Plus I couldn’t actually bring myself to open the box.

The copyediting on this manuscript was actually very helpful and thorough, which (as those of you who followed my last book through copyediting will remember) is not always the case. The copyeditor caught more mistakes and misspellings than I thought I was capable of.

Still, a few stylistic disagreements became clear as I worked my way through. She closed up an awful lot of one-sentence paragraphs, which I generally restored; I understand that one-sentence paragraphs are often considered undesirable, but in a book like this the one-sentence paragraph serves as a useful transition between different stories. As, for example, between the story of Yazdegerd, last king of Persia, and the story of the caliph whose army drove him out of power.

Yazdegerd was still hauling along with him the remnants of his royal court–four thousand or so secretaries, displaced officials, palace staff, and their women and children. There was no way to support that many idle people, in winter, in the mountains, in a province cut off from its former trade partners. Instead of turning the king away, the Khorasan governer hired a couple of assassins to solve the problem. The hired killers arrived in the middle of the night and did away with Yazdegerd’s bodyguard. The king himself fled eastward and took shelter with a stonecutter on the banks of the Murghab river. As he slept, exhausted, the stonecutter murdered him and threw his body into the water. With him, the entire medieval Persian state perished.
*
Uthman’s attempts to turn his own conquered realm into a state now took a downturn.

The first six years of his tenure as caliph–the years from 644 to 650, which were spent in conquest–had gone well, but the last six years were increasingly difficult. The Arab historians who chronicle his rule say that the turn in his fortunes came when he lost the signet ring of the Prophet….

Or between the stories of the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain and the empire of Constantinople…

The old man died not long after, and Alfonso the Battler became king of Aragon and Navarre, Leon and Castile, rex Hispania. But he held Leon and Castile only through his wife, and their marriage was a disaster. Urraca was a grown woman in her late twenties, not a naive young girl. She had a four-year-old son from her previous marriage, and this child, not Alfonso the Battler, had the right to become the next ruler of Leon and Castile. She insisted on ruling her own part of the empire without her new husband’s help, going so far as to banish her old tutor because he referred to Alfonso the Battler as “king of Castile.” On top of the political problems, she simply didn’t like Alfonso; there was a “want of affection between the wedded pair,” says one chronicler. They quarrelled, and separated within a matter of months.

But Alfonso the Battler still claimed the title of king over the whole realm. Over the next eight years, he fought a constant war with the Almoravid armies along the frontier. Urraca also sent the armies of Leon-Castile against the Almoravids.

Periodically, the estranged husband and wife also fought against each other; once Alfonso the Battler even captured his spouse and kept her for a while as a prisoner of war. The hostility between the Christian king and queen thwarted their attempts; thanks to their decaying marriage, the Almoravids kept power a little longer.
*
Back to the east, eleventh-century Constantinople emerged from its self-absorption just in time to see a brand new enemy appear on the eastern horizon.

Basil the Bulgar-slayer died in 1025; Constantine VIII, his young brother and heir, wore the sole crown of Byzantium for only three years. He was in his sixties and had spent his entire life in hunting, horseback riding, and eating. He had no skill at governing and no experience as a soldier: “a man of sluggish temperament, with no great ambition for power,” Michael Psellus writes, “physically strong, but a craven at heart.” As a ruler, his greatest expertise was in “the art of preparing rich savoury sauces.” He had no sons and no heir; he had three daughters, but had refused to let any of them marry, afraid that their husbands might try to unseat him. His reign was one of staggering irresponsibility….

Hey: a transitional one-sentence paragraphs beats writing, “Meanwhile, on the other side of the world…”

For the same reason–keeping a forward flow in the narrative–I tend to begin a lot of sentences with conjunctions, many of which she marked out. I put quite a few of them back in.

By 330 Constantine had succeeded in establishing one Empire, one royal family, one Church. But while the New Rome celebrated, the old Rome seethed with resentment over its loss of status; the unified church Constantine had created at Nicaea was held together only by the thin veneer of imperial sanction; and Constantine’s three sons eyed their father’s empire and waited for his death.

Here’s a place where I restored both the opening conjunction and the one-sentence paragraph:

Now Julian openly announced himself as an opponent of Christianity. His baptism, he said, was a “nightmare” which he wished to forget. He ordered the old temples, many of which had been closed under the reign of the Christian emperors, to be re-opened. And he decreed that no Christian could teach literature; since a literary education was required for all government officials; this would eventually have guaranteed that all Roman officials had received a thoroughly Roman education.

It also meant that the Christians in the empire would become chronically undereducated. Most Christians refused to send their children to schools where they would be indoctrinated in the ways of the old Roman religion. Instead, Christian writers began to try to create their own literature, to be used in their own schools: as A. A. Vasiliev writes, they “translated the Psalms into forms similar to the odes of Pindar; the Pentateuch of Moses they rendered into hexameter; the Gospels were rewritten in the style of Plato’s dialogues.”

Most of this literature was so substandard that it disappeared almost at once; very little has survived.

(At the same time: I do begin a lot of sentences with conjunctions, and I did have many many one-sentence paragraphs. Reading through that amount of manuscript at once highlights all your peculiarities of style. To the point where you simply can’t stand the way you write anymore, which is why I’m feeling cranky today even though the work is mostly done.)

As a matter of style, the copyeditor put commas around every single one-word appositive. I removed almost all of these because they bog the reader down when sentences are filled with proper names. Compare my original:

His oldest son Lothair was crowned king of Italy and co-Emperor; his second son Louis was coronated in Bavaria, a little Germanic territory to the east which had coalesced out of the remnants of several tribes; the youngest, Pippin, became king of Aquitaine.

to the copyedited version, which feels quite different (and not in a good way) to me:

His oldest son, Lothair, was crowned king of Italy and co-Emperor; his second son, Louis, was coronated in Bavaria, a little Germanic territory to the east which had coalesced out of the remnants of several tribes; the youngest, Pippin, became king of Aquitaine.

Also noticed that the copyeditor dislikes colloquialisms (I mostly ignored the dignified rephrasings she suggested).

Despite the acidic tone, there is little reason to think that Procopius got his basic facts wrong; Theodora’s past was well-known to her contemporaries. Her father had been a bear-trainer who worked in the half-time shows given by the Greens between chariot races. He had died of illness, leaving his wife with three small girls under the age of seven. The Greens had hired another trainer, and in order to survive the mother had forced the girls to appear before the Blues as entertainers. Entertainment led to prostitution, and by the time Theodora reached puberty she had already been in a brothel for years. Procopius chalks this up to Theodora’s insatiable appetite (he claims that she could sleep with upward of forty men per night without “satisfying her lust”), but a darker picture emerges from even his sharp-tongued account: “She was extremely clever and had a biting wit,” he writes, “she complied with the most outrageous demands without the slightest hesitation, and she was the sort of girl who, if somebody walloped her or boxed her ears would make a jest of it and roar with laughter.” She had, after all, little other choice.

The copyeditor took out “chalks this up” and changed the sentence to read, “Procopius ascribes this to Theodora’s insatiable appetite.” I changed it back. The latter sounds stuffy.

One little bit of news as I close: you can now download an MP3 of my lecture about what (neo)classical education is (and isn’t) from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. We’re making it available to coincide with the tenth-anniversary edition of The Well-Trained Mind, and you can buy it for a mere $.89 (or £0.69). For a full hour of hearing me talk. How can you resist?

Thanks for the suggestion, faithful readers.

Well, not completely wordless. I can’t really go completely wordless. But maybe the picture almost speaks for itself.

That is the copyedited manuscript of the History of the Medieval World, which is due back on May 22.

I put it in a safe place, on this shelf behind my desk.

When I sit at my desk, I can feel it watching me.

In other book news: the third edition of The Well-Trained Mind (the tenth-anniversary edition) is now shipping from Peace Hill Press, Barnes & Noble, and other booksellers. Weirdly, it’s not shipping from Amazon yet. Who can say why?

I’ve got two more titles upcoming: Workbook 3 and Workbook 4 in the Writing With Ease series, completing our elementary-grade writing program and due out in August and January, respectively.

And after that, I’ll let you know. I’ve been working at a completely ridiculous pace and it’s time to carefully plan out the next projects. And read some novels. And take the dogs to obedience training. And do all the paperwork for the new wetlands in the front field. And paint the barn. And…

So, just because I want everyone to see it, here it is:

Proofreading an index is a weird job. You’re looking not so much for typos, as for things that aren’t there–topics that SHOULD have been indexed but haven’t been. If you haven’t been trained to index, you’re sort of flying blind.

I haven’t been trained to index, but I’ve done this long enough to have some idea of what I want to see–particularly for a book like The Well-Trained Mind, which I’ve been answering questions about for nearly a decade. So I buckled down and tried to do a really thorough job on the index. This meant reading page after page of stimulating text like…

earth science:
experiment kits for, 393, 405–7
in second-grade curriculum, 166–69, 180–83, 217, 220
sixth-grade study of, 385, 386, 392–93, 405–7, 460
teaching resource lists for, 180–83, 405–7
tenth-grade astronomy vs., 540n
East of the Sun and West of the Moon (Asbjrnsen), 355
Ecclesiastes, Book of, 709
Ecosystem Science Fair Projects (Walker & Wood), 544
education:
entertainment vs., 200–201, 448
knowledge-focused approach vs. child-centered unschooling in, 624–25
passive reception vs. active engagement in, 448
see also classical education; home education
Education Week, 231
Educators Publishing Service, 36, 339, 483
Edwards, Betty, 432, 589
Egypt:
in history studies, 114, 116, 126–29, 282, 283
mythology of, 76, 348
eighth grade:
art and music study in, 438–39, 462
college preparations in, 698
curriculum summary for, 461–62
foreign language studies in, 418–21, 461, 569
formal logic studies in, 461
grammar work in, 341, 343, 364, 461
history study in, 277
math in, 258–59, 260, 261, 461, 527, 528–29, 531, 533, 534, 537
memorization work in, 364, 399
modern-era reading curriculum for, 343, 356–58, 378–81, 461–62
modern history studied in, 294–301, 326–34, 461
outline skills developed by, 273, 292, 295
physics studies in, 385, 386, 396–99, 410–13, 461
religion in, 461
teaching resource lists for, 262–67, 303–5, 364–67, 381–82, 422–25, 428–29, 440–47
vocabulary study in, 337, 363, 461
writing studies in, 360, 364, 388, 461
see also logic stage
Einstein, Albert, 547, 552, 603
Einstein’s Relativity and the Quantum Revolution, 545
Electricity and Magnetism (Whalley), 173
Electricity and Magnetism Science Fair Projects (Gardner), 544
electronic teaching aids:
in grammar stage, 198–201
see also computers; television; videos
Elementary Greek: Koine for Beginners, 567
elementary school:
home-school portfolios of work in, 656, 657
see also grammar stage; logic stage; specific elementary grade levels
Elements of Chemistry, The (Lavoisier), 547
Elements of Geometry (Euclid), 546
Elements of Style, The (Strunk and White), 484, 612–13, 614
eleventh grade:
art and music in, 590, 593, 614
college preparations in, 698
composition instruction in, 484, 614
computer-programming elective in, 577, 580–81, 614
curriculum summary for, 614
debate activities in, 475
foreign languages in, 569, 614
grammar studies in, 482–83, 614
great-books studies in, 495–96, 512, 521–22, 614
history study in, 278
major writing project in, 466, 502, 598–601, 614, 701
math in, 259, 260, 526, 528–29, 531, 533, 535, 537, 614
PSAT and SAT testing in, 260, 528, 529–30, 673, 698
religion in, 614
research papers written in, 601–2
science education in, 542, 543, 547, 548, 549, 552, 557–58, 614
teaching resource lists for, 521–22, 557–58
transcript credits and, 660, 661, 662, 663
see also rhetoric stage
Eliot, T. S., 62, 358, 562, 564
Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 289

and so on. (You get the idea. Multiply by 86 pages.)

