hanneblank (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} hanneblank) wrote,@ 2005-08-26 09:18:00 |
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Almost There!
Having been heads-down for a while, I am happy to announce that all this work is indeed paying off: last night I finished a complete draft of my last chapter for the virginity book. All 101 pages of it. (No, this is not a short book.)
There is still an editing pass to do before it's really done, of course, but completing the draft is a pretty important milestone. After all, it's hard to edit anything if you don't have anything to edit.
Today's going to be devoted to tidying up bibliographical loose ends and to doing that editorial pass.
Rather than filling the book with footnotes or endnotes -- the book is intended for an intelligent and educated but non-academic audience, and I know that seeing all those spiky little superscript numbers turns off or intimidates a lot of non-academically-inclined readers -- I've made the decision to use footnotes only occasionally and for what is essentially color commentary. Documentation and bibliography are going into a "selected bibliography" section at the end of the book, with sources grouped first by chapter and then by theme. My thinking is that grouping the sources this way will give readers a good and intuitive way of navigating the bibliography, and additionally will let them zero in on specific subjects of interest more easily. I think this is a particularly important thing to be able to do with a survey-style history.
Anyhow, this means preparing a great big document at the end of the book that is all bibliography, and while I have 90% of the data all set and ready to go, bibliography is finicky in terms of formatting and suchlike and so I need to spend some time making sure that it all looks the way it should. It's boring and time-consuming work, but I think I'm going to try to look at it as being restful, particularly after the headache-inducing intense analysis and writing that I've been having to do throughout the writing process.
I also have a short epilogue to write. But that should go quickly. And then I will send it all off to my editor and my agent and it'll be their problem for a while.
-- Hanne
Having been heads-down for a while, I am happy to announce that all this work is indeed paying off: last night I finished a complete draft of my last chapter for the virginity book. All 101 pages of it. (No, this is not a short book.)
There is still an editing pass to do before it's really done, of course, but completing the draft is a pretty important milestone. After all, it's hard to edit anything if you don't have anything to edit.
Today's going to be devoted to tidying up bibliographical loose ends and to doing that editorial pass.
Rather than filling the book with footnotes or endnotes -- the book is intended for an intelligent and educated but non-academic audience, and I know that seeing all those spiky little superscript numbers turns off or intimidates a lot of non-academically-inclined readers -- I've made the decision to use footnotes only occasionally and for what is essentially color commentary. Documentation and bibliography are going into a "selected bibliography" section at the end of the book, with sources grouped first by chapter and then by theme. My thinking is that grouping the sources this way will give readers a good and intuitive way of navigating the bibliography, and additionally will let them zero in on specific subjects of interest more easily. I think this is a particularly important thing to be able to do with a survey-style history.
Anyhow, this means preparing a great big document at the end of the book that is all bibliography, and while I have 90% of the data all set and ready to go, bibliography is finicky in terms of formatting and suchlike and so I need to spend some time making sure that it all looks the way it should. It's boring and time-consuming work, but I think I'm going to try to look at it as being restful, particularly after the headache-inducing intense analysis and writing that I've been having to do throughout the writing process.
I also have a short epilogue to write. But that should go quickly. And then I will send it all off to my editor and my agent and it'll be their problem for a while.
-- Hanne
