Then I had to wait for the galley proofs which came late as usual in pdf form. I was en route to a Road Scholar trip to Tangelwood tin the Berkshires to hear a Boston Symphony concert when the proofs came so I had to take them with me on the trip. I had two jobs to do, edit the galley proofs and write the index. I left the editing job to my housemate since she majored in English in college. I never said I was an English major. The problem with the editing of the galley proof is that the book was paged and nothing could be changed that would change the paging. But we found things that would work.
The hardest thing to change was the Time Line. I had originally made the time line by making an excel spread sheet and I had submitted that to my editor. She said it was too big so she inserted the information about the women into the time line dates. Well there were some errors made , so my housemate took the book and fact checked the entire time line so that it was right. She had to insert some missing information and correct the names of the women which was different after they were married. She did a great job. I don't know how anyone writes a book alone. You always need personal editors to check your work.
My housemate also checked the entire book and I had to insert the corrections into the pdf copy.
Then there was the index. I had never written an index before. My editor sent me the guidelines and also referred to the Chicago Manual of Style. I looked at that and then proceeded on my own. I went through the pdf copy of the book highlighting the words I thought should be indexed and put them onto an excel spread sheet. I chose to do it that way because I knew I could alphabetize things automatically. When I finish the spread sheet I alphabetized segments and cut and pasted them into word sheets that were alphabetized. Then when I finished that I put the word sheets in order to make the index. This was very labor intensive but it was the only way I knew. I had to finish this work on the train to Denver to go to the American Chemical Society meeting. I had hoped to finish this before that trip. But that didn't happen. I was able to finish and proof the index on the trip and then submit when i got to Denver.
My editor said the index was too long! So she was going to hire an index specialist to tighten it up at her expense! I told her I hoped that the person was African American because I put in things that I thought an African American researcher would look for.
I have a list of all the major colleges and universities that the women either attended or worked for. I also had another list of HBCU's that they either attended or worked for.
More about that later, this blog is too long as it is. So the production stage has ended and the promotion stage has begun.
Jeannette Brown
Sisterchemists LLC
