of abuse, or insecure about their identities. The need to captain for them is a form of self-care, a way to stave off their nagging neuroticism.
