I input corrections to a whopping two chapters today--the aptly numbered chapter 13 and the relatively benign chapter 14. I did so little mainly because there have been certain errands I've been ignoring, and I couldn't ignore them any more, so I got quite the late start. But the other reason was because chapter 13 felt obligated to live up to certain negative stereotypes about numbers.

To wit: There were some errors early in the chapter, and when I fixed them, they altered the layout. No huge deal, I laid out the chapter again. But then it turned out that, with the new layout, the chapter was a page longer than it was before.

NFW--I was not going to lay out the entire latter portion of the book again. So I went back and laid out chapter 13 a third time.

What saved my sandwich was the decision to replace the ornaments that marked breaks within the chapter with blank space. There are, for whatever occult reason, quite a few breaks in chapter 13.

You know what's nice about blank space? The way you can make it bigger or smaller, and people don't care. In fact, I'm going to guess this is why publishers stopped using ornaments--when you vary space around a little landmark like that, it's a lot more noticeable.