Boowick

I am at the phase where people are starting to say to me, "What? I thought you said the book was done!" Right on schedule. Expect another week or so of this (the Production Dept. expects to receive the "final" draft on Friday), followed by another couple of weeks of nothing book-wise, then me getting obsessed again, briefly, for the QC1 draft, and then that will be that.

Verily, I'm happily tweaking the text now, and am finally getting around to dropping in sections I've been meaning to drop in for weeks, or even months. It feels great. Or as good as it can.

There is a lot of grunt work to do this week, in the form of re-shooting practically all my screenshots, of which there are many. I used JPEG format for all of them, mostly to ease the process of converting the drafts into HTML for my own benefit. It turns out that JPEGs are too lossy for print, according to Rob the design chieftain. Who knew? Well, probably lots of people, but it's not like I asked. Fooey. (No, I can't just convert all the JPEGs into something else. I mean, I can, but that wouldn't fix the lossiness that the JPEGization already incurred to the images.) Well, I would have had to redo a lot of them anyway... lots of the early images are off-style. Most of the screenshots are of individual windows, and it's ORA-Mac style to shoot windows against a white background, and include the Aqua drop-shadow beneath them. I did neither of these things for the first few months of work.

I still haven't heard a peep from the other tech reviewers, and this still makes me kind of sad and anxious, though it's been so long now that I'm less worried that they're writing entire volumes of scathing criticism, and find it more likely that they're just plain ol' late. Chuck is checking up on this for me.

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Back when ERay said that I was the Jack Kerouac of tech writers, M replied, "Huh? But he didn't take years to write a book!"