The Remaining Tasks
3 August 2011
The remaining tasks are dauntingly complex and large in number, however finite and steadily dwindling. I’d say that right now we are at least six weeks away from being printer-ready. September’s an important month, and we are focusing on it intensely as a goal, but again as much as I’d like to provide certainty as to timing I cannot. All we can do is continue to report our progress and continue to work as hard as possible on the book and do everything necessary to finish the job and get it right: that has always been, and remains, our commitment.
The final lockdown pass continues. There are, as I’ve written before, two aspects of this: First, I have to create the final, lockdown correction document for each chapter, which involves collating information from several antecedent documentary sources, and adding information gleaned from a careful evaluation of certain aspects of the most recent version of each chapter. Second, senior designer John D. Berry then has to execute the corrections in each of these lockdown documents, and perform his own evaluation of text-flow and other issues and make further corrections accordingly; when he’s finished a first pass through a chapter, I check his work, and inevitably there are errors and omissions to be addressed, and other issues we need to consult on in order to resolve. Berry usually nails down anywhere from 80% to 98% of a chapter on a first pass, with remaining issues being resolved during second or later passes; each succeeding pass involves a rapidly dwindling number of things to deal with. So far, most of the time, we are able to declare a chapter final, locked down, after no more than three passes.
As of now, I am well past the halfway point in the book in terms of creating the lockdown correction documents. But we are still shy of the halfway point in terms of executing those documents and locking down those chapters. Over all, the speed of this process has increased and is continuing to increase, within the constraints of all due care.
No one is more eager to finish this book and get it into your hands than I am.
I will post another update the last week of August.
Best Wishes,
Ron Drummond
Publisher / Editor / Art Director