The more I worked on this particular index, the less happy I was with it. So I sent off my massive list of corrections to the editorial staff: page after page of remarks like, “Why are some subjects indexed ‘third grade,’ ‘seventh grade,” etc., while others are indexed ‘elementary’ and ‘middle’ and still others ‘grammar’ and ‘logic stage’? Why is there an entry for Japanese literature, but no other kind of literature? Why isn’t CLEP indexed along with the other college prep tests?” And so on. I also appended my opinion that the index, as a whole, was less than stellar.

Back comes an email from the editorial staff, who forwarded my corrections to the indexer: The indexer would like to point out that the index was based on the second edition’s index, and that I didn’t raise any of these concerns when THAT index was sent along to me for proofing. So my remark that the indexing was substandard should have been made five years ago.

How embarrassing.

I have absolutely no memory of proofing that index. Did I read it and like it the first time around? Why did I pass it last time and hate it this time? (Did I even get AROUND to reading it for the last edition? Surely I did….)

Anyway: No thorough job of proofreading goes unpunished. The editorial staff also pointed out to me that there was no time left to make the changes, so if I wanted to make them, I’d have to type them into the index myself.

So I did, red-faced. Ah, well; making a fool of yourself is good for the soul (I think).

Which is almost possible. Dealing with the edits is going very quickly–so far the suggested changes are along the lines of, “You’d better explain how Julian got two hundred ships into the Euphrates” and “You’d better pick one spelling for this name and stick with it.” The timelines are a little more complex. I have two commitments I’m trying to keep: to make sure that every place mentioned in the book is also on a map, and to make sure that all major dates and reigns go on timelines at the end of each chapter. These timelines have the dates from the current chapter on the right and the dates from the previous chapter on the left, like this:

Timeline for Chapter 6:

Timeline for Chapter 7:

It’s not always possible, in a world history narrative, to find a natural and intuitive transition from one chapter into another, and the timelines help hold the story together.

So that’s my task for the next few days. More soon.

The painting is by Jules Laure (1806-1861). It shows Charlemagne receiving manuscripts from his tutor, the monk Alcuin, around 781.

Charlemagne is a good choice for the cover of the History of the Medieval World; he represents one of the main themes of the book, the growing tendency of kings to claim divine Right instead of mere Might as a justification for conquest and domination. Here’s a brief excerpt from my chapter on Charlemagne:

Charlemagne had gathered around him a royal circle of scholars and clerics who were filling in the early gaps in his education (he had received much more military training than book-learning from his father, and had never learned to write); they not only discussed with him the finer points of theology, philosophy, and grammar, but they called him “King David,” after the Old Testament monarch who was hand-picked by God to lead the chosen people. Under the guidance of his personal tutor Alcuin, a British churchman whom Charlemagne had recruited to teach his sons, the king of the Franks developed a stronger and stronger sense of mission. His conquests were, in his own eyes, forceful evangelism: bringing the Gospel to stubborn unbelievers who needed to be saved not just from their sins but from their own unwillingness to hear.

Earlier in the decade, he had concluded a campaign against the Saxons with exactly this sort of persuasion. The Saxon resistance to his rule and the Saxon toll on his army had so angered him that, in 782, he had ordered 4500 Saxon prisoners to be massacred. Their leader Widukind had escaped, but after three years on the run he had finally been forced to surrender. As part of his surrender, Widukind had to agree to Christian baptism; and afterward Charlemagne decreed that any “unbaptized Saxon who conceals himself among his people and refuses to seek baptism, but rather chooses to remain a pagan shall die.” A Saxon who stole from a church, or did violence to a priest, or indulged himself in the old Saxon rites instead of Christian worship, would be put to death. And any Saxon who did not observe Lent properly would be executed.

To his credit, Alcuin objected. “Abate a little of your threatening,” he told the king, “and do not force them by public compulsion until faith has thoroughly grown in their hearts.” Charlemagne considered the argument and agreed, revoking the death penalty; but this did not change his sense of duty. He was not bringing merely salvation, but right doctrine and practice, to the western world.

Incidentally, my alert colleague Justin points out that the painting is reversed on the cover of the book. I’m not sure why the graphic designer at Norton flipped it; I’m sending a note to find out whether it was intentional.

My editor has sent back the first 200 pages with his comments written in. It’s sitting on my desk…I have to nerve myself to tackle it this week…

I’m working on the maps for the middle section of the book and marvelling over the number of ways I have managed to spell place names. Doing the maps always forces me to find my many, many variant spellings and make them consistent.

And Norton has suggested this cover:

What do you think? I like it, myself, but I’m curious as to whether or not you can identify the subject of the painting.

It’s a lot of pages for an ebook, isn’t it? I have a Kindle but haven’t used it as much as I expected to (mostly I take it when I’m flying, since it’s light). It drives me crazy not to be able to flip back and forth through actual pages.

Anyway, if you buy any of my books on the Kindle, let me know what the reading experience is like. I’m curious.

Time for Christmas vacation. I’ll be back after Christmas with updates.

*

The Mother Of God
by William Butler Yeats

The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare
Through the hollow of an ear;
Wings beating about the room;
The terror of all terrors that I bore
The Heavens in my womb.

Had I not found content among the shows
Every common woman knows,
Chimney corner, garden walk,
Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes
And gather all the talk?

What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,
This fallen star my milk sustains,
This love that makes my heart’s blood stop
Or strikes a sudden chill into my bones
And bids my hair stand up?

This involved some rewriting, but I was happy to find out that I didn’t have to rewrite most of my chapter on logic-stage history, because our foundational resource, the Kingfisher History Encyclopedia, was still available.

Well, in the two weeks since I checked, the book has gone OUT of print. Which means I need to replace it as a recommendation. Which doesn’t just involve replacing the name of the book where it occurs in the text–I have to choose new excerpts, do new sample outlines, and rewrite multiple other bits of text which make specific reference to page numbers, etc.

I sent off a panicked email (OK, maybe three or four emails) to my editor at Norton, who told me to calm down and take a nap. It appears that I have five whole days to pick a new outline and rewrite the chapter. Oh, and did I mention that it’s the last week of classes at William & Mary, which means I have to grade final projects by Friday? Oh, and that I had planned the next seven days to be an all-out assault on the last section of the History of the Medieval World, a last desperate attempt to finish it by my December 19 deadline????

BREATHE IN breathe out BREATHE IN breathe out….Maybe that nap would be a good idea.

I can probably do this (actually, what other choice do I have?), but I’m PEEVED. Let me give you some background on this. Ten years ago, when the first edition of The Well-Trained Mind came out, we recommended the Kingfisher Illustrated History of the World (an earlier version of this same text) as the central text for logic-stage history.

We quoted four chunks of text from the Illustrated History, so that we could demonstrate how students might outline them. Because the word count went over accepted free use standards, we wrote Kingfisher and asked for permission. They told us sure, we could quote from the book, and they would only charge us two thousand dollars for a permission fee. We complained and griped about this (“Don’t you understand that we’re telling people to BUY your book?”), but in the end we had to shell it out.

TWO WEEKS after The Well-Trained Mind came out, Kingfisher let the book go out of print, so that we had to spend the next five years telling people to use the replacement, a new edition of the book which was different enough so that the exact instructions we gave weren’t quite right.

And now here we are again. This seems like bad management to me. Why would you let such a popular book repeatedly go out of print?

I dug around a little to see what I could find out, and, lo and behold, Kingfisher is now owned by Houghton Mifflin. Which is not good news. Check out these recent news articles from Publisher’s Lunch, a daily update I subscribe to.

***UPDATE BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING***Someone from Houghton Mifflin just sent me an email saying that HM sold Kingfisher within the last year. In that case, can anyone explain to me why HM still has Kingfisher listed as one of their divisions on the webpage? And who now owns it? I’d go dig this info out for myself, but I have to stop digging long enough to rewrite the chapter which Kingfisher has just rendered obsolete. (In any case, it appears that the History Encyclopedia remained on the HM backlist, although I’d be very happy to find out that someone else controls the rights.)

*
Nov. 25: No New Books. What’s Houghton Thinking?

It was less than a month ago that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt held an “open house” at their New York offices to celebrate the first combined list of the once separate trade lines, but now that welcome is firmly closed as the trade and reference division has “temporarily stopped acquiring manuscripts,” according to vp of communications Josef Blumenfeld.

As first reported by PW and followed by the WSJ and NYT, Blumenfeld struggled for metaphors to explain the policy: “We have a temporary freeze on. We are working on what we already have.” Or rather, “there is a freeze-lite” he said. “There is a way in so it is not a hard freeze but for right now, there is a temporary — call it a freeze if you want.” Or maybe they are keeping the pipes empty before they can freeze?: “We have turned off the spigot, but we have a very robust pipeline.”

Blumenfeld explains further: “The climate is difficult. It’s about cash outlays, and every outlay of cash in every industry is being scrutinized.” But is it about expenditures, or symbols? “In this case, it’s a symbol of doing things smarter; it’s not an indicator of the end of literature.”

They also suggest that the lite freeze on that spigot might leave room for a trickle, since, while saying they are not acquiring new projects, “there are still things being considered by the acquisition committee.” But now that it’s been made clear to agents they aren’t acquiring, there won’t be a lot of submissions coming in the door to consider. Which is the really scary part about saying out loud you aren’t acquiring.
*
Nov. 26: Parent Co. “Would Consider” Selling HMH Trade

With general bafflement continuing over Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s willingness to admit out loud that they have a freeze on buying new books, the NYT speaks to Jeremy Dickens, president of Education Media and Publishing Group, the private equity company that owns the trade publisher. “He denied that the company was for sale, but said, ‘If there’s a transaction that makes sense for all of our stakeholders, we’ll consider it.’” And “he said that the company had received inquiries from other trade publishers interested in acquiring Houghton.”

On the freeze, Dickens said they wanted to be “extremely prudent about the way that we allocate our capital and where we make our investment decisions.” He added, “We have plenty of titles in the pipeline that will be coming out next year and we will continue to evaluate opportunities if and when we decide to lift the freeze.” That “if” will cause some additional concern….

The buyers took on massive debt to swallow Houghton Mifflin and then Harcourt, back when credit was at least cheap and freely available, and they now have “about $7 billion in debt” with annual debt service of “about $500 million.” DIckens says they have no problem covering the payments, but are not “allocating as much capital” to trade publishing, which is a small part of the company.

Meanwhile, yesterday agent Kristin Nelson, posting on her blog, said: “I did get a chance to talk to an Editorial Director at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s. She mentioned that the hold [on acquisitions] did not apply to the children’s division and that she had acquired something just yesterday.”

The article also paints a contrast between houses cutting back, like HMH, and publishers having strong years, like Hachette Book Group (where a string of hits is worth even more to the parent company now that the euro is somewhat weaker against the dollar.) And there is the suggestion that commercial hits are an essential part of success today: “One of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s best authors, Mr. Roth, is a literary lion who is frequently rumored to be on the short list for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Each of his last three novels have sold fewer than 75,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan, which reports about 70 percent of sales. David Baldacci, meanwhile, a stalwart author in Grand Central’s stable, has already sold 114,000 hardcover copies of “Divine Justice,” his latest novel, just published this month.”
NYT

Separately, the Observer undertakes a comprehensive survey of cutbacks on lunchtime expenses in publishing. HarperCollins and Random House are eating less expensively. (At RH, “some supervisors were recently given guidelines indicating how much employees should tip and which restaurants near the company’s midtown headquarters are thrifty enough to do business in. While the guidelines were advisory, the message was clear.”)

But others, from Marjorie Braman to Bob Weil, cite opportunities hatched over meals. Esther Newberg at ICM is willing to “alternate” in picking up checks, and Ira Silverberg paid for lunch on Monday with an HMH editor who wanted to cancel after the company “slashed” T&E. Oops.
*
Dec. 1: HMH Officially Has No Idea What They Mean

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s botched public expression of their current acquisitions policy has reached comic levels. In the latest installment, vp of communications Josef Blumenfeld confirmed for the AP our report from an agent that the children’s trade division is still buying projects. Otto Penzler adds that the freeze was news to him, and says that a “high-level Houghton executive” told him he could continue to acquire for his line of mysteries. “‘Does this mean I can keep buying books?’” he asked. “‘Absolutely,’ I was told.”

