not quite ready for prime time

Yesterday, I "finalized" my dead-tree book's cover and manuscript, then uploaded the data and published the book, which is now "live" on Amazon. But I'm not linking to it just yet: I've ordered myself a copy; when it arrives around the 18th, I'll flip through it and see what problems stand out. If nothing stands out, I'll declare a temporary victory and announce to the world that the book is on sale. If I find problems, I'll tweak and reupload.

This was a complicated process to go through. I had thought it might be simpler since all I'd really needed to do—so I thought—was gather material I had written before, shape up it up into a legitimate manuscript, mock up a quick cover, then upload. Easy peasy. But I'd forgotten how the process had gone for my 2006 Water from a Skull (published via CafePress.com). And my 2022 book Think Like a Teacher (recently republished as a paperback with a Korean translation) had such a short manuscript that that experience had seemed relatively easy. No, this time around, it was a slog. Edit every chapter, standardize all notations, make sure chapter-page numbers matched the page numbers in the table of contents, make sure certain important chapters (preface, afterword, bio) began on the right-hand page (as is standard), then comb through the entire manuscript to look for stylistic, consistency, and grammar/mechanics errors... of which there proved to be embarrassingly many.* Any book I write in the future faces the same uphill challenge.

So this is just an announcement that the movie-review book's dead-tree version is in its final stages of preparation, but it needs to go through one or two more layers of vetting before I tentatively declare it ready for sale. It's a lot of shit to keep track of, and I'm a one-man show.

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*The number of name misspellings alone was shocking. Here are a few:

Zoe Saldana → Zoe Saldaña
Hans Christian Anderson → Hans Christian Andersen
John Le Carré → John le Carré
Selena Kyle → Selina Kyle
R'as al Ghul → Ra's al Ghul (Batman villain)
Ben Ross (Stallone character, The Expendables) → Barney Ross
Christoper Nolan → Christopher Nolan
Dame Judy Dench → Dame Judi Dench
Eowyn → Éowyn
Viola Davis as Andrews → Viola Davis as Anderson (Ender's Game)
Cliff's Notes → CliffsNotes (get the brand name right)
Middle Earth → Middle-earth (see here)
Ian KcKellen → Ian McKellen (and not McClellan, either)
Amercian → American
Pac Man → Pac-Man
Colonial Defense Forces → Colonial Defense Force (Old Man's War)
Steven Fry → Stephen Fry
Pen and Teller → Penn and Teller
Chlöe Grace Moretz → Chloë Grace Moretz
Matthew Vaughn → Jeff Wadlow (director of Kick-Ass 2; Vaughn only produced)
Orson Wells → Orson Welles
Hatte Morahan → Hattie Morahan
Daniel Day Lewis → Daniel Day-Lewis

So many of the above were embarrassing to find because, in many cases, I knew what the correct spelling was, but my brain failed to catch what my hands had been typing. Luckily, MS Word's new Copilot AI is pretty decent (but not perfect) at catching spelling, mechanics, and consistency/style errors as long as you feed it small enough chunks of text (no more than 15 chapters' worth). There are probably still errors in my movie-review book, but they're subtler and better hidden now, which might be a blessing in disguise: If I'm having trouble finding them, then others will have trouble, too.