My Other Goal

Working on Goal #2

As 2024 drew to a close after a year of mysterious illness, I found I had only two major goals for 2025, which I listed in order of expected completion:

1. Get the second edition of my book out. This was scheduled to involve responding to copyedits, reading proofs, and assembling the index.
2. Get well.

Almost immediately, I had to revise. In light of my diagnosis in early January, I had to downgrade my second goal to

2. Survive the year.

At this point, now that I am responding well to the chemunotherapy, I am fairly confident that I can achieve this revised goal, though I'll have to wait till the end of the year to check it off.

Which leaves the other goal, the second edition of my book, The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet. Just now I am deep into the reading of proofs, with the index yet to go. So far the proofs have contained a few errors in almost every chapter, distributed among ones that 

1. should have been caught at the copyedit stage (Why did I capitalize conquest only three out of four times in the phrase "Spanish Conquest"??),
2. were introduced at the copyedit stage (No, it's not OK to label a table column "Later etruscan," and don't get me started on how bad the copyediting was.), or
3. involve inaccurate typesetting of the scripts or fonts I'm discussing (A mention of the dot placement that distinguishes Hebrew shin from sin somehow ended up with both of them having the dot on the right.).

On Friday, after proofing several chapters, I went out to run an errand. Between illness and low immunity I haven't been going out to shops much. Mostly I just go to medical appointments. Doing academic work and errands felt comfortably normal—so much so that for a moment I forgot my cancer. It still comes as a surprise sometimes.

Now I have one more chapter and some front and back matter still to go. Then the index. Or rather, part of the index, followed by chemo, followed by more of the index.

I'll manage this goal yet!