finished the manuscript

Last Monday, we packaged up our manuscript, one very large table that was big enough to merit its own file, and our "About the Authors" file and sent them along to our publisher. She advised us that it will likely be early 2027 before we have the physical copies of Strategic, Sustainable Web Content: A Practical Handbook for Librarians in hand.

In the end the manuscript was just shy of 49,000 words, and came in at 218 pages (double-spaced as a Word file). I'm not sure what that will work out to in a printed volume, but certainly that seems to me like it should be sufficient to be, you know, like a real book.

I had forgotten how anticlimactic it can feel when you finish a big project like this. Unfortunately, it's not like you press send and then later that day your doorbell rings and there's a box on the welcome mat that has the printed books in it (but wouldn't it be neat if it did work that way). You can't even tuck a flower in the tall stack of pages neatly tied with string, like Winona Ryder did as Jo in the 90s movie version of Little Women.

I'm grateful for my co-author, a joy to work with as always. My thanks go out to my family and friends for their encouragement, support, and patience ... there's a lot of laying on the floor and wanting to give up that goes along with finishing a book (at least in my experience).

I can't say I ever thought I'd write one book, much less three. I've been thinking about how strange and sort of amazing it is that you can go from just a passing thought, to a real idea, to a proposal, to a table of contents, to a blank document to something that somehow is an actual finished thing that other people will one day be able to hold in their hand and read. I've gotten so used to thinking I'd better go work on the book that I've wondered if I need to figure out what the next book will be about.

Let's not be hasty though.