One thing I have learned in writing family history books is that nothing goes according to plan. I learned this in spades with the writing of the Brennan family history book:
THE BRENNANS OF IRELAND, OHIO AND BEYOND
I sent out a letter to my cousins in December, informing them that the book would be on the way to the printers that month, and might even be available to ship before Christmas. As it turns out, a series of changes and problems made that impossible. My book designer, who is also my lovely daughter in law, Tere Mendez, did an amazing job of creating a beautiful book. She then sent it to me for review, just after Thanksgiving. While I was proof reading and seeing if there were any major changes I wanted to make, she was proof reading as well. We both found a number of mistakes that needed correcting, and I had a number of changes I wanted to make. So Tere got back to work. The changes, combined with the upcoming holiday season, and other design jobs she had on her plate, led to a delay until she and my son, Matt, came down for Christmas.
During their visit, Tere and I spent many hours going over the book, chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence. (It should be noted that even this extensive proof reading missed a few things which we corrected later.) Tere took the work back to Seattle, where she lives, and made sure she had all the corrections in place. We both agreed that the manuscript would finally be sent to the printer the first week in January. I felt bad that my relatives would have to wait even longer for a book once promised in late December, but it was what it was and I was just happy to be finally getting the book in print.
Late Monday, the day Tere was going to send the completed book to the printer, she called and said she had printed up a few pages of the book to see how they looked and decided she had used a font size that was too large. As she humorously said, "You can read it from outer space." That meant she had to change the entire book to a smaller font, which would shorten the chapters, cause difficulties in aligning the text with pictures, and change the page numbers in the Table of Contents. So she set to work, correcting the book at night, while she worked on her other projects during the day. And while she was doing that, I did one more proof and found many mistakes in capitalization and punctuation that had gone unnoticed before. One of many things I have learned as a writer is that proofing your own book is very difficult. After having read it so many times, your eyes just skip over mistakes, filling in a missing letter or punctuation mark, not seeing a misspelling, your mind not even registering incorrect capitalizations. But this time I found a number of them, and when Tere finally had her part of the changes done, we corrected the last batch of mistakes. I'm not going to say they were the final mistakes, because I know there are minor mistakes I have not found. I only hope I have not made any major ones.
Now the book is at the printer. I have paid a deposit and they will begin the process, sending me a printed proof to read and approve before they do the final run. The book should be completed by early February, and I am hoping to send out the first copies shortly after I receive them.
