I finished the Conclusion of my second monograph today! I really should have celebrated this, but – well, it was lunchtime and I checked my emails, and … shall we say that I forgot about celebrating by the time I’d finished answering the email?
Never mind. I’ll celebrate tomorrow instead. Before I start the revision process. This evening, I read through all my publisher’s guidelines. I read about endnotes (bye-bye, beloved footnotes. You’re no longer the flavour of the month). I read about chapter abstracts, and formatting, and a whole lot of other stuff. Saved it all in a folder, and reached for my MHRA Guidelines. This is where I remembered that it could take quite a while!
The good thing, I suppose, is that my cataloguing background makes me quite attuned to the fine detail required in formatting references and so on, and pretty well prepared for the routine-ness of it all. I’m more concerned about ensuring everything’s consistent between chapters, and – the worst bit – tightening up the prose. I need to jettison quite a few words, to get within the word-limit.
What a blessing that I’ve got two weeks’ holiday coming up. No proper vacation for me, this time. But I do look forward to getting the manuscript submitted later this year!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 