This project is cursed
Friday, 26 May, 2006
(Perhaps this post should be entitled, “DBK III: The continuing saga”—“DBK III” meaning The Selected Works of D. Broughton Knox (Volume 3): The Christian Life. For all you non-Sydney Anglicans, D. Broughton Knox was principal of Moore College during the time of such public figures as Peter Jensen, Phillip Jensen, John Woodhouse [current Moore College principal] and David Peterson. Why do his selected works run to three volumes? Because he had a massive impact on Sydney Anglican theology—so much so that a lot of the preaching that goes on in this diocese sounds just like him.)
Warning: Excessive whinging ahead.
January
Having just started working three days a week at MM, one of my duties is to scan in or type up the material for DBK III. The material has been selected by Gordon and it comes from transcripts of The Protestant Faith/The Christian Faith Broadcasts (a radio program DBK used to do), chapel sermons and other assorted bits and pieces. Tony is on leave. I don't yet have an office and a computer but I'm able to use Simon's massive multimedia station to do most of the scanning and typing. With some of them, it's easier just to type them up than to scan them because the print material is so blotchy.
Tony comes back from leave a week later, sees what I've been working on and says, “How did this and this get into the material? That's already been put into Volumes I and II”. (NB: This is post-scanning and typing.
My second job is to weed out the material from Volumes I and II which is not as straightforward as it seems because some of the material was combined to form the one chapter and some of it was retitled.
New material is then chosen.
February
In between other projects, I scan/type up/edit all the new material. I ask Tony about Bible referencing because Vol 1 is all in footnotes but Vol II is all in text. He says that probably happened because of the original manuscripts they were working from. I assume that means I just keep it as is in the original manuscripts. But where he alludes to something and hasn't referenced it, I add in footnotes.
Gordon, Tony and I have a meeting and look at it. Tony reckons there's not enough. Some of the material that has already been typed/scanned gets axed because it doesn't have much to do with the theme of the volume (which is “The Christian Life”). Gordon chooses some more material which I then scan/type up/edit.
March
I finish working on it all and send Tony a suggested Table of Contents. He writes a Preface but doesn't have time to look at the whole thing. The whole thing goes to layout.
April
It comes back from layout and Tony finally has a look at the whole thing. He doesn't think it's as impressive as Volumes I and II. He even suggests pulling it from the production schedule and maybe just producing a smaller book which just contains “The Gospel of the New Testament” (which is unfinished—it ends in handwritten scribbles). Part of me is annoyed because I've already put so much work into it; part of me is a bit relieved because then I don't have to do the index.
After a product development meeting, Tony decides not to pull it from the schedule. Instead he rearranges everything, cuts out the bits where DBK tends to ramble on a bit, and adds some more material which he gets me to scan/type and edit. I do that and then check it against the revised table of contents he's sent me. Two or three articles in the list. I ask him about them and he groans and says that they were in the wrong pile—I didn't have to type them. Oh well, we'll use them later—maybe for The Briefing.
The whole thing goes back to be re-laid out again. We're already late for our printing deadline—oh well. Better to get it right than release a sub-standard product.
Joy, our designer, calls me and says that when she transfers the text into Quark, some of the sentences don't have spaces between the words. When she dumps it into another program, she gets funny characters between the words instead. I work out that it's the scanner software—it's put in strange characters where they should be spaces. Unfortunately, in Microsoft Word, they just look like ordinary spaces (just without the dots that you get when you turn on the hidden characters). Also unfortunately I cannot do a global replace of them so Joy has to correct them herself when she sees them.
May
I am nervously waiting for DBK III to come back from layout so I can index it. I start the process by scanning in the indices for Volumes I and II and checking the search terms. I even compile a list of Bible verses from the footnotes as it will be useful for the Scripture index.
DBK III comes back from layout (this was last Thursday). I start indexing (this was this week). I've only got one week to do it because next week I'm on leave. It's a long tedious process but it's helped by the fact that I've got a PDF of the whole thing and can use Acrobat Reader to look up search terms. I'm painstakingly waiting for the thing to count up to 212 (that's the number of pages) for each search until I discover the Advanced Search option. Then things go much faster.
I finish both the Scripture and the General Index just before lunch on Thursday (yesterday). Brilliant! I go through the changes with Joy. Now all that's left is the proofing which won't be done by me (thank God!) and then it's out of my hair.
I write some instructions for the proofreaders about the spaces between words problem (I've picked up a couple myself but it never hurts to have an extra pair of eyes). I also tell them about the footnotes—how they're meant to be like that.
Emma wonders whether we ought to write a note about it in the preface. I go to talk to Tony about them. Over the course of the conversation, it slowly dawns on me that, for an academic publication (which DBK III essentially is), we can't have inconsistencies in Bible referencing and that we really need to have one or the other. Since “The Gospel of the New Testament” is footnoted and since it comprises most of the book, it makes more sense to change everything to footnotes.
This unfortunately will throw out the pagination.
Which in turn makes both my General Index and Scripture Index wrong.
The drama queen in me wants to die (or at least start screaming very loudly).
“This project is cursed,” said Tony.
Then he tells me to enjoy my leave and to not even think about those three particular letters (DBK).
Blinks:
A way of funding writing in the future: pitch and idea and get people to support it.
Place where you can hire play equipment for parties, etc.
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
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