Update on the book — I see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Since submitting the initial draft of the manuscript we’ve completed three out of four rounds of editing.

The first round was mostly structural changes within chapters to improve readability and flow. Seven of eight chapters had their contents repackaged, and three had new introductions written to frame the concepts better.

The second round scrutinized the content more, smoothing awkward language, fixing inconsistent usage of “we” vs. “you”, correcting the occasional muddled tense and weeding out a few of overused expressions (I used “as such” twelve times in the first draft, now it has been eliminated entirely).

The third round was a final critique of some word choices, for example replacing the term “farting around” with “experimenting” in one memorable paragraph. There were only forty or so comments in the margin by this point — a pleasant change from the sea of red ink in earlier versions.

Upcoming round four is copy editing — checking for typos, etc. — which thankfully is not my job; final legal / fact checking — also not my job; and double checking all the citations are correct and well formatted — also not my job!

We’ll give it a final read over after this round, and from there the book will be typeset and, well, look like a book for the first time.

Still no definitive title and subtitle although there are some great contenders. Booky McBookface is not one of them — sorry!

See this post on LinkedIn