I’ve had a productive week. I completed my book and it’s ready to go out to reviewers. Part of the reason I had a good week was because I had a very good week last week, and managed to clear the decks of anything particularly difficult, urgent, or time-consuming so that I could take the whole week to properly focus on the book.

This week I:

  • Completely reviewed a paper of the manuscript, covered it with notes, and put those corrections in.
  • Entirely rewrote several troubling chapters twice.
  • Deleted a chapter that wasn’t working
  • Wrote down all my regular typos and went back through them.
  • Improved all the diagrams
  • Added a total of about 20 pages of entirely new text and diagrams
  • Double checked my references and fixed a bunch of bugs there
  • Started looking in earnest for beta-readers: emails, posts in relevant groups.

…and I’m spent. It really is impressive what you can put together in a solid week of effort. The other reason, of course, why I really had to do this as a week’s concerted effort is that that’s what I demand from my writers…

There is still more to do. I need to replace the cover (which I should do after I get some pull quotes), finish the indexing, and rewrite some of the descriptions, but I don’t want to over polish before my reviewers propose radical changes…