Blumenfeld tries to persuade the AP that “talk of a freeze had been taken out of context.” But he’s the one who used the word “freeze” and said they had “temporarily stopped acquiring manuscripts.” And Jeremy Dickens, the president of parent company Education Media and Publishing Group, is the used the same term, and raised the notion that it might not be temporary: “We have plenty of titles in the pipeline that will be coming out next year and we will continue to evaluate opportunities if and when we decide to lift the freeze.”
*
Dec. 3: Saletan Quits Harcourt Houghton Mifflin

The situation at Harcourt Houghton Mifflin continues to worsen, as the AP reports that svp and publisher of adult trade Becky Saletan has resigned her position as of December 10. There was no further comment beyond confirmation from the company. Saletan (along with others at HMH) has been required to stay silent as the company has stumbled its way through explaining their partial “freeze” on acquisitions of books for adults.
*
Dec. 3: Dismantling of HMH Continues with Firings
Galleycat reports that Ann Patty says she has been “fired” along with “a lot” of other employees at Harcourt Houghton Mifflin, adding to the community’s sense that the parent company has simply given up on the trade line. As ever, the company is not commenting. Place your takeover bids now.
*

I don’t know what’s going on over at HMH (and neither, apparently, do they), but this suggests to me that I’d better not choose the last remaining Kingfisher history in print, the Concise Encyclopedia of History, to replace the out-of-print volume.

I’ll be looking for something else this week.

Guess that takes care of next week’s free time…

I guess it’s wrong to feel satisfied when current events continue to make the book relevant, huh?

The bigger box was from my Spanish publisher, Paidos, by way of the Norton office. The History of the Ancient World has been sold into Korea, Spain, Bulgaria, and Russia (so far–I’m hoping that other foreign publishers will take an interest in the series as it progresses), and the Spanish translations have just come off the press.

Beautiful books.

For those of you who don’t know, The Well-Trained Mind was the first book I did (my mother co-authored) for W. W. Norton, almost ten years ago now. The book first came out in 1999, and we revised it the first time for publication in 2004, five years later–by which point we’d had the chance to hear from, literally, thousands of readers. The first edition was based on our own experiences; for the second, we had the great advantage of knowing how our recommendations were working for a much larger cross-section of parents and kids. (Believe me when I say: We had no idea so many people would READ it.)

So the second edition had a fair number of changes in the text, because we’d discovered where we were unclear, where we needed to include alternative methods and programs for different kinds of learners, where we needed to simplify. And between 1999 and 2004, a lot of books and curricula we recommended went out of print, or changed prices–including some of the core texts that we had described in great detail.

This time around, I honestly didn’t think there would be as many changes. I’ve been collecting curricula for the last couple of years, looking for anything new and earth-shatteringly wonderful, but while I’ve added a few new books and programs this time around, most of our recommendations still stand. And I hired a friend to help look up all of the prices and publication information so that we could update the details.

(One corner of my new-curricula pile. It’s threatening to spread and take over the third floor of the house.)

Despite that, the revision turned into a HUGE project. The big problem: Publishers let PERFECTLY GOOD BOOKS go out of print with astonishing regularity. Whole wonderful series of books that are only five or six years old, gorgeous art books that must have taken a FORTUNE to produce, science books that are well-written and clear–they all seem to fall off the backlist. And among the worst offenders are Usborne and Dorling Kindersley. I like Usborne books a lot, and I adore the DK reference books, but you just can’t rely on their titles staying around for any length of time. And this confuses me. After the first print run you’ve paid off most of your development costs; you’re just paying the physical cost of the book and the royalty to the author, and the rest is gravy. Why on earth let the books die?

Anyway, I ended up writing in an incredible number of changes, just because so many books are simply not available any more. And it was a long tiring process. In case you don’t know, a revision to an existing book is done–yes, in the year 2008–by HAND. Wherever there is a change, I am supposed to photocopy the page and write the change onto it in pencil. If the change is longer than a sentence, I type it out, indicate where it is suppose to go on the original page, attach a new page with the typed-out change to the original change, and then save the added text as a text file onto a CD. The result looks kind of like this (click for a close-up):

By the time I was done, I had a huge stack of photocopied pages with brief changes written on them in pencil,

and I had typed out and saved 199 separate text files with changes of a sentence or more.

My eyes hurt.

My HAND hurts. I don’t usually write that much in pencil any more. Seriously. I need to do some writing-muscle exercises so that computer use doesn’t atrophy my hands.

Anyway, I finally got the revisions done and out the door (here’s Mollie, my husband’s niece–she’s working for me this year–with the box, heading for UPS).

That’ll be another set of page proofs returning to be proof-read, sometime this fall–after I finish the History of the Medieval World, I hope. Remember the History of the Medieval World? My attention’s been a little distracted over the last few weeks.

Time to get back to feudalism…I mean it, this time…

Every publishing contract I’ve signed gives me two options: prepare the index myself, or else allow the publisher to hire a professional indexer and have half the costs deducted from my royalties. On my first book, I checked around with my writer friends to find out what the best option was. The vote was unanimous: everyone who had tried to save money by doing the index themselves wanted to put her head in an oven by the time it was done.

So I always take the second option. It usually ends up costing me in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars or a little more–which is a good thing, because the index rolls around at the point in the process when I’m thinking that I never want to see this leprous scabby book again.

AHEM.

It’s a good book. Really.

Anyway, even though the index gets outsourced to a professional freelancer, it then gets sent back to me for proofing. The indexing this time around struck me as very good indeed, but I did have a few suggestions. For example, here’s part of the A section, with my remarks in all caps:

Abbott, Lyman, 34
ABC News, 144, 153
abortion, 112, 113
Abzug, Bella, 113
African Americans, 175 I ASSUME THIS REFERENCE IS TO THE CLINTON CHAPTER, WHERE I COVER THE SUPPORT OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN VOTERS—IF SO, DOESN’T IT COVER MORE THAN ONE PAGE? (THROUGH THE END OF THE PARAGRAPH ABOUT LYNCHING.) I THINK IT WOULD BE GOOD TO ALSO INDEX WITH AFRICAN AMERICANS MY REFERENCE TO SOUTHERN BLACK CHURCH SERVICES (CH. 7).
Allen, A. A., 294n22
Allen, Steve, 119
altar call, 34, 65, 66, 109, 160
. See also revivals
America IS THERE ANY WAY TO DEFINE THIS ENTRY A LITTLE MORE AS “AMERICA, THE NATION” OR….SOMETHING LIKE THAT? THE WHOLE BOOK IS ABOUT AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC CULTURE AND AMERICAN EVANGLICALISM, AND WHEN I SEE THIS ENTRY I THINK THAT “DEMOCRACY IN” AND “EVANGELICAL RELIGION IN” AND EVEN ‘CATHOLIC CHURCH IN” SHOULD ALSO BE INDEXED UNDERNEATH IT, WHICH WOULD MAKE IT MUCH MORE EXTENSIVE. AS IT STANDS, IT STRIKES ME AS KIND OF A RANDOM SELECTION OF TOPICS. IF “AMERICA AND HAGGARD,” WHY NOT “AMERICA AND KENNEDY” OR “AMERICA AND CLINTON” OR “AMERICA AND BERNARD LAW”?
as decadent, 139
fundamentalist view of, 57
and Haggard, 211
and mythical Christian past, 125, 126
and popular culture, 67
renewal of, 57
repentance of, 6, 107, 127
American Catholic bishops, 186
American public, 158, 159, 162, 168, 177, 178, 181–82, 242, 243
American Puritans, 4–5, 26, 27, 127
American Religious Town Hall (television program), 296n35
Anderson, Jeffrey, 203
Angelus Temple, 38, 61
establishment of, 45
finances of, 41
and radio, 47
services at, 43, 44
tableaux staged at, 53, 54–55
anxious bench, 33, 34, 290n20
. See also revivals
apology HAGGARD ALSO OFFERED AN APOLOGY
and Bakker, 117, 133
and Clinton, 158, 163, 180–81
and confession, 2–3
and Kennedy, 79
and Law, 7, 188, 189–90, 191, 193, 195, 199, 265, 267, 269, 272, 284
as mainstay of American culture, 14
and Randolph, 199
The Apostle (film), 162
Armstrong, Ben, The Electric Church, 124
Armstrong, Neil, 90
Asbury, Francis, 32
Assemblies of God CAN YOU PROVIDE A “SEE ALSO PENTACOSTALISM” HERE? I TEND TO USE THE TWO INTERCHANGEABLY IN SOME CHAPTERS.
and Bakker, 137–38, 141, 142, 229, 232
and Christian Voice, 126
and Dortch, 231
and Fletcher, 233
and Swaggart, 143, 144, 145–46, 237, 238
Augusta Chronicle, 111, 140, 146
Augustine, 84–85, 108, 174, 180, 208, 209
Confessions, 84, 89
Azusa Street Revival, 53, 292n19

…and then there were a number of queries that the indexer had for me–he caught a good number of problems and inconsistencies. Such as the ones below (again, with my answers in all caps…)

QUERY
93: I assume that this is her last name: Wagner, Helga CORRECT
108.1:–this line doesn’t seem to make sense: SHOULD BE secular humanism?
“The political goal of religious humanism is a one-world government controlled by man, not God,” declared Christian evangelist and educator Bill Gothard. IT SHOULD BE SECULAR HUMANISM
125: Is this an advocacy group? If so, why italicized in text? Christian Voice (advocacy group) IT IS AN ADVOCACY GROUP, AND IT SHOULD NOT BE ITAL.
188-189, 265-266: I assume that Law’s press conf. took place on Jan 9, not Jan 10 (as stated on 188), and in 2002, not 2001 (as stated on 188). THAT IS CORRECT. THE PRESS CONFERENCE WAS JAN. 9, 2002. THE COVERAGE OF THE PRESS CONFERENCE APPEARED IN PAPERS ON JAN. 10, 2002, THE FOLLOWING DAY.
Law, Bernard Cardinal: press conference of January 9, 2001, , 265–68}
201: I assume that these are the same: U.S. Catholic Conference AND United States Conference of Catholic BISHOPS YES, THEY ARE THE SAME. THE ORIGINAL TITLE WAS THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS AND UNITED STATES CATHOLIC CONFERENCE. WE SHOULD ALWAYS USE UNITED STATES CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS FOR CONSISTENCY.

That’s the week’s excitement, folks. Indexing. If something more thrilling were going on, I would certainly tell you.

So the next thing that happens should be…the arrival of the ARCs, or galleys–these are the prepublication copies of the book, sent out to reviewers. When they get here I’ll take a picture. Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out how to write about feudalism in a manner that doesn’t cause people to drop off to sleep as though hit by a somnolence virus.

The first pass galleys are the pages that will eventually be bound into the book; the typesetters create them from the electronic file of the manuscript that I sent, and they’re supposed to incorporate into the galleys all of the copyeditor changes made in pencil on the hard copy of the manuscript pages. This creates plenty of opportunity for new errors to creep in. Like this one (you’ll need to click on the picture and look at the large version to get the full effect):

(What do you think the copyeditor’s blue insertion says? Now, have a look at what the typesetter THOUGHT it said…)

Yes, that’s right. The copyeditor wrote “penetrating.” The typesetter–trying, I guess, to read the handwritten letters–typed “revetrating.” Which is not, so far as I know, a word.

Due to the struggle I had with the copyedited pages and the tight production schedule that the book is on, I didn’t get to approve all the copyedits before they went to the typesetter, and this is one of the changes I hadn’t seen before. So I changed it back to the original wording anyway. I had written “infiltrating,” which is different from “penetrating,” and I guess I’ve taught too many freshmen classes to ever pick that particular word (they all giggle when you use anything that might possibly be interpreted as a double entendre).

The typesetter on this particular job seems to have been very literal-minded: he (or she) incorporated changes into the text whether or not they made sense. Here, for example, is a copyedit I accepted:

(The copyeditor changed “work” to “strove”…)

(…and the typesetter saw “store,” which turns the sentence into gibberish.)

