weekend work

I'm off to the office to put in a few hours of weekend work as a way to stay ahead of schedule with the projects we're working on. My boss had agreed to create two textbooks for our CEO, but this was so that the boss could later tell the CEO that we'd be showing him three books done in the initially agreed-upon time frame—just to show the CEO what we're capable of. I've generated material for two of the three books; I'm about halfway through the third now. What happens next is that I hand over my mss (standard abbreviation for the plural manuscripts; the singular is ms) to our designer, who uses his Adobe InDesign magic to turn everything into a textbook. Because our designer has a tendency to introduce errors of his own into the text as he's working, it is then my job to proofread the mss and have the designer correct the dozens or hundreds of mistakes that I find (not all of those mistakes are the designer's fault; the boss and I contribute content as well, so some of those mistakes come from us, too). The designer redoes each ms, and I proofread them a second time—in theory, this second proofreading is the final stage in the process. We have a bit of a time crunch, though, because I'm leaving for my walk in mid-October, so all of my second proofreadings have to be done before Saturday, October 14, the date of my departure. You can therefore see why I'm putting in some weekend hours, and I'll be doing this again at least twice more.