As promised for those who are interested in such affairs, I have been over the last week dealing with the final edit and insertion of illustrations and captions for the my editor to do their bit.
There is a little tale here: I quipped to the mate that I expected the job to appear in my inbox while we were doing the antifouling and hull touch-ups on Whimbrel.
Well, we got on with the antifouling on a Friday evening a week and a half ago now. The job was all completed on the Saturday, including various ‘scuff’ marks being sanded and repainted – most due to damage caused by the modern ‘hard’ mooring buoys now almost universal around the east coast rivers. In the evening Whimbrel was returned to her mooring.
The story so far:
Well … checking my spam mail box on the desk computer on Wednesday following our boat work, with my finger hovering on the delete button, I suddenly noticed one from ‘AM Production’ – heck, my publisher.
Transferred safely and opened I found a request for my final edit. It arrived the day we started work on Whimbrel’s bottom!
So, I had to set to and get on with it. I had a week before we were due to sail off to the River Medway to participate in the Queen’s Jubilee Pageant on the river.
This was before I found that ‘file’!
My current publisher was content for me to set the illustrations into the text, so once I got set up, it was just a matter of copy & paste.
The ‘book’ will later go through a pagination process where it is pushed into the published size, spacings and layout etc.
Editing in hand.
The ‘red’ bits were my previous corrections
I had a break in the middle and overhauled Whimbrel’s two sheet winches. They were opened up, cleaned of old grease and crud. Pawls were checked and deburred. All was regreased and reassembled , then back to editing…
Finally, I came to the end!
A break was taken to clear the head and ‘sit’ on what I had done.
While the head cleared I had a couple of hours down the club preparing and antifouling the bottom of Twitch, the tender.
After dealing with Twitch, I again ran all the way through the text looking at my corrections. Around a half dozen other ‘mistakes’ were found too – some inflicted by others!
A busy couple of weeks for sure. Hey, but, you all say, you love it…
All my work has now been ‘put to bed’ and will go off to the publisher…