Here’s a word reversal that the copyeditor didn’t mark clearly enough…

and that the typesetter reproduced faithfully.

And here’s a copyeditor notation that I don’t quite understand.

Neither did the typesetter.

Yeah, that’s right, it now reads, “The Father of Lies. Hair.” I don’t know why.

These are the kinds of mistakes that make me scared to open the book, once it comes out. If I miss something like this, I will sound like an IDIOT.

And then there are lots of smaller changes, like this one: the copyeditor deleted the first comma but forgot to take out the second, which makes the sentence incorrect…

and there are changes that I can live with, but wouldn’t be my choice, like this one…

Webster says that “appendix” can be made plural as either “appendices” or “appendixes.” The copyeditor chose the second. My five years of Latin are shouting NO, NO, NO! but I’m not listening.

Princeton has graciously agreed to let me have a look at the second pass galleys to check on whether corrections have been made, so I’ll be waiting for those to arrive.

In the meantime, I’m getting ready to head to Seattle at the end of the week for the WHO conference. I’m taking Dan and Emily with me so that they can meet their baby cousin for the first time. Will report on that shortly (if I survive the coast-to-coast flight…)

So the MS went back to Princeton and has now been given a thoroughly competent copyediting. It’s been an interesting experience. Copyedited pages always look they’re bleeding because the editor makes typesetting notations all over them.

But these pages were really, thoroughly copyedited. The editor suggested a number of alternative phrasings throughout, some of which I accepted, some of which I didn’t. (Since there’s a fair amount of theology in this book I have to be particularly careful about word choice: for example, “privacy” and “secrecy” are not at all the same thing when you’re talking about the Catholic practice of confession.) I haven’t gotten this particular kind of copyedit before. My editor at Norton always says how nice it is that I can put clean sentences on a page, and the copyedits on the books I’ve done for them have pretty much been confined to correcting inconsistencies in punctuation, citation, and so on.

This copyedit has me pondering such questions as: Is it better to say that elected officials “had the duty of satisfying their constituency” or “were obliged to satisfy their constituency”? Is it clearer to say, “Randolph is here arguing that confessions progressively move the sinner closer and closer to salvation,” or to say “Randolph argued that confession moves the sinner progressively closer and closer to salvation”?

I generally read manuscripts out loud when I’m working on final phrasing; something I tell my freshmen writers to do (not that they ever listen). Those phrases sound very different to me. It’s astounding how much a small change can shift the feel and sound of a sentence, and the feel and sound are important. Language is like music. Add or subtract an instrument, change a note, and you’ve got something different, even if the melody remains the same.

I remember Madeline L’Engle saying how distressed she was when her publisher changed her spelling of “grey” to “gray” throughout one of her novels–A Wrinkle in Time, I think (although I could be wrong.) For her, “grey” was a soft, warm color, while “gray” was a hard, battleship color, and the spelling threw off her entire picture of the world she was building. I know exactly what she means.

You know, somehow I never imagined that my name would end up under that particular picture.

You’ll note, by the way, that after we considered all the subtitles you so kindly provided, PUP ended up keeping my original subtitle. Sorry! But I had a GREAT time reading all the suggestions….

So…things are looking up slightly here. It’s still kind of winter-grey outside, but the sky is blue,

and February is over. And I know spring is coming when I can look out of the window and see Daniel sunbathing on top of the grape arbor.

I do, however, have one of my less-loved duties to finish up before next week…going through copyeditor suggestions, in this case on the confessions manuscript for Princeton University Press.

Right before a manuscript gets typeset, it goes to the copyeditor (usually a freelancer hired by the publisher), who goes through it word by word, makes sure you’ve been consistent with spelling, fixes punctuation errors, turns numbers into words where appropriate (29 vs. twenty-nine), catches errors (Roger Mudd interviewed Ted Kennedy on CBS, not NBC), and makes sure that your bibliography is properly formatted. In my case, the copyeditor also changes all my whiches to thats. I am a grammar fiend, but I have a block about restrictive and non-restrictive clauses. The explanation as to when you use which as opposed to that has never made any sense to me.

I’m grateful for all of that…but sometimes there’s a fine line between correcting mistakes and rewriting someone else’s perfectly acceptable prose in the way that YOU would write it if it were YOUR book. This time around, I’m spending an awful lot of time writing STET (which is copyeditor-speak for LEAVE IT THE WAY I ORIGINALLY WROTE IT BECAUSE I LIKE IT THAT WAY) over top of the copyeditor’s changes.

I’m wondering if part of the problem is Princeton’s status as a university press…I tend to write informally, in what I flatter myself is a readable style, and the copyeditor (who is very conscientious and has corrected ALL of my restrictive/non-restrictive clause problems) has been re-stiffening a lot of my sentences. The copyeditor, I should make clear, is NOT a Princeton editor but rather a freelancer (as almost all copyeditors now are). But perhaps the knowledge that the editing is being done for a scholarly publisher is affecting the copyeditor’s approach?

One example among many:

I wrote, about Aimee Semple McPherson’s own account of her supposed kidnapping, “The account highlighted her essential vulnerability and weakness–largely by positioning her alongside the popular suffragists of the early twentieth century.”

The copyeditor changed it to, “The account highlighted her essential vulnerability and weakness–largely by accentuating those qualities in a manner that might put her in league with the suffragists, who were immensely popular in the early twentieth century.”

Er…nope. That’s not changing a mistake; that’s rewriting prose style. Most of the changes also add words, which I don’t like. Never use ten words if five words will do.

So I’ve spent a whole lot of time writing STET on this manuscript.

put it all into a box and got it ready for the UPS pickup.

This is so much fun. One of the easiest jobs a writer has: Getting the manuscript ready for the UPS guy. And I don’t get to do it all that often. (Like, once every two years.) So naturally I have to take pictures.

I think that the next step with this book will be going through the coypedited manuscript, but I’ll keep you posted. (Also I’m guessing that some of the images I’m using for illustrations aren’t high res enough, so I’ll probably have to hunt down some better quality scans.)

And now back to the Middle Ages.

I’ll leave you with the final table of contents. Hope it sounds interesting….

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: From Private to Public Confession

PART I: The Shift Toward Public Confession
Chapter One: Grover the Good, Belshazzar Blaine, and the Rapacious Woman
Chapter Two: In the Presence of the Elect (With the World Looking On)
Chapter Three: Aimee Semple McPherson and the Devil
Chapter Four : Confession Goes Public
Chapter Five: Ted Kennedy Misreads His Public

PART II: The Age of Public Confession
Chapter Six: Jimmy Carter, Traitor to the Cause
Chapter Seven: Jim Bakker Shoots His Allies
Chapter Eight: Jimmy Swaggart’s Model Confession
Chapter Nine: Clinton and the Three Public Confessions
Chapter Ten: Unaware of Change

Conclusion: Predictions

Appendices: The Texts of the Confessions
Works Cited

So now I have a question for you: what should the book be called?

Important details: The book traces the metamorphosis of public confession of sin. I argue that, over the course of the twentieth century, it changes from a religious ritual that takes place in front of fellow believers, into a secular rite that erring leaders HAVE to perform in front of their followers in order to hold on to power. I examine, in detail, the scandals surrounding Grover Cleveland’s illegitimate son, Aimee Semple McPherson’s disappearance, Ted Kennedy’s plunge into the creek at Chappaquiddick, Jimmy Carter’s Playboy interview, Jim Bakker’s tryst, Jimmy Swaggart’s voyeurism, and Clinton’s…well, everything that Clinton got up to.

My working title was THE ART OF THE PUBLIC GROVEL: SEXUAL SIN AND PUBLIC CONFESSION IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICA. I really didn’t expect Princeton to hang onto that title, but my editor at PUP says that he likes “The Art of the Public Grovel.” (Although I should add that the outside reader of my dissertation, which had the same title, didn’t like “public grovel.” At all.)

However, he’d like to change the subtitle to: How Leaders Return to Power After Sexual Sin.

Which is a perfectly good subtitle. It’s just that (warning: academic-speak coming up) I want to be careful about implying that there’s monocausality behind, say, Clinton’s successful attempts to resist his removal from office. Clinton’s methods of confessing and apologizing DID play a big part in his ability to hang on to the good opinion of way more people than you’d expect. But it wasn’t the ONLY reason that he managed to stay in office.

On the other hand, this isn’t a strictly academic title–it needs to appeal to a wider readership, so I do need a title and subtitle that’s attractive to general readers.

So if you’d like to suggest a title and subtitle, please do. If we use yours, I’ll send you a couple of free copies of any of my books that you’d like. I’ve got a big box of the Korean version of the History of the Ancient World, if you happen to read Korean. It’s very beautifully done. (Once again, my Korean publisher takes the prize for production values.)

I’m in Princeton this week, as it happens, saying hello to my editor at Princeton, visiting my friend Lauren, and reading inscriptions from medieval south Indian kingdoms in the basement of the Firestone library. Tomorrow I’m headed down to Manhattan to consult with my agent and my editor at Norton; I’ll report on that as soon as I get a chance.

So, in no particular order, here’s what’s occupying the brain of THIS working writer on the first day of December…

1. I’m waiting on the contract from Princeton University Press to be issued, at which point I’ll sign it, return it, and commit myself to delivering the manuscript along with the permissions for all images and quotes by February. (Would be nice for a book on political confessions to come out in the election year, wouldn’t it? When I find out a pub date I’ll let you know.) This means that my assistant Nancy and I are pestering rights departments at a time of year when NOBODY is particularly anxious to provide a quick answer. So far, Nancy is doing wonders at getting folks to call her back. The only completely uncooperative response has been from Jimmy Swaggart’s Family Worship Center, which answered her request for permission to reprint Swaggart’s apology sermon with a flat “No.”

Which I suppose is understandable. However, the sermon was delivered in public and has already been reproduced multiple times, so I don’t actually think they can forbid us to publish a transcript. I was only asking to be polite.

2. After a stupefyingly long time, I have emerged from slogging through the details of the tenth century and am on to chronicling the eleventh. Now I’m getting into some REALLY extraordinary behavior…such as that of the Empress Zoe, who in 1034, at the age of 56, was widowed when her husband, the Byzantine emperor Romanos III, conveniently drowned in his bathtub. Zoe was less than crushed; she had only married him on her father’s orders anyway (her father had forced Romanos to divorce his own wife and marry Zoe instead). On the same day that Romanos III died, Zoe married her lover, the twenty-four-year-old palace chamberlain Michael. He then became Emperor Michael IV.

(Zoe, in a doodle on a Byzantine manuscript)

However, Zoe hadn’t been long married when she developed a crush on another young man, a court official named Constantine Monomachos, twelve years younger than she.

Michael IV was annoyed enough by this to exile Constantine to a distant island.

As Zoe was past producing an heir, Michael IV adopted his nephew (also named Michael, and only five years his junior) as his son and appointed him to be the next Emperor. The nephew-son didn’t have to wait long. Michael IV, although apparently quite good-looking, was also a bit of a weakling; he died at the age of thirty-one from a long-standing illness, after only seven years on the throne. Almost at once, Zoe had the nephew-son arrested, blinded, and castrated. He died, unsurprisingly, and she became senior ruler of the Byzantine Empire.

At this point, Zoe (who was now in her sixties), became reigning empress of Byzantium. At once, she called Constantine (aged 41) back from his exile and married him.

Entertaining, but not very edifying. Happy Advent.

3. And speaking of Advent, I am highly pleased with myself because I remembered to buy Advent candles for the church wreath BEFORE the first Sunday in Advent. So I won’t have to make frantic calls on Sunday morning to find someone with five unused candles in their closet. Getting the Advent candles set up is one of those Lord High Everything Else jobs that the minister’s wife gets to do. This has nothing to do with my writing, except that it’s one of the things that clutters my mind like a mental dust-bunny until I get it done.

