Keeping Up To Date

It’s been another week of few words being written. As long as they’re being put down, I’m okay with the slow pace.

I did find myself in the odd situation of having to go into fine detail with a number of people over the last week about the book binding decisions that are being made for the special book printing that I am working on at the moment. The number of odd looks I was getting about why I knew so much about the publishing and printing of books was entertaining. I had to remind myself that not everyone knows I’m a published author (a self-published author, at that), and had to refrain from giving them pointed blank looks in return (it’s a special skill I’ve developed -- the pointed blank look).

The book continues to sap my time. Because its physical printing is going to be so long after the original version was released, it is effectively a new edition. To that end, I have been engaged in editing for it to be a new, revised edition. That alone isn’t too bad, as I was expecting editing to happen to make it ready for publishing. It’s realising that I’ve got 26,000+ pages of original reference material that were updated and I have to go back through it all and find what’s changed. I thought that things were going to be fairly straight forward, with margin marks to tell me where things have changed in the parent references, but that would be too easy. I was a little concerned when I couldn’t find any margin marks, so headed for the change logs, only to find that there were page after page of annotated changes affecting the full document, and that the margin marks were not being used due to the extensive and total nature of the changes to the references.

To say my heart sank is an understatement.

On the upside, I got through 20,000+ pages last week, and feel like I’m on the home stretch for it now. I’m not going to get too excited about being able to wash my hands of the book, but it does feel like it’s getting closer. At the very least, I know that I won’t have any responsibility for the book from next year, so there’s a no-later-than date that I won’t have to worry about it after. It’s getting past that point for the rest of this year that’s causing the current crop of issues.

Time to shift more effort into the words I want to write, not the words I have to write.