Back to the Roots

Where this blog began . . . and from where it's been distracted of late. Travails in the editing world. Some quick notes on a recent project. Then it's back to work finishing a job for my old employer, which, after my moaning about it for years, still cannot manage to print out a decent set of page proofs.

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Working on a project that’s taking days longer than it should. Problems, about which the publisher did not inform me:

British punctuation and spelling throughout — all must be fixed; but can’t do globally because of quoted material and extracts.

Foreign editor of a multiple-foreign-author book, meaning that the same non-US idiomatic phrases appear in every author’s pieces: “Hypermarket,” rather than supermarket. "Right across": Took me awhile to figure this one out. It means “throughout.”

Hundreds of footnotes needing to be composed from a poorly written and horribly inconsistent bibliography. The footnotes were along the lines of Smith 2010, which doesn’t work as a footnote for this publisher. Publisher requires either author, date style in the text, or traditional notes, but since many of the footnotes weren’t really quoted material and incorporated more discursive stuff, author date wouldn’t have worked.

Some chapters included many notes that didn’t match up with biblio information, resulting in queries.

Heads typed in all caps, requiring rekeying.

Ridiculous overuse of scare quotes: a spending “spree.” And italics for emphasis.

Because the changes are being tracked, must be very careful that open quotes being replaced don’t end up facing in the wrong direction -- and because of the UK-US shift in punctuation, a ton of quote marks require replacement.

I could go on.

And what's the book about? At this point, it doesn't even matter.