4. And speaking of things that have nothing to do with writing, but are occupying the parts of my brain that might be better used, take a look at THIS…

a sixteen-year-old with a BRAND NEW DRIVER’S LICENSE. Possums and cats of southeastern Virginia, beware.

I’ll let you know how the eleventh century is progressing; my ridiculously ambitious plan is to finish up a rough draft of the events in the entire book by Christmas, so that I can go back and start producing some decent prose instead of the excruciatingly boring stuff I’m currently putting on paper.

On the first business day of September and March, I check my email about every ten seconds, waiting for a message from my agent. When it finally comes through, it will say something like, “Here are the numbers: $XXX, minus agency commission. I’m off to the bank and will send a check as soon as the payment clears.”

This is why writers have cash-flow problems: This royalty money, which comes in every six months, comes from copies of my books sold as long ago as A WHOLE YEAR.

Here’s how it works. In September of 2006, a copy of The Well-Educated Mind sits in a bookstore in Williamsburg. The cover price is $27.95, but the bookstore has discounted it 10%. An enlightened and discerning reader wanders by, picks it up, leafs through it, and then takes it up to the counter. She buys it for $25.15, takes it home, and stays up all night, mesmerized by the chapter on the History of the Novel.

The bookstore keeps $11.18 of that sale, and sends a check to Norton for $13.97 (publishers sell books to retailers at 50% off). The standard royalty rate on hardcover books is around 12.5%, so out of that $13.97, Norton owes me about $3.50.

When do I get that $3.50? Not until September of 2007.

Publishers reckon up their royalties every six months, so in March of 2007, the accountants at Norton figure up how many copies of The Well-Educated Mind have been sold to bookstores between September 2006 and February 2007. (Another peculiarity of publishing: the year begins in September, when the big fall books come out, and ends in August.)

But the accountants have no way of knowing whether those copies have actually gone home with readers who will love them. No, all THEY can see is that the copies have shipped to bookstores, where they may still be on shelves, or in boxes in the back room. And bookstores have the right to return those unsold copies at any point. So the accountants will HOLD ONTO my royalties for an additional six months. Between March 2007 and August 2007, whenever copies of The Well-Educated Mind get shipped from bookstores back to the Norton warehouse, the $3.50 for each of those copies is deducted from my royalty total.

By the end of August 2007, the accountants figure that any books shipped between September 2006 and February 2007 have already either sold or been returned, so they release the royalties for those books (which are now reckoned not just shipped, but sold). At that point, the publisher is legally obliged to pay over the money by the end of the month.

Which in practice means–you got it–the royalty check is issued on the very last day of the month. Hey, that money is earning interest. No point in handing it over too quickly.

So a check arrives at my agent’s office on the first business day in September. He emails me to let me know the total, deposits the check in his account, deducts his agency commission, and then writes a check to me.

Generally this takes another week or so. Sometimes longer. Imagine my surprise, when I first dealt with a big publisher, to see that the check from the publisher was drawn on a bank in Wisconsin. Yes, that’s right. The publisher paid all royalties out of a bank account in the midwest because it took the royalty checks another two or three days to clear that way–another two or three days that the royalty money was earning interest for the publisher.

So when do I get the $3.50 which has been sitting around unspent since September 2006? Sometime in the second week of September, 2007.

The royalty statements which have just arrived make no mention of the History of the Ancient World, because the total that my agent informed me of today–that’s September 4, 2007–is for books sold between September 2006 and February 2007 . The History of the Ancient World had a pub date of March 2007–so it won’t even show up on my royalty reports until I hear again from my agent about royalties in March 2008.

Hey, no matter what I may say about the spiritual toxicity of publishing, writing is great for your maturity It’s all about delayed gratification.

…And the wait continues. My twenty-five author’s copies showed up this week, and Norton is now shipping to wholesalers, but since the official pub date of March 26 hasn’t arrived, no one’s selling the book. It’s like those last two weeks of pregnancy, where every day feels like it’s about seventy hours long, and you keep TELLING yourself that in the grand scheme of things it’s REALLY not that long to wait…which never worked when I was pregnant, and it’s not working now either.

In the meantime, I’m doing my duty as pastor’s wife, which this week included calling a square dance at church.

Somehow it never occurred to me that this would be part of the job.

And I’m writing (because that’s what I do). Working on the history of the medieval world, drafting out a writing program to use with my two oldest kids, doing a final round of dissertation revisions–I’m supposed to defend it in three weeks, although frankly I’m at the point where I feel like saying…Oh, just forget about it, it’s too much trouble. And the William & Mary doctoral robe doesn’t even have a hood. And it’s GREEN.

Anyway, by the end of March the dissertation will be defended, the book will be out, and I won’t even have thirty post-pregnancy pounds to lose. (Although maybe five or six post-dissertation pounds.)

It still won’t be available until March, though. Norton always asks Peace Hill Press to get copies of OUR titles into their warehouse for distribution six weeks ahead of the actual publication date (or “street date”) because it takes that long for the books to wend their way through the system and land in the bookstores. So the street date of March 26 hasn’t changed–although often books do start showing up on the market a week or so before.

My box of 25 author copies should arrive on the back porch shortly. Meanwhile, here are some more proud-parent shots: the back, with blurbs for my last two books on it:

a nice shot of the spine:

and the book-equivalent of the baby-in-the-bathtub shot:

So next week I’ll tackle such questions as: Should “civil war” be a subentry of “wars and warfare,” or should it be separate? Should the First Servile War be indexed under “F,” or should the main entry be for “Servile War” with “First” as a subentry?

It may not sound very exciting (and in fact it isn’t), but I’m so glad to be back to history-writing that I don’t mind it. I’ve finished a committee-mandated dissertation revision, which I hope will be the last, and put all my dissertation books away until after the New Year, and I’ve gotten ALL my medieval history maps and charts and books back out so that I can write about the White Huns.

As you gaze at the above picture, you might want to read about why messy desks are a good thing, from the New York Times. This week we’re revelling in all sorts of creative messes, involving not only books and maps but flour and sugar.

I’ve still got at least one child in the more-is-more school of cookie decoration. As witness:

That’s a cookie sheet that reflects a very happy and busy mind.

So a Merry Christmas to all my readers. May your houses and desks show evidence of creativity and happy busyness.

Background: This pre-Christmas week was cheered by my unscheduled visit to the hospital. I won’t overindulge in details. Suffice it to say that the visit lasted three days and involved an undignified amount of throwing up. Neither will I name the hospital in question, but here it is in 1883. (Hey, it’s Virginia. Even the hospitals are historic.)

Apart from giving birth four times, I haven’t been an inpatient since 1992. Have there been sweeping changes in nursing practice that I’m not aware of? Apart from making sure that my pulse was still beating every four hours, the nursing staff pretty much allowed me to enjoy my solitude. Even when I didn’t want to.

Me: (hitting ‘call nurse’ button frantically, and repeating every twenty minutes until I get a response)
Cranky Voice: What do you WANT?
Me: I need to see a nurse.
Cranky Voice (suspiciously): Why?
Me (thinking that I’d just as soon not describe my various problems into an intercom): Can I just see a nurse?
Cranky Voice (clearly losing patience): Why do you need to SEE a nurse?
Me: I’m in PAIN.
(Long pause)
Cranky Voice (eventually): Well, all right.
(Wait of forty-eight minutes ensues)
Nurse (appearing in doorway): What’s the problem here?
Me: You told me to tell you if I was in pain. Well, I’m in PAIN.
Nurse: Honey, we can’t do anything about that.
Me: Can I have a Tylenol?
Nurse: Your doctor hasn’t ordered anything like that.
Me: Can you ask him?
Nurse: We don’t want to disturb him at 2 AM, do we?
Me (mentally screaming, YES, darn it): Well…can I have a cold cloth for my head?
Nurse (thoughtfully) : Hmm. Yes, that might help. Good idea.

SIGH. (Before I get a zillion indignant comments, I know that there are many dedicated and hardworking nurses who want to make their patients as comfortable as possible. Floor 5 of this particular hospital didn’t have any duty over the weekend, that’s all.)

Anyway, I staggered home Sunday evening, after three days of being sustained on nothing more than IV fluids and ice chips, to be welcomed into the island of sanity which is my home.

As any normal well-balanced person would do, I immediately checked my email. And there it was: a massive electronic file containing the newly-finished index, along with a note from my editor’s new assistant saying, ” Please look over and answer any indexer queries (such as different spelling of names that overlap–which one is correct?). Please also look through the entire document for any spelling errors or concept ideas that need to be changed. As everything here works on a fast schedule, please email, call or fax the changes to me by the end of the day on Dec 13th at the very latest.”

In other words, forty-eight hours to read and evaluate the whole thing, as well as answering a raft of scintillating queries such as:

*
Which of the following spellings is correct? Please clarify:
Artabanos, 544. Artabanus also on 544.
Artaphrenes, 524–27. Artaphranes, 526, 527.
Herod Antipas, 709, 720. Herod Antipater, 720.
Magadha kingdom, 482, 484, 489–90, 610, 642. Maghada, 490.
Satapatha-Brahamana, 15, 307. Satapatha-Brahamana, 307.
Sealand, 383, 383, 387. Sealands also on, 383 and 387.
Tso chuan, 300n, 493. Tso Chuan, 493.
Washukkanni, 213–17, 214, 240. Washukanni, 213.
Xiongnu, 650, 652, 652, 653, 655, 715, 749, 759. Xiangnu, 715
*

(If you’re on codeine, it looks even MORE fascinating.)

Now, if you were raised female in the South, in a certain type of environment, you would rather DIE than give anyone a hard time. Your deepest fear is that people will think you’re Difficult. I mean, the closest thing to complaining I did at the hospital was to say meekly, “Are you sure the anti-nausea meds ordered four hours ago aren’t up here yet? Oh, okay, thank you so much. I’ll just keep on throwing up.” So I got ready to check the index.

My husband said, “What are you doing?”

I said, “Norton wants the index back in forty-eight hours.”

My husband said, “”Well, tell them they can’t have it.”

The skies opened and light shone down. I can DO that? I mean, what if they do think I’m high maintenance? It’s not like I socialize with the Norton folks on a regular basis. It doesn’t really matter if they like me, does it? Anyway, the book will still come out, right? And I AM high on codeine, right?

So I emailed back, “I’m just out of the hospital. I can probably get it back to you by Monday, but if that’s too late, it will have to go to press unchecked.”

And in five minutes, she answered: “Get better. Monday is fine.”

(SOUNDS OF LIFE-CHANGING ENLIGHTENMENT: GONGS, HEAVENLY CHORUSES, AND TRUMPETS. SOMETIMES I CAN JUST SAY NO.)

So I went to bed to recuperate, where my invalid hours were cheered by the regular appearance of Emily in a laundry basket, a.k.a. Scary Basket Monster.

I did get an email from my editor’s new assistant, asking whether the following bio line is correct for the jacket of History of the Ancient World:

SUSAN WISE BAUER teaches at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. She lives in Charles City, Virginia.

Short and sweet. I OK’d it. (Norton does a beautiful job on book jackets, but for some inexplicable reason, my jacket bio on my last book for them came out reading, “She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.” Which I don’t. And never have, although people keep saying to me, “When you lived in Charlottesville, did you….?” So I appreciated the chance to proof it this time around.)

Apart from that, nothing in particular is getting done in these amorphous days. I’m just writing and writing and writing. And getting ready for Christmas, of course.

Rather than posting a picture of JFK (BLEARGH), I’ll wrap up with this photo from my touring-friend’s blog (click here for her account of the French bicycle adventure).

Hey, that’s me!

Off to the Delta gate now. Have been up since…er…well, it’s 4 PM East Coast time, and I got up at 5:30 AM Oxford time, which was 12:30 at night East Coast time…I’m too tired to do the math.

I regret to say that the second pass proofs are waiting for me at home, though. My editor’s assistant assured me that they wouldn’t be needed back until the 17th, and then left to take another job. Turns out they’re actually due back on the 14th, which is Tuesday…which means I need to overnight them on Monday…which means I need to read them…tomorrow?

