This has been a pretty good week. I had started to review my book designer’s sample manuscript over the weekend, but didn’t get too far.

Reviewing the manuscript felt too final. I sort of ignored it for a couple of days, because I didn’t feel ready to call it “done”.

Even though I thought I was prepared to send this book off to the printers, now that I’m close, I wavered a bit. So I took a couple days off from looking over the formatting.

Once I started up again, however, I actually started to feel a lot better. There is something cathartic about reviewing someone else’s work, and feeling more confident in your own.

I started finding little things to have my book designer tweak. That’s not a knock on him or the effort he’s put in to this point. But extra spacing, non-indented paragraphs, or misaligned headings — those are the details that stand out in a book. It’s just easier for me to notice because I’m seeing them for the first time.

Even the stylistic choices that we didn’t explicitly discuss beforehand have solidified in my mind. I want page numbers in my Table of Contents. I want all letters, songs, and signs to be formatted the same way. I want certain text to be added to the title page.

It’s comforting in a way to know that everyone makes mistakes or misses something. That’s why we rely on each other for help. My editor caught plenty of my mistakes. I caught more than a few mistakes she had initially missed. My book designer probably caught formatting inconsistencies. And now I’m ensuring he didn’t leave anything out.

That’s how this works.

So now I’m just finishing up my review of the formatted manuscript and preparing notes to send back to the book designer. I presume it will take him another week or two to make those adjustments, and then…

Is that it? I kind of hope so. I’m looking forward to going through the final process.

It feels like this is the eerie calm before the whirlwind of work I’ll have to prepare for publication.

Goals for 5/17:

1. Complete my review of the formatted manuscript and send notes to my book designer.
2. Figure out what else needs doing before I publish.
3. Continue outlining WoEL.

Steve D