Book Revision. Counting Words and Weeks

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I’ve done the first edit of the book. Cutting roughly 11% off each chapter was a good start, but each chapter gets a bibliography, and I couldn’t know how many words that would add. I do now!

Each chapter has to lose 2.5% more words. Say, between 8-10 words a page. It doesn’t sound so bad that way, and it does make me a bit more ruthless about anything extra that doesn’t carry the thread forward.

I still want to get this done by the end of the month if humanly possible. And I do have a short list of little points I need to check, so I need to find time to sort those out too.

But whilst I count down to completion at the end of July, I’m also counting down to the beginning of next July when I stop being a librarian and can hopefully just concentrate on research. (49 weeks to go. No time to stitch an imaginative weekly square this week, just a plain one.)

But I have the Ketelbey Fellowship in St Andrew’s to look forward to this autumn first!

And I do have another (smaller) book idea …

Countdowns!

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

You know the story of the shoemaker and the elves? He goes to bed, exhausted, and wakes to find the little elves have done all his outstanding work? Oh, I wish!

Technically, my book is meant to be finished by the end of July. I’ve written quite a bit of the last chapter, but it goes without saying that that’s not the end of the process!

  • Writing the conclusion;
  • Tidying the introduction;
  • Checking the whole thing – for content, and also against the style guide;
  • Converting footnotes to endnotes;
  • Sorting the bibliography…

I’m also handling the comms for an international congress – it begins on 31 July.

Of course, there’s also the day-job to be done! And domesticated things don’t just stop. Garden hedges grow regardless of everything. Aargh!

And I have a whole magazine issue to proofread ASAP. (This task was accepted on my behalf – literally nothing to do with me!)

Daily Countdown

Now, the book deadline has been engraved on my brain for a long time. I’ve also known the congress date quite a long time. But believe it or not, it’s only just dawned on me that both dates coincide, and that therefore 38 days’ countdown for one thing would be 38 days for the other. Strange how the realisation suddenly makes it all the more stressful! All I can do is keep doing what I can. A colleague asked me the other day, what were my plans for this summer … ?

‘Finish a book’, I whispered. One way or another!

Alas, I don’t feel indomitable today. More like, a bit hopeless, faced with the mountain in front of me.