And again I say, BLEARGH. Something tells me that my kids (seen below jumping in leaves in my absence–Pete sent me these pictures by email so I wouldn’t FORGET them in the intoxication of the Bodleian) are not going to sanction this course of action.

“Attack of the Huns”

“The Flying Warrior Princess”

No, really, it’s Research. No, I can’t do it in the States. I have to go to Europe. Darn. I’ll post updates during the trip.

While finishing up a ton of preparatory work, I’ve also been celebrating birthdays (two October birthdays in my family):

and part of the family tradition is that I make and decorate the birthday cake in whatever flavor and shape the birthday kid requests. (You should have seen the Jonah and the Whale cake a few years ago. The erupting volcano was pretty cool too.)

Meanwhile, my editor’s assistant emails to tell me that the second pass (the typeset galleys with all my corrections incorporated) will “be with me on Wednesday.” I begged to have the chance to check the changes; normally authors don’t get to see the second pass, because it’s already being indexed, and any additions can throw the page divisions off and mess up a whole lot of indexing. However, the good folks at Norton agreed to let me inspect it one last time, as long as I ONLY check for errors and promise not to yield to the temptation to fiddle with my prose.

They also agreed to give me some advance notice when the second pass was on its way. Forty-eight hours is NOT advance notice. So unless they can overnight it to Calais or Oxford, it isn’t going to get back to them in any sort of timely fashion.

SIGH. One more thing to work out. Meanwhile I’ve got to finish planning a myriad of family scheduling details, wrap up a couple of loose ends with my mapmaker so that she can work while I’m gone, and check fifteen times that I’ve got my passport. (That’s my borderline OCD kicking in. I’m always certain that my passport won’t be there the next time I look.)

Also I have to make costumes. My second son has decided that he needs to dress up as a Dr. Seuss character. But not something easy like the Cat in the Hat or the Grinch. No, he’s going to be the Pale Green Pants With Nobody Inside ‘Em.

Sounds like a visit to the fabric store is in order.

(Products of weekend pumpkin carving. Oldest to youngest children, left to right. Kind of reflects their personalities, yes?)

and my first batch of new primary sources, which arrived yesterday from Amazon. I LOVE primary sources. With a project this size, I have to use secondary sources to construct a basic outline of events, but the medieval historians themselves are grand reading.

(Thank goodness for Penguin!)

But I had to pull myself away from the medieval world, day before yesterday, to address the next challenge in getting the History of the Ancient World on the shelves: flap copy. My editor’s assistant sent me this note:

Susan, please take a look at the attached flap copy and let us know what else you’d like to add/emphasize. this feels a little light as is:

A lively and engaging narrative history showing the common threads in the cultures that gave birth to our own.

This is the first volume in a bold new series that tells the stories of all peoples, connecting historical events from Europe to the Middle East to the far coast of China, while still giving weight to the characteristics of each country. Susan Wise Bauer provides both sweeping scope and vivid attention to the individual lives that give flesh to abstract assertions about human history.

Dozens of maps provide a clear geography of great events, while timelines give the reader an ongoing sense of the passage of years and cultural interconnection. This old-fashioned narrative history employs the methods of “history from beneath”: literature, epic traditions, private letters and accounts are all used to connect kings and leaders with the lives of those they ruled. The result is an engrossing tapestry of human behavior, from which we may draw conclusions about the direction of world events, and the causes behind them.

(end flap copy)

So I wrestled with this for a little while, keeping in mind the biggest challenge in flap-copy writing: not opening yourself up to unnecessary potshots. I decided that characterizing what I do as “history from beneath” was only going to annoy historians who actually DO “history from beneath”–telling the stories of the voiceless, rather than those of leaders and kings. And I followed my husband’s advice, which was to avoid saying that the book was “meticulously researched.” (Yes. Definitely NOT a good plan.)

So here’s what I sent as a modification:

(begin flap copy)

A lively and engaging narrative history showing the common threads in
the cultures that gave birth to our own.

This is the first volume in a bold new series that tells the
stories of all peoples, connecting historical events from Europe to the
Middle East to the far coast of China.

The Story of the Ancient World provides both sweeping scale and
vivid attention to the individual lives that give flesh to abstract
theories about human history. Particular lives and audible voices
emerge from the distant past, and anchor bold conclusions about the
direction of world events and the causes behind them. The result is an
engrossing tapestry of human behavior which illuminates the broad scope
of world history. Dozens of maps provide a clear geography of great
events, while timelines give the reader an ongoing sense of the passage
of years and cultural interconnection.

Susan Wise Bauer combines traditional narrative history with the
most recent scholarship to produce a readable and thorough guide to the
complexities of the ancient world. From the earliest emperors of China
to the late days of the Roman empire, The Story of the Ancient World
gives every reader a chance to view the big picture of world history.

(end flap copy)

Don’t know how much better it is. I HATE writing flap copy. It’s even worse than writing catalog copy–which, after all, is going to be read only by salesmen and bookstore buyers. Flap copy goes out to EVERYONE.

At least it’s finished, and I can go back to Ammianus Marcellinus and his Excursus on Huns and Alans. It’s a beautiful, subdued, misty fall morning, and from my office door I can see down the lane. The perfect scenery to accompany medieval history-writing. (Although perhaps not very Hun-like, unless you can imagine them charging down it, “consumed by a savage passion to pillage the property of others.”)

Those of you who are VERY alert may notice that the publication date on the History of the Ancient World has changed, on the various bookseller websites that already list it, from Feb. 28 to Mar. 26 of 2007. Norton has decided that the production challenges of putting out such a huge book dictate an extra month of production time.

Well, darn.

Furthermore, for reasons having to do with layout and theme, publication of my review-essay on John Stackhouse’s Finally Feminist has been delayed until the January/February issue of Books and Culture.

AND I haven’t yet gotten my dissertation revisions from my committee. So it’s still sitting here untouched on my desk. However…count yourself lucky, because you now get to follow the process of academic publishing from the beginning–yea, witness the very genesis of an academic title.

When I finished the draft, I sent it off to the religion editor of a well-known university press (I met him a couple of years ago, and he asked to see it when it was finished). We’ll call him Editor X, at Anonymous Prestigious University Press, since I don’t have a signed contract in hand.

(That’s Editor X, in case you’re wondering.)

Editor X wrote me back, saying that the dissertation had the makings of an excellent academic title, should I be interested in revising it for publication. (Dissertations always need revising for publication, mostly because the format of a dissertation is not designed to keep a reader interested. Or awake, come to that.) I said that I would; I’d like to have a title published by a university press on my resume.

First, though, I had to get permission from my editor at Norton to publish with another press. Norton has first refusal rights on my next nonfiction work. Technically, in fact, Norton doesn’t even have to LOOK at anything else I write until all four volumes of the History of the World are finished; I have in essence signed my nonfiction-writing future away to them for the next eight years. (This doesn’t include any titles I might write for Peace Hill Press; my agent put in a clause exempting PHP books from the restriction. I wouldn’t have thought of that. Which is why I have an agent.)

Should Norton refuse to look at the dissertation, it would just sit in limbo until 2012, since I can’t legally submit it to anyone else until they formally decline to publish. Some publishing companies actually are obstreperous enough to behave in this way. Norton is not one of them. My editor, the brilliant and accommodating Starling Lawrence, took a quick look through it and agreed that it would be a better academic title than trade book.

Armed with his written pass, I told Editor X that we could proceed. He then sent me a detailed list of revisions which would need to be made to the manuscript.

Even after I make the revisions, though, Editor X doesn’t get the final word. He has to send the manuscript out to three (or so) selected academic experts, called “readers.” The readers have to agree that I’ve made my argument convincingly before Anonymous Prestigious University Press can send me a contract. This is called “peer review.” Unlike a commercial publisher, a university press can’t just publish a book that SOUNDS well-reasoned. It has to be approved AS well-reasoned by others in the profession. Which is why a university-press title has prestige, on your resume. It says that you’ve convinced your colleagues that you’re a sound thinker. (Or at least that you’re thinking the way they’re thinking. Which is not, I realize, exactly the same thing.)

Anyway, I can start on the revisions for Editor X at any point. I’ve been waiting to hear back from my W&M committee about revisions that THEY might like, hoping (vainly) that the two sets of revisions might, possibly, dovetail.

But I haven’t been able to get responses yet. For various reasons, all beyond my control. Delays, delays….

So I may just have to start revising for Editor X, and hope desperately that the committee revisions are more or less in the same ballpark.

See, this is the problem with being a writer. You spend half your time working frantically to meet deadlines, and the other half of your time fretting about the HUGE time lapse between your deadlines and any actual appearance of your work in print. Publishing is all about EXTREMELY delayed gratification. This puts a horrendous strain on your maturity, which is why writers eat too much chocolate, or drink too much, or otherwise engage in unhelpful but immediately satisfying behavior.

Blogging, by contrast, is the quick-and-temporary fix. Immediately satisfying but a little short on staying power. Blogging is to writing as sugar is to steak. Blogging is to….

Well, supply your own analogy. I’d write a few more, but now I have to go back to categorizing the Germanic tribes that were hanging around the Rhine in the fourth century, a task which I will be rewarded for when Volume II makes its appearance, sometime in 2009.

(Me in Italy, reflecting on what happens to writers who wait too long for gratification)

Now that my husband is back, I have managed to finish off checking those first pass pages.

I found lots and lots of small errors, about half of which were mine (misspellings, words left out) and the other half of which were the typesetter’s (eliminated and transposed lines, weird line breaks, repeated words). Almost half of the time lines were set incorrectly. Instead of using the hard copies that I sent, which showed where each name and event should go, the typesetter apparently printed out another copy from the electronic file–which changed all the spacings.

Here are all the corrections, marked with yellow flags:

I added the acknowledgment and dedication pages, which always go in late, and shoved it in a box (I do realize these pictures are more interesting to me than to anyone else….):

I regret to say that, while I was plowing through the first pass, my fall cold turned into pleurisy. (Doesn’t that sound like a Victorian ailment? Like gout.) So I had to go and get an anti-inflammatory shot yesterday, and now I’m languishing around the house in my pink bathrobe. To cap the week off, it’s pouring outside. So I summoned my second son and entrusted him with the box. Here he is, heading out to take it to the Peace Hill Press office so that they can UPS it back to Norton for me,

and here he is, triumphantly returning (with helpful older brother).

Thank goodness that’s done. By the time I was on page 800, I was choking on my own prose.

In closing: I’m happy to point out that the new books by Norton authors Michael Lewis and Ian Toll, both of whom I had dinner with at BookExpo in May, have gotten starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, which is a very high honor indeed.

Next week I should have some interesting news about the process of getting a dissertation published. So stay tuned.

These are paperback, bound copies of the first pass typeset pages (errors and all), made expressly for the purpose of sending copies out to reviewers at journals and magazines which have a long lead time–a long time between the point at which the writers turn in their articles and reviews, and the time when those articles appear. Newspapers do this in twenty-four hours; a lot of magazines need three or four weeks or more, plus time for the reviewer to read the book and write the review.

Hardback copies of the book won’t be manufactured until January–after I return the first pass, the corrections have to be made (which will shift the page count), the book needs to be indexed, a final page count has to be made before the spine can be designed, the back cover and flap copy has to be finished…and then the book can take anywhere from 4 to 8 weeks to be printed and bound. So the ARCs give reviewers extra lead time; that way the reviews can come out right as the book’s being released, rather than weeks or months afterwards.

The front cover of the ARC is a paperback version of the final front cover (click on the pictures for a larger version).

The spine is printed on a plain white background,

and the back cover reproduces the information from the catalog page, along with a warning that quotes should be checked against the final (corrected) book.

Inside, the typesetting is close to its final form, although the graphic quality of the maps and illustrations is not very high.

It’s illegal to sell ARCs; Norton gives them away, and no one is supposed to market them as a cheap version of the finished book. ARCs occasionally pop up on eBay (do a search, and you may see a few). I don’t know what other publishers do, but Norton sends cease-and-desist letters to sellers who insist on auctioning off ARCs.

