Reading my book

Here I am at work and in between helping people, I have my book on my screen and I'm reading it. I ran spell check and grammar check first and can I just say that the Microsoft Word grammar check is totally off? That grammar check doesn't take the rest of the sentence or paragraph into consideration. I rarely use that grammar check for that reason. If I changed all the things it suggested, then nothing would make sense at all.

However, it did point out a few obvious errors where an extra word wasn't needed. So for that, I'm thankful. I do find it surprising that after I had proof read my book myself several times last year, that are still mistakes. I haven't touched my book since probably January or March of 2008 but I did that on purpose. It is often helpful to leave a work in progress alone for a while and then come back to it with a fresh mind.

So, I begin a new and will read my book again and see what happens. According to the Word program, I have a bit over 62,000 words in my file and it is 281 pages long with 1 inch margins on top & bottom with 1.25 inch margins on the sides and double spaced lines. The Writer's Market book suggests one and half inch margins all the way around but I think that's just a waste of space. Besides, I believe it all depends on what the publisher wants.

Whenever I write, I often wish I had a laptop of my own so that I could read my book, write and create where ever I am. While I do have laptop, it's not technically mine. It belongs to my company, a work laptop. So if I were to get a laptop, I'd consider getting a netbook or a mini. That way, I could carry it everywhere and with the size of the tiny laptops today, It would be like carrying a note pad. I do have my book printed out on regular paper and could always carry that with me, but since it's 281 pages, it would be a hefty thing to carry around. Not to mention a pain in the butt to edit on paper first and then edit it again on the computer.

For now, I carry my book on a 2gb flash drive that I plug into the work computer and then copy the book on to my home computer as a backup. So I may do some research on netbooks. I really only need something that can run a word processing program and a long battery life would be nice too. Perhaps I'll see if any other writers out there have used a netbook of some kind and have suggestions. Of course, price will probably be the deciding factor for me.

Now to get back to work. Until later, Thanks for reading!