As you can see from the astonishingly early blog post (before the afternoon!), I am slowly resurfacing. Our deadline for the manuscript submission has been met, even though technology conspired against us to make it as hard as possible, and there were a few last-minute decisions to make. Beast Trivia Snippet #1: When both authors of a joint project are suffering from nasty colds with plenty of side effects and too little sleep, things can be more tricky than they would ordinarily be.

While there will be some remaining stuff to sort out and clear up, and at one point in the future also the edit/proofread, things for now are much relaxed. A very, very good thing - I spent most of Saturday (the part not spent working, that is) and most of Sunday resting in deference to the nasty cold, and it finally seems to have taken the hint and is letting up. My devious plan for today is to do as little as I can possibly get away with, and I have already made much progress on that score: tea has been drunk, there was leisurely breakfast with a book, whiling away some time catching up on blogs I like to read, and petting the cat. Also: blogging with more time on my hands than these last days.

While I did not find much time to stay current with things these last days, it has not escaped me that Leonard Nimoy has passed away. I'm one of the generation that grew up with the New Enterprise, with Wesley Crusher and Captain Picard and Worf and Data, but I've seen a few of the original series too, as well as the films. Many other people have said a lot of appropriate words about Mr. Nimoy (and Mr. Spock), so I'll just post this video which, additionally, describes what I plan for today. And possibly also for part of tomorrow.



Rest in peace, Leonard Nimoy.

It is Friday, it is sunny, and the day has just turned even nicer than before by a completely unexpected, picture-related miracle in last minute. It totally made my day! Otherwise, our manuscript is sorted and formatted and the picture list is lined up and only needs one last joint checkup for the captions to eliminate any left-over typos... and we're good to go.

Wow. It will be weird to have the Beast transition from this stack of files on my computer to an actual book in book form that is being available to people, and being read... and I hope we've done good by it.

Once the thing is sent off, I will settle down to cure the nasty cold that has decided on the worst moment ever to pester me. It's not nice meeting a deadline when you have a cold and can't even complain properly due to lack of voice. But, as OkGo so aptly put it:



This too shall pass!

We are finalising the last bits for the book. So of course, nerves are a bit taut, and I think we'll both be very happy to completely forget about the book for a while when we will have delivered it! In any case, I can tell you that I have learned a huge amount of things while doing this book. Not only what a minyan is and what Australians call fairy bread - I've also found out how you can use two hands to count to 9999. (That beats counting binary by a far stretch - binary hands will only bring you to 1023.) I've also learned that it has its distinct disadvantages to write a book with someone on the other side of the globe, balanced by the distinct advantage that someone gets work done while you sleep, and you can wake up to a new iteration of the project. On an active day with many small edits, we also found that a file can go through six or seven iterations during the time we're both active, which is my morning and Gillian's night. Soon now. Soon.

After a little scare on Monday, we are now all set with pretty, pretty pictures for our book, or will be once the pictures that were promised but are still outstanding are delivered. Many pretty, pretty pictures, thanks to the gracious help of a lot of people all over the place!

On Friday, we shall bring our stack of beauties into a proper order for sending them off to be published. The end of this craziness is drawing near!

(And I will probably sleep for three days straight once this is done.)

The answer? Very long. It can take very, very long indeed.

We're making progress, though. The list of pictures is slowly growing, as is the number of references in their final format. That's not hard work, but nitpicky stuff that includes lots of looking up the missing details in the references. Final edit has been done, and there are only a few last little issues that need discussing, checking, or clearing.

Which is very good - since the clock is ticking. Soon now. Soon.

Well, more or less. I'm still feeling the strain of the editing marathon, but things have settled down a bit, and I can concentrate on the other stuff now. There also was a nice bit of resting time on the weekend, which was utterly necessary and did a world of good.

The other stuff is finishing up the picture collection, tidying up the reference formats, and taking care of stray odds and ends in the index word list. Which sounds like easy-peasy work, and it sort of is, but it's also mind-numbing and time-consuming. Not many days left to suffer from this, though!

As this very, very late blog post might tell you, I've been swamped. I managed to finish the proofread yesterday, but I still need to transfer a good-sized portion of the corrections into the file, and well... other things have been set aside and need to be dealt with, too.

So I'll do the smart and sensible thing and will leave off blogging until next week - I'll probably be back on Tuesday.

And now back to my way-past-schedule manuscript corrections and back to the two Big Questions: Why on earth did we write that much? And why did it seem like a good idea at that time to make all these corrections?