Finally received the first proofs of the book this week. 

It was supposed to be an extra special birthday present from Routledge, but it arrived a few weeks late. I'm talking about the first proofs of course, which I had to pick up from the FedEx distribution center near the airport because there was an error in Routledge's database listing an incorrect apartment number. Fortunately I had the evening off from opera rehearsal so I could go down and the get the package.

In general things look good. The images and musical examples are present but I hope they're not in final form because some of them look...funky. Mostly it's a sizing thing -- some are on a separate page for no real reason I can discern since others of the same length are appropriately placed in the text. Still, they paid someone to "resize" my TIFF files (twice!) so I'm not sure they got their money's worth. Then again, I know nothing of what they do to TIFF files. Anyway, I sure hope it's temporary.

Once they receive the proofs back they'll address my corrections and send me another set of proofs from which I'll make the index. I'm actually looking forward to that a little. Before I sent the original manuscript off in September I went through the text and put all of the terms I plan to index in a Word file, so I've already done a good amount of the heavy lifting.

No sign of an actual cover design yet, but I did get a message from the new editor asking about the proposed image I sent in September. She said they'd really like to use it, and just wanted to confirm the contact information I'd provided.