Book

My book is coming along. My blog is to promote the same idea as my book - applications of mathematics at the high school level. I don't want to be some jerk and use this blog to publicize my book. At least not very often. Let me take this week, though, and tell you where I'm at on it.

I just heard from my peeps at McFarland Publishing. They are pretty much done with what they do. The sent me a PDF of my book - exactly 200 pages. I now have two more jobs.

One is to do a final read through for errors. I'm about 3/4 the way through that. It seems pretty good. The main mistake that has come up is where I use a subscript or superscript in an equation and the next symbol mistakenly gets put into that form as well. No big deal. I think that is easily correctable.

They say I can respond by e-mail if there aren't too many errors (under 30) or run off the offending pages with corrections written in. They let me know it isn't time for general editing. This is just to find errors. I'm not sure I always know the difference, but in most cases I think I do.

Job 2 - Create an index. I've never done that before. I thought I would read it for mistakes and plan out the index at the same time. Nope. That turned out to be way more than my head could handle. So by tomorrow I think I'll be through the initial reading. I don't think I'll have to read every word to do the indexing, so perhaps that will go faster.

I've wondered before how they come up with an index. They sent instructions on how it is done, or at least how they want it done. It's pretty interesting. There are some rules, but at the same time a lot is left to the discretion of the author. Rules just on the correct alphabetize an index is a lot more complex than one would think.

I have to do this and send it in by December 31. It goes to the printer then. I'm not exactly sure when it officially comes out, but shouldn't be too long.

I hope this wasn't boring, but I've never done this before and going through the process has been interesting.