More Last Minute Mayhem

Earlier this week, my co-author for the Stuart’s Ride book, J. D. Petruzzi, unexpectedly received a large pile of copies of articles from the Baltimore American newspaper from June and July 1863 from the researcher that we use to find things for us at the Library of Congress. Never mind that our researcher has been aware of this project for more than a year–he just now got around to sending us this stuff, right at very last possible moment.

To our surprise, J. D. found a number of really useful articles for the project in this pile. In particular, we were able to flesh out our discussion of Corbit’s Charge at Westminster, MD a great deal thanks to some of this newspaper coverage. The problem is that we are in the final page galley stage; the book is nearly finished being laid out. Adding this material was much more difficult that turning on the “track changes” feature of Word and then typing it out. Instead, we had to carefully prepare the inserts, show Ted Savas, our editor/publisher, where they were to go, and then hope that Ted got it right. It was a big deal for Ted to do this and to get it right.

Ted tried, but the endnotes for one of the chapters got all bollixed up. It’s NOT Ted’s fault–it was actually a pretty major job, and it’s not a huge surprise that things got bollixed up. I just spent an hour going through the galley of the second chapter and then going through the endnotes in order to make sure that everything matched up the way it was supposed to. Since I was the primary author of that chapter, I was the logical choice to do this, and not J. D.

Let me tell you, I now have a world-class headache from it. It was a major chore doing that, and it was also essential that it be done correctly. The very last thing that we want is for the notes to be all wrong, and for some reviewer to catch the fact that all of the notes are wrong, and give us a bad review as a consequence. So, I had to be very, very careful, and I think that they’re all correct now. Poor Ted. He must have been about ready to pull his hair out by the end of it, and I know that he threw his hands up about the endnotes, which is why he threw it back in our lap in order to make sure that we’d gotten it right.

J. D. and I have both said this before: we’re lucky to have Ted as the publisher on this book, as I doubt that anyone else would have permitted us to make such substantial additions at the very last minute, as we just did. Thanks, Ted. We really appreciate your dedication to publishing the very best book possible.