Now where was I? Oh right, the book.
I wanted to be a "good author" and not add too many complications to the process. One thing Georg had warned me about was adding new material. He worked in production at Raven, and authors would sometimes add new paragraphs or more, about entirely new ideas, when they were only supposed to be copyediting. Apparently this was a problem for them because it would throw off the page-count and just make their life difficult in general.
We had been asked to add some material -- like Notes on Sources -- that probably did increase the page count. I'm not sure how much of a problem that really is, and they did ask for the additions. So I just wrote a note to Joanna that she could omit them if the additional pages are a problem.
However, I couldn't restrain myself from also adding lines in a couple of places that were entirely new. I know, I wasn't supposed to do that. I just couldn't resist! I was in the library, looking for a citation I had neglected to write down. I wasn't even sure what book the quote was from, so I had pulled out a stack of books from our bibliography & was scanning them all. Tedious, eh? That'll teach me to write down sources the first time around!
Turns out that the reason I hadn't written it down, was that it was from the same page of the same book, a biography of Edward VII, as the quote immediately below it. I guess I had assumed that they "went together" so I didn't need to cite both. I hate the way that looks -- to have two footnotes together, from the exact same place -- so I looked up the source that my source had used.
That book, a biography of Queen Mary, was much earlier & cited original letters rather than another biography (what's the term for that? a more primary source?) so I thought it was a good addition. Best of all, the Duke library had it, so I could get it out and look up the quote for myself. That way I can honestly call it a "work cited."
The other additions I shouldn't have made were to the King of Wands and Swords, based on Disraeli and Gladstone, respectively. You see, while I was looking for the biography of Queen Mary, I discovered that the library had several other volumes in the series of letters between Queen Victoria and her daughter Vicky (Empress Frederick of Germany). I had used one volume extensively, so I was kicking myself for not having found the others over the summer when we were writing.
I couldn't help but take one and browse through it, even though I should have finished my work on the book and gone home. Reading through, I found Victoria's letter telling her daughter about Disraeli's death and how much she would miss him. And another letter in which Victoria complained bitterly that Gladstone was the most tedious man who could ever be Prime Minister. It was exactly what we had been writing about, so I just had to include it.
Unfortunately, adding two books to the bibliography may have increased the page count. I hope not, but the bibliography got rearranged so much that it's hard to tell. I'm not really sure how serious a problem it is to add a page. I hope not too much.
In the "learn something new every day" department, while working on these edits I learned that I am overly fond of commas. Almost every sentence in the proofs looked like it needed a comma, maybe two or three. I'm sure the sentences I originally wrote had tons and tons of commas in them. I'm not even sure who removed them, Georg or Joanna. In any case I restrained myself to suggesting a couple here and there.
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