No love in Philly

Flew in Monday morn early for Enterra board meeting at historic old Union League building downtown. Took the train from airport to City Hall and walked the rest.

Meetings went 12 hours in total, but a very nice dinner at end. 2008 was very good to Enterra, as Development-in-a-Box‚Ñ¢ really took off.

I gave all board members advance proof copies of Great Powers, marking the section on DiB.

Got to my room around 2200, after following game on phone. As soon as Saints drove for second-half-opening TD, I pulled out my Second Pass copy of the book, downloaded the Final Pass PDF sent that afternoon and began the laborious process of checking all the corrections submitted last time.

Three and a half hours later, I was done. Couldn't find a single mistake until 284, where two words were reversed in order. Then I found another: Enterra listed as a "technology consulting" firm instead of a "technology/consulting" firm (meaning we do have the former and additionally consult and don't just consult on technology).

Third was a missing comma in Acknowledgements that made two names run together.

Fourth and fifth were my mistakes: capping "Frontier" in "frontier integration" entry in glossary and same mistake with "grand strategy."

Final mistake was new: a header in the endnotes that should have been sentence-case and italicized but was title-capped and additionally bolded.

There were about six or so call-out sentences in the endnotes that--despite ellipses--still ran more than one line. We had asked all to be cut down to fit on one line, but that was with placeholder page designations that were all "00." Problem was when you started adding real number beyond 100 and that extra space threw the call out sentence into a second line (usually just a word).

In both PNM and BFA, this was the norm, but I had really sought to eliminate these 2-line call-outs here, and succeeded in virtually all cases.

Coincidentally, I see Bradd Hayes and he turns over 200-plus slides generated from Great Powers, which was perfect timing.

Still, I think I'll read Last Pass PDF one more time before looking at slides.

Got something to pen for Esquire this week (Feb issue). My "How to Become a Grand Strategist" was slipped from the Jan issue to this one.

Glad to be staying home this Turkey Day.

Comments

[Lexington Green]

Proofread the Hell out of it. It's the only way. Too much of what gets published today is riddled with errors. Spellcheck is no substitute for anything. It is at best an adjunct to repeated, eyeball proofreading.

Sounds like it will be very clean.

Looking forward to seeing the final version.

[Robert L]

I absolutely adore how anal you are about getting everything right. It bugs me when simple little mistakes are strewn throughout a book - my eye catches them and it's distracting. I think I've become more critical of mistakes as I've been reading your step-by-step progress with Great Powers, and I've been looking for things in other people's books that you mention finding/correcting in your drafts. Why can't there be more people like you??? :)