Today is a day of significance – the 77th anniversary of Josef Jakobs’ execution at the Tower of London. It also marks “T minus 1 month… the manuscript is due at the The History Press on September 15. Things are slowly coming together.
I’ve been pruning the manuscript and then sanding it down. I’ve managed to trim a good 40,000 words off of it, which is quite an accomplishment. It’s now a matter of cleaning up lingering loose-ends.
There is a big formatting hurdle still to tackle, but only in the days immediately prior to September 15: going from double-spaced to single-spaced, eliminating all MS Word-generated bullet lists, etc, and (the big one) transforming MS Word’s auto-generated end notes into manual end notes with square brackets. I definitely don’t want to do that one until everything is squeaky clean in the manuscript. Deleting one end note would result in a massive headache.
I’ve been getting photo contributions from some of the people of whom I have made requests. I still need to scan my own pile of photographs for the book. And I have gotten clear about what it would cost to use photographs of National Archives images and/or documents. It ain’t cheap. On the other hand, I did get a discount from the Royal Armouries, so that was nice. And After the Battle magazine is kindly sharing some of the photographs from their archives free-of-charge.
On another note, I have been following-up on some leads relating to Tin-Eye Stephens (Lt. Col. Robin William George Stephens). Some leads have produced lovely information while others have been a dead-end. And yet others need a bit more research. I’m hoping to get a blog post out soon… maybe not before September 15 though… can’t get distracted.