Drudgery

So here I am in the hot weather version of my scribbling suit: baggy t shirt and baggy shorts. Bare feet. Hair up in a scraggly pony tail. And I have spent nearly two hours engaged in the worst form of informational writing drudgery: cleaning up my references.

Chapter 1 is nearly done, and it is probably the most heavily documented piece of the whole book since it deals with the history of library service to children. Much of this was already cited in the earlier edition. Dealing with those references was easy, if boring. All I had to do was print the chapter, go to the original bibliography, and type in the references (hoping that I had gotten everything right the first time), checking them off as I worked my way through. More challenging were the new bits that I had added. In many instances, I had the source at hand -- easy peasy. In too many cases, however, I didn't want to interrupt the narrative flow to look up the citation. So sprinkled through the manuscript are the dreaded words: "check cite. " Or even worse: "add more." For example, I wanted to list the new PLA Service Responses. Do I have a copy of the latest edition of the Service Responses? No. I've got my fingers crossed that they are on the Web someplace; otherwise, I'll have to request them through ILL and go back to fill this part in much, much later.

See: It's even boring to read about it.

Sorry. I'll get through this hump and have something more interesting to say next time. Maybe I'll even follow Cindy's example and wear something more attractive. (See her comment on my last post.)