Caregiver's Guide: Care for Yourself while you care for your loved ones

Some of you may wonder how the book edits are going?  I say good.  The process of having a book published goes like this:  after months of writing (in my case, it's two years), I mailed my book to the publisher.  The good folks at McFarland & Co., Inc do their work for several months.  Along the way, they email questions like "Is there supposed to be a chapter 12?  It appears to be missing." Oh dear, what did I do?  Of course there's a chapter 12.  So I attach chapter 12 to my email and send it to them.  Oops.  I'm glad they caught that mistake.
Then weeks later I receive an email, "book proof edits were mailed with instructions.  Please check these edits and make an index.  Please send all this to us hopefully within a month."

 Book page edits and making an index are the last thing a writer does.  Book page edits involve unbound pages that are set up exactly how the book pages will be.  I have to read through, make corrections, refer to the original manuscript (which the editors sent back with lots of red ink editor marks and suggestions.  (That's ok, it's their job to make my book look as perfect as possible.)  I look for content corrections, typographic corrections, etc.  You've got the picture.  That's step 1 in book page editing.  We will talk about the next steps in the next blog posts.