The home stretch

It's been a quiet week at Light Reading; August is always slow as far as digital treasures go (though I enjoyed Andrew O'Hagan's Pippa Middleton piece for New York Magazine) and really I've just been dug in on the style book, which is now in the home stretch. (Mixed metaphor alert? But I cannot do without those phrases.) If it's not done by the end of the day today, I should be finished with it by lunchtime tomorrow...

(After doing a very thorough edit with gap-filling-in new writing in the first half of the week, I typed most of it up late Tuesday night and finished yesterday during the day. Got to Cafe del Sol at 6:30 this morning and sat down and copy-edited the whole manuscript all the way through, finishing around 10 or so. Now I'm sitting at my desk at home about to type in those edits; the only thing remaining to be actually written is several paragraphs for the very end. I don't like writing endings, I prefer just to stop, but it will not do!)

(This is one of the three or four main things I need to fix on BOMH also. That's next up in the queue: say about ten days or two weeks of work on that, and I can get it back to my agent by the end of the month. Couple other bits and bobs of work: reader's report on a journal article, a couple conference paper abstracts. Then change gears and get back into teaching mode; I'm teaching two new classes in the fall, I did one syllabus in June but the other still needs to be sorted out and "thunk" through.)

Anyway, back to style, once I've typed these changes in, I'll print out this final version and read it through one more time, but there are only a few stretches where I've really done significant editing, for lots of the book it's minor changes that I can check just by reading it against the marked-up copy. I am old-school in my methods, I find it is the best way to catch errors...