I’m now correcting the proofs of my book. It seems like it will appear in print in 2014, in time for my tenure review.
There are quite a few typos that creep in during the process of transforming the manuscript from a .doc file into a print-ready one. The funniest mistake is that the editors have, in some instances, masculinized my last name. (E.g. Instead of a last name that sounds like Tsvetkova, they put me down as Tsvetkov.) This is especially funny since I’m being published by an association of international feminists.
The book will be 223 pages long. The font is very pretty, and there are cute curlicues on top of each page. Unfortunately, the editors are not asking me for my photograph, which is upsetting. I would have given them the one that appears on the Home page of this blog. (My husband hates this photo because he says I’m not nearly as terrifying in RL).
Of course, now that I will have an actual book, I will dream of somebody writing a review of it. It’s a good book, if I say so myself.
Clarissa's Blog 
Excellent — and watch those editors as they are insane.
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Will you ask someone to proofread your book? Someone with xrays-eyes in English? I did that work for profs in Grad school in FR and SP and there is always something wrong or missing.
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The editors are doing that. Then I do that. Then they do that once again. And then I do that for the last time.
Do you know that you are featured in that book? 🙂
I love dropping this news on people.
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Your editors may appear to be doing that, but as I’ve mentioned in a comment below, there’s a more depressing, somewhat more scatological end toward what they’re actually doing …
The more technically competent you are in your written language, the more steadfast and unassailable your help has to be in making sure you are as strong as a rock in rebuffing what may be trivial wastes of your time.
Also, your picture becomes part of “cover matter” and will likely be dealt with by someone who’s skilled at this, provided your publisher actually deals with this. In academic works, it may be something you have to insist on being part of the cover matter for your book.
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This book will be part of a series, and I don’t think there were any photos on the previous books in the series. So I think I’m doomed to seeing it in print without a photo. 🙂
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Send your picture anyway with comments about where and how you want it displayed.
Can’t hurt….
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Ah, you said the magic Word …
Lazy editors rely on the spell checking and grammar checking features of Word.
You can override some of their lazy editing skills by installing the Proofing Tools for your version of Microsoft Word — I suggest installing Proofing Tools for as many languages and regional variations as you’re likely to write in.
For instance, I recommend installing Proofing Tools for Australian, Canadian, British, US, and South African English so you can render versions that have been individually edited (by you). If you write in multiple languages, you may need to purchase a full internationalised copy of Proofing Tools.
Anyway, here’s how to use this feature …
You switch out of Print Layout into Normal Layout, after which you select all of the text in your document. If you’ve installed Proofing Tools, you’ll see a little “English (US)” indicator (or whatever regional variant you write in) in your status bar. Double-click on that, re-select your desired language and regional variant, and click the check box for “Do not check spelling or grammar”.
Once you click OK, all of the red wavy lines under words in your text will go away. (If you haven’t updated the TOC in a while, now’s a good time to do it while you’re in Normal Layout.)
It then falls on your editors to turn this feature off — the more technically proficient will see this as a momentary setback, understanding full well why you’ve done this. A skilled editor will ask for a copy of your personal dictionary file so it can be consulted for proper spellings of certain words, knowing precisely why you’ve done this.
Your editors are clearly not that bright.
Otherwise, keep in mind that the “editing process” is often an excuse whereby the publisher’s people take turns crapping all over something in order to say that they’ve been involved with the work. Lynne Truss made some amusing comments on how she had to “stet” many passages full of commas within one of her books — of course, she is the author of “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”, a book on the proper use of commas, and can be reliably relied upon to be reliable as an authority on this subject.
If you wonder where the rumours that “some authors are difficult to work with” come from, they come from the under-literate help that some publishing houses keep on staff within editing and production departments.
“Juvenal’s ‘Satires’ … don’t you mean juvenile satires?”
Hence a culture slowly dies.
