The book manuscript is in! - and some changes afoot
What I did in the final stages of draft number 3 of my book manuscript.
Hallo, readers!
WHAT a few weeks it’s been. As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I was aiming to get Draft no. 2 of HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY to my editor in the first half of September. Last week I managed it.
The final two weeks were damned nasty. I was further behind EV-UH-RY DAY.
Four days before the day I pressed send, I decided that due diligence and puzzling through the hard stuff had gone on for long enough for now. It was time for…. the locust manoeuvre.
Imagine you have a 350pp draft manuscript, and four days in which to press send. Starting from zero, that means signing off on about a hundred pages a day - zooming through it like a plague of locusts, consuming a few of the most heinous bloopers along the way. Of course, I wasn’t exactly starting off from zero. About 340pp were already written, and 5pp were prelims like the TOC and the list of illustrations. I’d revised or edited or gussied up most of the chapters multiple times. Some 25pp comprised the bibliography I’d already put together for Draft no,. 2, to which I merely (ha! understatement) had to add the new stuff.
But there’s something satisfying about a blank slate, a blank page, or a fresh check-list through which one flies at lightning speed, chomping past the easy stuff, putting it on the done-list, like this:
100pp/day meant signing off on about 12pp/hour: ticking queries resolved, flagging those for later, and keeping turning those pages. I got through a combination of super-easy and slower pages each day. Some pages were, in theory, almost effortless, like the bibliography. In practice, there turned out to be 60+ new references to add to it, half of which I’d been too busy (another ha!) to add to Zotero when I had read the things, so that was another step to stumble through, but whatever.
But I turned the ms in! The Friday morning resolution to turn the thing in at the end of Monday became a thing turned in on Tuesday at lunchtime - pretty damned miraculous since, five days previously, the “before publication somewhen” to-do list had included a 3,500-word, 10pp, single-spaced to-do list - and that didn’t even include the running “ooh, shiny, read this!” list of doom. (What happened to this stuff? It’s on the anaconda-length to-do list for Draft no. 3.)
Now what? Since I’m publishing this trade-list book with an academic press, there are a few extra steps. First, there was the process of anonymous peer review: the press sent the ms out to a couple of experts for feedback. That step happened last winter/spring.
Now the revised manuscript, the review reports, and my response letter about how I revised the ms in dialogue with the reports goes to the Faculty Editorial Committee. With any luck, when they meet in a few weeks, they will decide that the ms is sufficiently respectable to leave me and the editorial team to make final revisions and edits and get the book into… production! The magic green light will then be ON!
For now, I’m winding down and resting, and catching up with errands.
What’s coming up? I’ve been planning a re-design of this newsletter, and am tinkering with a different platform, so the next newsletter will have a shiny new look! You’ll still be able to read everything for free, there will still be an archive of all the issues to date, and you’ll still be able to unsubscribe with a single click.
Takes and recs
Earlier this year I discovered a FABULOUS book YouTube channel: historian of science Dr Brandy Schillace’s Peculiar Book Club. Most of the episodes are free to access; the conversations are enormous fun and super-informative, there is hand-made stock-motion animation, there are musical interludes and quizzes and a cocktail and a mocktail for each episode (I think) and a livestream chat…. Guests have included science journalist Ed Yong talking about his luminous An Immense World and US historian Megan Kate Nelson talking about Saving Yellowstone.
If you’re interested in the histories of science, medicine, the environment, or in anything unusual or mysterious or just BIG, I heartily recommend this show. And do consider subscribing - to the YouTube channel, and/or the podcast. It really helps the show: for example, many YouTube development tools only become available once you have a certain number of subscribers. And the mess that social media channels and search engines have become means it’s that much harder for people who create things to get the word out to people who would appreciate the things they make.
On that note, thank you for being a subscriber! Look out for subscriber-only book-launch related offers in a few months. Have you noticed or appreciated any particular book-launch related offers from authors? Pre-order (discounts), Zooms-with-the-author, cute merchandise, free swag, or classroom Zoom-ins for educators? Feel free to add thoughts and suggestions to the chat. And if you know anyone who might appreciate keeping an eye on monster-related content or book-related thoughts, please consider sharing this newsletter!
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