Comic Cuts - 19 January 2017

I think I'm on track to have the next volume of Forgotten Authors out in early February. Now that I have the text, there are still a lot of stages to go through before I can hold a physical book in my hand.

Not the least of these is reading through all of the essays and doing bits of rewriting, usually just to weed out some of the klutzy writing that might result from revising a paragraph two or three times as you write, pulling it apart and putting it back together again as you go along, finding better places for the information that paragraph contained, or finding that you need to add something that will pay off later in the essay.

I'm four essays in on that process, but I like to break up the proofing process as it's so easy to see what you meant to write rather than what's actually on the page. So the proofing is done in short, intense bursts and I'll then take a bit of time away to work on something else. So I've been writing a couple of pieces that will find their way into the next volume – brand new pieces, as I'm using the book as an excuse to write up some authors I've never before got around to – taking some photos for the next cover and, yes, I finally got around to doing my tax returns on Wednesday.

Once the proofing is done and I've written the introduction and contents page and resized the pages, I can then create a first draft PDF, from which I compile the index. And once that's done I have to produce two different versions of the complete set of texts, one with endnotes for the e-book version and one with footnotes for the printed book. If it's anything like the last time I did this, that will take a few days as I have to go  through every note of the e-book to make sure they all link to and from the text properly. I'm hoping that I can remember how I did it last time because it may have taken some while to do, it worked... and that's how I've muddled through using computers for nearly thirty years.

So we're not quite there yet. But getting there.

No falls or spills this week, but I'm reminded constantly that one of the reasons the paths are so broken up around here is that they're used as car parks by everyone with too many cars for their driveway. The main road into town is full of holes because only one side of the road carries all the traffic; the other side has cars parked along it 24 hours a day.

And then there are the people who cannot follow the most simple of instructions. This was rammed home a couple of times this week when we were on our morning walk last Friday and noticed a car on the main road breaking hard to avoid hitting a bloke who had parked his car on the path in order to jaywalk across the road to the shop. So as well as being parked across the entranceway to the car wash behind the bus stop (so its a busy bit of path), he couldn't be arsed to walk the four yards up the road that would take him to the zebra crossing. It's not the first time it's happened to the same guy with the same result.

Monday afternoon, we spotted someone else parked right up against the No Parking sign outside the new doctor's surgery. Some people will rebel against anything and everything. It reminded me of what happened last July when the council had a major programme of redoing the road surfaces. Huge notices were put up to warn people not to park on the road, but some idiots won't be told, resulting in huge patches of untreated road where the workmen had to work around parked cars.

Today's random scans are on the subject of roads...

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