A great editor preserves culture and notices details — a crap editor notices nothing but the smell he or she has left on a page, even one rendered otherwise unassailable through the author’s own means …
One side consequence: people involved in your “collaboration” who aren’t aware of the fact that you’ve disabled spelling and grammar checks on your entire document may believe themselves to be more competent at their attempts to continue your writing than they actually are, introducing “small” errors into your work that turn out to be rather noticeable on close reading.
Don’t try to solve this problem with “Track Changes” — save multiple versioned copies of your work and use the document comparison features to figure out what these people have done to it. Blame and recriminations may be assigned after you’ve figured out how to undo the damage they’ve caused.
Finally, save every document in some kind of text format — I’d suggest Unicode UTF-8 for maximum compatibility with the future. One day twenty years from now, when Microsoft Office from the 1990s and 2000s has been replaced with something else, it may be necessary to recover your work from a text file rather than the original document.
This is one of the reasons why it helps to install MultiSave within LibreOffice, BTW …
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One more thought while I’m at it …
If your publisher sends “galley proofs” in PDFs, you can print those to a PostScript print driver from Acrobat and then convert the PostScript to something else with GhostScript.
That includes converting the original text back to plain text so you can see what they’ve done to it.
If you can revert the PDFs to PS and then to some kind of plain text, you can probably compare the text using “context diffs” using the Unix “diff” tool — “diff -c” works for context diffs. You might need to convert line endings — that’s what “unix2dos” and its inverse are for.
Then you can see, paragraph by paragraph, what they’ve done to your work without having to do so much close reading.
Think of it as better living through automation …
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Thank you, dear Jones. This is extremely useful. Yes, they sent the galleys in .pdf, and I thought this meant I couldn’t touch the text.
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““Juvenal’s ‘Satires’ … don’t you mean juvenile satires?”
– THE BEST. :-)))))))))))))))))))
“Finally, save every document in some kind of text format — I’d suggest Unicode UTF-8 for maximum compatibility with the future. One day twenty years from now, when Microsoft Office from the 1990s and 2000s has been replaced with something else, it may be necessary to recover your work from a text file rather than the original document.”
– Gosh, I totally need to do this. Because you are right, this is what’s in the future.
These are extremely useful comments, so thank you very much for them. I will copy=paste them to a separate file for future reference.
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I’ve been bitten by the plain text save problem before — I’ll explain …
Once upon a time, there was a fantastic little word processor for the Apple IIe, which is what I used to write on before I built a huge box with a clackedy keyboard and big spinning disks that cost me a small fortune, all of which has been eclipsed by even the most febrile entry-level laptops today. Fortunately all of that newer stuff is more or less compatible with the present-day, which is not the case with the Apple IIe.
I saved all of my early work in this word processor’s format, not thinking that one day there would not only be nobody using Apple IIe systems, but also that there might be a shortage of software and hardware that could read the files and disks.
Apple II floppy disks used their own proprietary format for signalling, making the problem even more intractable — only “data recovery” companies could be relied upon to have some of the hardware, and of course they priced access very dearly.
I gave up on the Kafkaesque problem in a Kafka-like way — I simply destroyed the lot and told everyone that I’d lost all of my old files, which in a technical way was more or less true, even if I didn’t let on that I was the one that razed everything clean.
So if you actually care to recover your works from twenty years ago, saving to Unicode UTF-8 might for now be your best plan. But just to be on the safe side, store all of your stuff on media you can smash with a hammer — I strongly recommend 2.5″ laptop hard disks since they’re typically made with glass substrate platters. They’re durable enough when placed in durable enclosures, but outside the enclosures, a hammer makes quick work of them.
If your editors and publishers won’t “let” you out of existing arrangements without some sort of force majeure, there’s always a way to arrange one, and you don’t even have to tell them that “your dog ate the manuscripts”.
“My laptop disk failed and all of my backups failed …”
A few writers have pulled this off with a straight face …
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Congrats!!!!! What a wonderful feeling. 🙂
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