Feeling Misty-Eyed

I'm working on the original manuscript of Ride to Raton to prepare it for becoming an electronic or e-book. The instructions for doing this suggest putting the manuscript through a particular process that clears out extraneous coding. This will prevent the conversion software from going haywire.

I hesitated to do this, because it clears out the italics from the manuscript. I use italics to indicate interior thought and foreign words. Ride to Raton has a lot of both.

However, because of a problem that crept in because I didn't do the suggested process with The Man from Shenandoah, I decided the work would be worth it to upload a completely clean manuscript.

This process is requiring me to read carefully certain sections with lots of Spanish in them. I'm having a peculiar reaction to this. Not because of the language. Not because of the mild irritation of needing to do the process. Instead, I'm singularly moved by the awful situations in which I put my characters. When the cold winds blew and chilled the bodies of my leads, I felt the cold. When they tenderly shared their family composition with each other, I was touched. When something really bad happened, I felt the pain and I cried.

Wow! Words are so powerful. Even though I wrote them all those years ago, they are still potent enough to shake me.