But I can send a few of them out for free. “Few” being the operative word. There were ten in the box. Three went to Peace Hill Press folks; I’m keeping one; I’ve already promised three to various expert readers….

So if you’d like a copy, way ahead of publication, here’s the deal. Post a response to this blog entry. On Monday, September 25, I’ll write down all the names of the people who have posted comments and toss them into a hat or something, and send an ARC to the person whose name I draw out first.

Not really a raffle, as you don’t have to buy anything to enter. But you do have to write a comment… and make your presence known.

And then I had a quick leaf through it, just to see how the book design came out. It’s very similar visually to The Well-Educated Mind; here’s the front page (as with all photos on this blog, click for a larger version):

and one of the pages with an inset map.

The first pass is a stack of manuscript pages, not a bound book, but here’s how the pages will look side by side.

I hauled it down to my office this morning. My desk is already covered with two different phases of the medieval history,

and I’m enjoying myself sorting through barbarian invasions and crumbling Roman administrative systems, so I couldn’t quite bear to clear it all away. I’ll lose momentum if I stop working on the Middle Ages. Fortunately, I’ve been given until September 19 to return the first pass. Unheard-of luxury! So I’ve exiled the first pass to the corner.

I’ll start on it next week. If I leave it on the floor, maybe I can keep working along on the medieval MS at the same time. That would help me stay sane. Reading through the first pass is excruciating. Your work always sounds cheesy and boring when you’re hunting for mistakes. It’s also frustrating to spot errors on pages you’ve already been through again and again. Just checking through the first pass to make sure that all the illustrations were set in, I saw a HUGE ENORMOUS blunder on the temporary chart in Chapter 85, which still needs to be typeset. How did I miss this? I’ve only glanced at it a dozen times. Here it is on the page:

and here’s a clearer view:

I bet YOU can see the huge blunder, can’t you?

These are the pages that go into the bound galleys, unfortunately, so the reviewers will all get THIS version of the chart. Hope that they remember to check their review against the final copy of the book…

“Susan, a heads up that first pass (gigantic) will arrive with you tomorrow.”

This will be my first look at the typeset manuscript with maps and illustrations in place…and I’ll have to read it through and make final changes, probably within a week or so. Slightly inconvenient timing, as my husband and oldest son (and father and brother and first cousin) are all GOING TO ALASKA FOR TWO WEEKS AND LEAVING ME ALONG WITH THE LITTLE ONES.

Ahem.

I’ll snap a photo of the FedEx guy staggering up with the first pass, if I can catch him. He’s warier than the UPS driver and usually evades me.

The answer, according to my mother (seen scalding a chicken below, with the help of our neighbor from across the road), is 140-145 degrees (F). Less than that, and the feathers don’t come off. More, and you end up pre-cooking some of the chicken.

The second most popular question is: How can I build my own Whiz Bang Automated Chicken Plucker? The plans we used were from Herrick Kimball’s book, Anyone Can Build a Tub-Style Mechanical Chicken Plucker.

Over in that alternate universe (the one where I write books), my editor has decided that all of the time line designs currently on the table are confusing. So we’re redoing all the time lines vertically.

Which means I get to retype them all. Hurrah.

Meanwhile I’m trying to finish off the outline for Book Two. Will post more as soon as it gets finished…

and spent some time sightseeing.

Back at home, the History of the Ancient World has now gone into composition–the process that creates the pages you’ll see when you open the finished book. Once all the text has been put into this format, Norton will print them all out and send them to me in a big unbound stack–the “first page proofs.” I’ll have one last chance to make changes as I read through them, but if the changes amount to more than 10% of the total text, Norton will charge me for them.

While I wait for the first page proofs, I’ve got to finish this darned author questionnaire. I have been putting this thing off because Louise Brockett at Norton said they wouldn’t really need it until June. Now I’ve got to make myself do it.

Does anybody want to help out? I could particularly use suggestions for the following. I’m supposed to identify:

1. Special interest groups, associations, societies, or organizations that might make bulk purchases of your book.

2. Mail-order catalogs and/or Internet sites (excluding major booksellers like Amazon.com) that specialize in the subject.

3. Any specialized magazines, journals, Web sites, or newsletters that focus on the subject area addressed in your book. Include addresses and phone numbers if you have them.

4. Newspaper or magazine columnists who write about subjects similar to that of your book.

5. Any television or radio programs that focus on the subject area addressed in your book.

So do you belong to a historical society, or buy books from a catalog that features history titles, or read a history magazine…or listen to a local show, or read a local column, that tends to mention ancient history, the teaching of history, or anything tangentially related? If so, please post.

Now I’m going to go join the boys, who are watching King Kong in the hotel room and eating a whole lot of pizza.

Anyway, here’s the first version:

and the second:

and the third:

Thoughts?

This means that I now have spread on my desk the 800-page manuscript, a stack of endnotes, another of footnotes, the Works Cited, a stack of timelines, a stack of maps, a Table of Contents, a list of map captions, and a list of illustration captions. I’m supposed to make sure that all of these are in complete agreement. No small job, as you can see:

Here’s a typical page with the copy editor’s marks (quite a few of those are intended for the design team, not for me) and queries.

All of the yellow flags, I regret to say, are questions that I need to answer.

For example: Are these quote marks necessary? Elsewhere you say that this date is 567, but here you use 567–which is correct? You refer to “The Tale of Enkidu” and “The Coming of Enkidu”–which is the correct title? There is no page number for this reference–what should it be? The endnotes in the text skip from 7.2 to 7.4–should there be a 7.3, or should we renumber?

And multiply this times 800 pages.

I have until May 15 to get this back, which is very tight indeed. However, I am now installed in the Chicken Shed Office! So I have room to spread out, and when I need to look up a reference, I can simply get up and pick the book off a shelf (as opposed to digging it out from a stack on the floor). Here’s one of the back corners:

and one of the front corners:

and the view out my door.

This morning, after I supervised breakfast and chores, my mother asked if she could have the children to help plant tomatoes. So they all stormed off to the garden and I went down to tackle a few more copy-editor queries. I think they’re having more fun than I am. (They disagree, by the way.)

And here’s the final cover:

Amazon.com usually pulls its information from the Norton sales catalog, which I have not yet seen (they usually do send me several copies, so I’m guessing that it’s on its way). When it arrives, I’ll post the catalog page for comparison.

I’m in Seattle at the moment, visiting my brother and getting ready to drive up to British Columbia to speak at an education convention. Will post a report shortly. There are MOUNTAINS here!

Taking pictures out of the window instead of paying attention to the road…at least I remembered to bring the camera, for a change.

Now I’m in desperate need and throwing out a call to my readers. HELP. I need experts.

I’ve researched and researched and researched this book, but any professional will tell you that a non-expert, even one who researches obsessively, can make huge elementary errors in unfamiliar fields. This is quite different from the multiple inevitable small errors that sneak into long works, and which we’ll have to correct one at a time as we find them. Rather, I don’t want to use an outdated transliteration of a Chinese name, or chalk up a motivation to an ancient Indian emperor that every major historian in the field has dismissed…you get the idea.

For several months now I’ve been sending out emails to faculty members and graduate students at various history departments, begging for someone to cast an eye over a few chapters of the manuscript and offering to pay a reasonable honorarium. The only response I’ve gotten has been from Peter Enns and Mike Kelly at Westminster, both experts in the ancient Near East. (Thanks, guys.)
It’s a bad time of year, I’m guessing–everyone’s either grading frantically or writing papers–but at this point I think I need to widen my recruitment pool. I can make small changes in the galleys up until September, but I’ll have to pay for them if I make too many (it costs the publisher money to go back to the printer and reset pages).

So how about it, gentle readers? Any experts out there, on any area of the ancient world pre-Milvian Bridge? If so, drop an email to the office address (info@peacehillpress.com), and they’ll forward it on to me.

In other news…the spring crop of baby chicks has arrived. You order them by mail, believe it or not. The Charles City post office, which is accustomed to such things, called us at 6:30 AM on Monday morning to tell us that the cheeping box had arrived, so that we could drive down and pick it up.

The chicks hang out in the brooder until they’re a bit bigger, and then we’ll shift them to a larger chicken house. When they’re big enough we’ll put them in with the adult hens.

My oldest son is the chicken manager (he feeds, waters, and makes a profit off selling eggs to the neighbors), but the younger ones are always happy to help out at baby-chick time.

This unfortunately means that some of the older hens who have quit laying are, how shall I say, for the chop. An athletic hen tastes quite different from a store-bought, pen-raised chicken; there’s not nearly as much meat, but the flavor is more distinct and less bland. Good for chicken and dumplings. My father has found plans to build something called the Whiz Bang Automated Chicken Plucker which you can construct out of an old washing machine drum and various other bits of farm junk. No, I’m really not kidding. Yes, I know it sounds like something Wile E. Coyote would order from Acme. I’ll post a picture of it when it’s finished.

Meanwhile I have been doing everything in the world except writing. I spoke at a conference in Maine (lovely people, beautiful setting, but I forgot my camera) and lectured on rhetoric at the University of Richmond (ditto). This upcoming week I’ll be in Philadelphia, taking part in a panel on education and doing a guest lecture at my alma mater, Westminster. I will try to remember the camera.

The travelling, which is an important writer-job (it keeps the books in front of the public eye), also makes it impossible to write. And with spring coming, duties on the farm tend to multiply as well. We had the first big grass-cut of the year today, a task made slightly more complicated because my second son (who is supposed to take over the grass-cutting duties this year) turned out to be just slightly too light for the Kubota zero-turn mower. It’s got a safety switch that cuts the engine if it thinks the seat is empty, and whenever he shifts his weight, the engine quits. We finally solved this by putting one of Pete’s fifteen-pound weights on the seat and plonking him down on top of it.

And off he goes, a very small spot in a very big field.

During all the travelling and grass-cutting and book-packing (I’m getting ready to move out to my new office) and permission-hunting, I am trying to carve out an occasional four or five hours to start on the next manuscript. Without at least one solitary period of writing a week, my imagination starts to wither. Right now it’s feeling pretty dried and shrunken.

More next week…

So I’ve spent a couple of happy days working on a beginning outline for Volume II. We have temporarily settled on a due date of May 2008 for the medieval history manuscript, which is going to be a push, especially if I finish up my dissertation this summer. However, I think it’s (semi) doable.

I’ve been reading Norman Cantor’s book Civilization of the Middle Ages, which is a revised and expanded edition of his classic Medieval History. In the first chapter I ran into this fascinating paragraph, which dovetails with my own thinking about Latin-based classical education (a different approach than the neo-classical methods which my mother and I have written extensively on). Cantor says:

“The Romans…believed in themselves as educators, as trainers of the next generation in a specific order of civilization. They developed a tough, aggressive educational system that took little notice of individual talents….There was no room for art or music within the system; all boys were forced to become little grammarians, since language and literature were, in fact, the whole of their curriculum. Higher education was simply higher studies in language. A society dominated by an aristocracy is one in which the rulers need to learn nothing but language; they do not need science or the arts, they do not need new knowledge of technology or sources of wealth, but they must communicate–they already have power, which they will exert through communication. Through narrow concentration the Romans did marvelous things with Latin–basically an awkward, inflexible language. They ignored the sciences, studied almost no mathematics and little history, but learned both written and oral Latin superbly well…..Later western systems were based on the Roman; educators read Cicero and Quintilian and found their model convincing and acceptable. It is a natural system for an aristocratic society, which needs to train its young people only to accept the power handed on to them–a similar system existed in Confucian China.” — Norman F. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, pp. 10-11

A fascinating observation. I prefer to design for my own children an education in which Latin is a tool for the greater understanding of the English language–but only a tool, not the center of the curriculum. The Romans, after all, could no longer survive as a civilization when the aristocrats no longer had artisans, peasants, and mercenaries to whom they could issue their orders.

Looking across the Tiber River towards the Vatican–a picture I took last year while in Italy.

However, despite faxes to Egypt I haven’t heard back from the Cairo Museum, where the mummies are on display (I assume that the museum has the rights to the images).

