I love working with concepts, the big picture, strategy, and ideas. I’ve also come to really enjoy conceiving, researching, and writing books. I just finished my seventh, Growing @ the Speed of Change: Your Inspir-actional How-To Guide For Leading Yourself and Others through Constant Change which I am really pleased with. It’s my best book yet.

The minutia of proofing, editing, checking, and rechecking isn’t my thing. I have great admiration – and lots of thanks – for professional proof readers like Carol Ring. Last week she put her incredible eye for detail to the page proofs for Growing @ the Speed of Change. And she found a few dozen little inconsistencies, typos (my big picture eye fills in what I wanted to say so I don’t see many errors), and minor changes from manuscript to page layouts. That required me going back through and checking everything she found.

Then came the Endnotes… (I am hearing the thumping, dramatic, music from Jaws here.) A bit of background; my favorite kind of book to read and to write, combines lots of strong research with an engaging and conversational writing style. Other than Moose on the Table: A Novel Approach to Communications @ Work (my only work of “edutaining” fiction), that’s been the approach of my six previous books. Growing @ the Speed of Change has over 150 footnotes. Especially since this book is aimed at frontline staff and supervisors, I know that 95% of its readers won’t look up even one Endnote. And that’s just fine with me. But I do want those core readers to be assured that I am not just spouting fluffy theories and pie-in-the-sky concepts. And since my books are used in high schools, colleges, universities, and cited in other books and articles, I want all my sources to be easily found.

Well… the Endnotes I created were incomplete and filled with typos and inconsistencies that I glossed over in the intensity of my writing last winter. And some were moved around in the page layout process so the numbering was mangled. We also needed to use change formats for some Endnotes that a few publications specified when we got permission to use their material. Fortunately, Betty and Cara from our office came through on short notice to help me. The morning of their intense effort I was in the dentist chair in the same building as our office (our dentist is also our landlord.) When I came back to the office, they agreed that I’d been having more fun!

All is now fixed (including my tooth) and off to the printer. Now I go back to (chewing on) much more fun big picture work now!