Today Isabel and I finished proofing and indexing the final version of our book and put it in the mail at 12:42:32PM headed for Texas A&M University Press. It was a hard slog. Our editor gave us three weeks to proof the text and index it.
Our first pass at selecting words to index produced over 2,000 index cards. It took two hours per chapter. Then came alphabetizing and weeding. One thousand words made the final cut.
Proofing was a tag team effort. One read aloud every word, every punctuation mark, every diacritical mark in the edited manuscript while the other marked errors on the proof text. It sounded like Victor Borge's phonetic punctuation skit, just not so funny.
By working ten-hour-days we completed three weeks of work in two weeks and two days.
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