Other than that, I’m just about done with the images. I had to buy most of them, but I was able to use one of my own–Hadrian’s Wall, a photo I took on a research trip to the U.K. It’s possible that the file is not going to be high-resolution enough for Norton, but I hope it is; I love this picture.

Meanwhile I’m fielding queries from the copyeditor, who is reading through the manuscript with an eye to correcting any inconsistencies. Norton, like most publishers now, outsources its copyediting, and mine has gone to a wonderfully detail-oriented freelancer in Maine. Every few days she sends me queries which reveal just how many creative spellings I have indulged in (hey, YOU try spelling Apennines the same way every time). Here’s a typical email:

*

1. Re the use of uppercase vs lowercase on geographical features: the author has indicated that “river” should always be lowercase, to agree with the maps; thus Nile river, Yellow river, etc.

Are the following usages OK? These are what I’m seeing in the text, but I’d appreciate it if the author could confirm that these are what she wants:

desert — lowercase, as in Arabian desert
peninsula — lowercase, as in Arabian peninsula
plain — lowercase, as in Mesopotamian plain
valley — lowercase, as in Nile river valley

Delta — uppercase, as in Nile Delta; also referred to as “the Delta”
Gulf — uppercase, as in Persian Gulf; also referred to as “the Gulf”
Mountains — uppercase, as in Zagros Mountains
Sea — uppercase, as in Black Sea
Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt — uppercase

2. It would be great if I could clear up some of the discrepancies I am seeing:

Bosphurus Strait or Bosphurus Straits (w/ an “s” on the end)? I am seeing both in the text and on the maps.
Rig Veda or Rigveda?
Great King or great king? (when referring to “the” great kings)
Merodach-Baladan or Merodach-baladan (w/ lowercase “b”)?
Yangshao or Yang-shao? (I see both in the text, the latter on maps)
Washukkanni (2 “k”s) or Washukanni?
Hattusus or Hattusas? (I see both in the text, the former on maps)
Sumu-abum or Sumu-Abum (w/ uppercase “A”)?
the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, as in text? or The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid as in Works Cited?

3. Re references cited in footnotes (all of which are in Works Cited at the end of the book): there’s quite a bit of variation in this. Sometimes it is is simply the author’s last name and page number; sometimes the author’s full name, title, and page number; sometimes the author, title, publisher, date of publication, and page number. I wonder if this is something the author would like standardized? Since all of these references are in the Works Cited, it doesn’t seem necessary to include publishing information. Perhaps go with author’s full name, title, and page number?

4. I note that journal articles are cited differently in Works Cited and in the Notes. For example, here’s the same citation from a note and then from Works Cited:

46.12 Edward L. Shaughnessy, [title], in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 48:1 (1988), p. 223 .

Shaughnessy, Edward L. [title]. In Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Jun. 1988), pp. 189-237.

Is this OK? Or should they be formatted the same in both places? If so, I’d suggest the top example simply because it’s more concise and I believe more commonly used.

5. Re four-digit numbers: include a comma or not? Thus 5,482 men or 5482 men?

*

Meanwhile I’m trying to prepare all of the final documents that need to go to production as soon as possible: the revised time lines that end each chapter (all 85 of them), a full list of credits for all of the photos, copy for the captions of all illustrations and maps, and what publishers call the “forematter”: list of previous publications, dedication, table of contents, and acknowledgments.

And in the middle of all THAT I’ve had to negotiate a deadline for the next volume. Everyone at Norton thinks that it would be better to keep the gap between volumes to two years, if possible.

Sure. Let me just rent my hut in Tibet now. I’m sure my husband won’t mind if I leave him to raise the kids alone for a year or so.

Children numbers two and four:

Children numbers one and three:

Will report on the end results of the negotiations shortly.

Now for news from the annoying-details-of-production front. I have FINISHED, yes, finished, drawing all the maps, and have turned them over to the talented Sarah Park so that she can turn them into works of art (see my January 26th post below). Nancy is working on the permissions letters for all the text quotes (see February 21). So I have turned to the issue of the illustrations.

I had planned on including 36 illustrations–none of them huge glossy color pictures, since the text, not the photos, carries this history along–but each of them illuminating a certain point. For example, when I describe the wedge-shaped cuneiform of the Sumerians, wouldn’t it be nice to SEE a Sumerian tablet with wedge-shaped writing?

I have my own photos taken at the British Museum–here’s a Sumerian tablet:

However, I can’t use my own photos. For one thing, they were taken through glass, so they’re a little fuzzy–fine for my own reference, but not great for reproduction. But the biggest issue is copyright. The British Museum owns the rights to images of any objects in their collection, so I can’t just reprint my own snapshots.

Out of my 36 illustrations, 32 are photos of historical objects (the bust of Nero, the mummy of Rameses II, an Assyrian picture of Jehu of Israel bringing tribute to the Assyrian king Shalmaneser). All of these objects are in different museums. The simplest way to get high-quality illustrations is to go through a commercial clearing house which takes high-quality photos and manages the rights. Here is a cuneiform tablet, courtesy of Corbis Images, one of the biggest and most widely-used clearing houses:

Yes, it’s a small image, because you have to buy the rights to reproduce the full-sized one. So I sent Corbis all the information about my own book (what territories it will be published in, copies in the first print run, cover price, whether the illustration will be less or more than a half page, etc.) and got a quote back.

$525.00

Sheesh. Multiply that times 32. Gasp. Clutch.

But I really WANT the photos. OK, the Sumerian tablet may not be THAT exciting (although I always marvel that anyone can actually READ that stuff), but consider this: In my chapter on the Philistines I say that they were cultural magpies, taking bits of other peoples’ culture rather than creating their own. (So were the Romans, but they always come off better, somehow.) One example: The Philistines were part of an invasion of Egypt and, while down in the Delta, saw Egyptian writing and Egyptian sarcophagi. So they began to create their own Egyptian-style coffins. But because they were stealing someone else’s customs, the coffins are odd-looking. The features are out of proportion, and although there are Egyptian-style hieroglyphs painted on them, the hieroglyphs are meaningless gibberish–copies made by an artist who didn’t understand the original.

Here’s a coffin (my own British Museum photo):

Now isn’t it nice to SEE that?

However, I can’t afford $525.00 per picture, so I’ve put in a call to Corbis to find out whether I can get a reduced rate (apparently they’ve got some sort of corporate arrangement with Norton). I’m contacting the museums directly to find out if there’s a cheaper way to do this. I’m searching around through other picture services. And hey, if anybody’s got a photo of the Midas Monument or a Shang bronze that you’d like to send along, let me know.

My next post will be from Chicago, where I’ll be speaking this weekend. If any of my readers are there, come up and say hi and I’ll put a picture on the blog.

ADDENDUM, two hours after original post…

Just in case any of you have friends-with-photos (like JFS below), here’s a list of the illustrations I’m looking for:

Scorpion King Macehead
Narmer Palette
Cuneiform tablet
Bent Pyramid
Vulture Stele
Mohenjo-Daro Man (statue)
Sphinx
Gudea’s Statue
Statue of Senusret III
Sculpture of Cretan Bull-dancer
Battle of Kadesh frieze
Mummy of Rameses II
Shang Bronze
Philistine Coffine
Jehu on the Black Obelisk
Midas Monument
Ishtar Gate
First World Map (Babylonia)
Terracotta army of the First Emperor

And the following busts: Philip of Macedonia, Alexander the Great, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Octavian, Nero, Commodus, Constantine.

There, I have cast my bread upon the waters, and we’ll see whether any floats back (or whether it sinks, soggy, to the bottom).

SWB

300 words or less of prose
Any amount under 300 words of prose if it equals more than 10% of the source work
2 lines or less of a long poem

of any work which is still under copyright. Works published before 1923 are in the public domain; so are works published between 1923-1963, if the copyright was not renewed (if the copyright WAS renewed, the term of copyright lasts 95 years from the date of first publication). For works published 1964-1967, the copyright lasts 95 years from date of first publication. Then there are lots of small exceptions. (“If a work was created but not published before 1978, the term of copyright is at least until December 31, 2002…” and so forth). Government documents are always public domain (not that I’ve had the opportunity to quote many of those). Photographs, illustrations, and drawings never fall under fair use guidelines.

Whew.

I really hate this part of the process. For one thing, a book this size has got so many quotes in it–and even those works which are ancient in origin I’m quoting in translation, so I have to get permission from the translator (and I can only quote Dryden’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives so often before I have to revert to a more modern version). My wonderful assistant Nancy (who has made my life orderly) went through the MS for me and made a chart of quotations which is 29 pages long. Here’s the first page:

Now I’m going through the chart and totalling up words for each source and locating the publisher. Then Nancy will help me write each publisher (or fill out their online permission form) asking for the right to quote from the work in question. Here’s a typical set of requirements for asking permissions, this one from HarperCollins (see http://www.harpercollins.com/templates.asp?page=permissions, if you’re interested in the full document):

*

Requests to use material from HarperCollins Publishers General Books [adult trade U.S. publications] should include the following information:

Title and author of OUR BOOK AND title and author of YOUR BOOK.
Imprint of our book
Your publisher’s name. You must have a publisher in order for your request to be considered.
Format [hardcover, softcover, etc.]
Territory of distribution for your book [U.S., North America, world, etc.]
Print run [total number of copies to be printed]
Publication date of your book
Price of your book
Your complete postal address and e-mail address
Note: Incomplete requests cannot be considered. Include all information.
Requests may be made by writing to:

Permissions Department, 6th floor
HarperCollins Publishers
10 East 53 Street
New York, NY 10022
We cannot accept requests by telephone, fax, or to personal e-mail boxes. Please allow enough time for your request to be handled. It may take four to six weeks or more for a response, which will be sent by mail. Do not submit duplicate requests.

*

I realize this is probably the most boring blog post I’ve ever made, but there you have it; it’s a boring process, one of those tasks that takes hours but doesn’t FEEL as though you’ve accomplished anything. And the reward, of course, is that you get a lot of letters back saying, “Certainly you can quote from our book, as long as you shell out $300.” Multiply that by 29 pages of permissions, and you’re talking about a fair amount of money. Fortunately Norton pays the up-front costs and then deducts it from the royalty statements later on, so I don’t have to come up with the cash–but it hurts plenty when that first royalty statement arrives.

Okay, so much for that. I promise that my NEXT post will deal with more thrilling matters.

Not that there’s a huge amount of thrill connected with this particular stage of book-production…

Oh, and it’s February, and I want to go somewhere warm. Or have something exciting happen. Or at least eat cookies unendingly with no thought of the consequences.

Meanwhile, I want to get my dissertation drafted out so that I can defend it in the fall. The challenge here is that I could probably finish up the production work on the book fairly quickly if I devoted all my work time to it, but it’s so depressing to do only non-writing work day after day. So I’m trying to balance out a certain amount of production work every week while also getting back to my dissertation.

THIS is difficult because I tend to be an obsessive worker–when I start on one particular project, I have trouble thinking about anything else. And I also over-research to a really horrendous degree. I ended up writing 500,000 words on the History of the World and then cutting it in half, which is not something I can afford to do on my dissertation–I just don’t have the time.

So I’ve adopted a couple of new strategies. I’m scheduling my work time so that I alternate days on the dissertation and on production work–this wastes a certain amount of time, since I have to re-orient myself at the beginning of each work period, but it should keep me from losing my mind. Also I’m taking a different approach to my disssertation. I’ve outlined the entire thing on a single piece of paper:

Now I’m going to do a limited amount of research on each chapter, do a very rough draft of the whole thing, submit it to my advisor, and then devote additional attention only to those parts which she feels are lacking. That way I can avoid doing a year’s research on each chapter, which is my natural impulse. I’ll let you all know how this goes.

In the meantime, work on the Chicken Shed continues. My father built a custom door, since the doorway is a non-standard size, and it is magnificent–here he is, along with my husband, trying it out:

And the inside is almost ready for painting. I’m thinking I’d like to go with a color other than white: any suggestions?

I should be able to start moving into the Chicken Shed by March. Which would be a very good thing, considering the new source of noise in my house.