Buried

A forbidding-sized pile . . . and I wish I had the cat, too.

Man, a ton of work has just fallen upon me. It appears I'm going to be buried in history stuff for some time. I received the copy-edited proofs of a book I'm co-editing with a friend today via UPS. I'm looking at this big pile of over 400 pages, each of which must be read very carefully because this is really the last time you get to catch any errors and make corrections. After the page proofs, the next step in the process, no changes except factual errors and typos. That means hardly any changes. I am also responsible for building the index for this hummer, which can't begin until the page proofs. And I've got a sinking feeling that I will have to do the indexing by hand, unless some way can be found to either perform electronic indexing on a pdf file or have a Word file to work.

And this is just one thing on the plate. I have also received another 400+ page manuscript for a book about Confederate generals in the Trans-Mississippi theater. This one is for the initial edit. I've already encountered one chapter that is just awful. It needs a  lot of work before it gets into our book. My co-editor and I are like good cop-bad cop. Guess who the bad cop is?