Funny that this is really happening... 

Sometime last week Routledge pointed me toward copyedited versions of the various chapters and endnotes and so on for the book. Even though they weren't reading for content, I was still a bit anxious that someone (a group of people as it turns out) had read everything. 99% of their copy edits were details like paragraph indenting and fixing bibliographic entries to conform to their style. They'd also put the chapter titles and headings into the Optima font, which made things feel different -- holy crap someone other than me is going to make design choices about the presentation of my content! hehe

There were also some queries about spelling of weird things, and a lot of confusion over my use of the word "affect" as a noun. Maybe it's just a new musicology thing but we tend to use the word "affect" in the sense of Affektenlehre, or the Doctrine of Affections. An "affect" in this instance is a basic mood or emotional state, but I can understand that this use might be unfamiliar to non-musicologists, especially given the classic grammatical problem of "affect" vs. "effect."

Also interesting was their attempt to tame my somewhat zealous quoting of words whose meaning I'm attempting to put into play as part of an argument. At times, though, they'd suggest putting the words in italics instead, which had the effect (ha!) of making parts of the ms. seem like a textbook: Now folks, we're going to learn about whiteness, etc. While I was careful to remove all such italicizations, I begin to agree that my quotes became a bit much. The fear of Richard Taruskin's ghostly open-armed quotation gesture only spurred me to agree to more of their prunings than I might otherwise have thought.

It was also an opportunity to fine tune and make consistent my musical examples. They were initially built over the course of several years (in ye olde versions of Finale) so there was a lot of work to do, mostly in terms of regularizing the "P.M. ------|" indications for the guitaristic technique of palm muting. I also wanted to make the size of the examples consistent to 4.25" wide, as well as simply giving everything the kind of good going-over I wasn't able to do when I sent off the ms. Oh, and I sent along 1200 dpi TIFFs this time, instead of 600. Probably overkill for music notation, but there you have it.

It was also the last chance to edit the content before it's fixed in published form, so I did some of that. Mostly word-choice type of things, but a couple of paragraphs got moved around and rewritten, particularly in Chapter 1 and the Introduction. Now that I've uploaded my changes to the Routledge FTP server, the text is done, done, done. It's mostly a relief, since I finally addressed some minor nagging things that had been bugging me. It's a relief until I wake up at 2 am suddenly remembering another issue.

Next up, according to the production schedule, are the first real page proofs. Expected in the third week of December they'll make a nice birthday present.

Final permissions details still in the air. Venom people told me on the phone I wasn't worth a prompt response, but to keep bugging them (argh. Hollywood types...). After months of nothing, the Hendrix people finally kicked me over to Hal Leonard Publishing, but at the moment it's still unsettled. The person didn't think Metallica had actually given me permission to use their stuff -- Hal Leonard also controls Cherry Lane which publishes Metallica song books, etc. -- so I faxed her the relevant correspondence and hopefully Hendrix will be taken care of soon.

Stay tuned...