Don't ever do this

Books are big complex things, the more so because smaller presses require the author to basically do everything.  Three parts all have to agree with each other: the text, the figures, and the figure captions.  For a variety of reasons, but mostly because of resolution, and too little of it, TPP finds himself redoing a lot of figures, but along the way not everthing works out just exactly the same.  You find a better image over here.  You don't want to pay a publisher to use an image over there, so you have to get a replacement to avoid plagiarism.  A colleague helps you out with an image, a terrific image, one that you have to use even though it means modifying a plate, again.  And worst, as a result you think of a better way to present things, and this requires you to shuffle a couple of other items to make this work. You make this one little change in all of this and it's like knocking over one domino in a long row or a large network of dominos.  Something like 32 individual images or illustrations were arranged into 16 plates, and when you get done you've got something like 31 individual images and illustrations arranged into 13 plates, so now the chapter text and figure captions have to be updated, corrected, jiggered around, the figures renumbered and reorganized to make everything come out even again.  It took all day, and TPP is exhausted.  Only one more chapter to go, plus all the tough items that were passed over along the way.  And the appendices, all the appendices, containing another 62 figures! 

Go figure and 90-90 rule of project planning

The 90-90 rule of project planning is simple. The first 90% of a project takes up 90% of the time allotted. The last 10% of the project takes up the other 90% of the time. Publications are rather like this because figures are always the last thing to be finalized and finished, a fiddly fussy process that seems to take forever. This is compounded exponentially by the number of figures involved. So just when the Phactor thought he was over the hump and had all the figures ready for 11 chapters of a book, he discovers that all the figures were of the wrong file type (dang!) and then he finally remembers he sort of skipped over chapters 8 and 9 so as not to get bogged down in a spot where the figures were less finalized. This turned out to be something in the neighborhood of 25 figures that need to be checked for font of any embedded labels, resolution and size, cosmetic detailing, replacement with better figure, nifty changes to better illustrate something, and any way you slice it or dice it, several days of work. All but five were finished yesterday, and about 1/3 of all figures still need to be changed to a tiff format, and that's just about it for spring break. Trying to get a project like this done while classes are in session is just about impossible, but with a diligent effort, a very patient editor may well get this beast before the end of May. Of course field season looms and a prairie study site will need to be burned some time this week. But today is basically a day off occupied by waiting for a delivery of several tons of rocks (pond renovation project) and then off to Chicago for a nice dinner and evening out with friends.