I have mentioned that I have written books. Since it was Gloria who supported, encouraged, and assisted me enough that I actually did write the books, I'll go into more detail in the chapter on Gloria.
But I suppose that I can tell one particular story here. Or maybe two.
As noted, when people ask me about how to write books, I tell them that, once you have actually written the book, that is the easy part done. That is possibly overstating the case, but certainly it is the part after you have actually written and finished the text, that is the most annoying.
The publishers will have various requirements of you. These requirements may not be expressed early on in the process. It may only be after you have written a book or two, or three, that you start to realize that this is a necessary part of the process, and that you should do it while you are writing the book.
The first annoying thing is the style sheet. This is simply a collection of words, generally specific to the topic that you are writing about, which are used relatively infrequently. Because of this, there may be variations in how people address these particular words, or possibly phrases. Sometimes you will have two or three words which you just group together, and write as a phrase. Sometimes you will capitalize the initial letters of this phrase, if it is important enough. Sometimes you will hyphenate between the words, rather than using spaces. In any event, you have to decide how you are going to deal with these words or phrases, and then be consistent about it. Generally speaking, the first time you use one of these unusual terms, you write it into a file or document as a style sheet. As you use more, you add more of these items to the style sheet. As you reuse these terms, you refer to the style sheet, and ensure that you are using the terms consistently, spelling them the same way, and doing the same things in terms of hyphenation. When I wrote my first book, the word "email" had not yet been standardized. Some people just wrote "email," and some people wrote it "e-mail." I had, by this time, actually reviewed rather a large number of technical dictionaries and glossaries. So, in trying to figure out how I was going to write email, I looked up the word email in all of those dictionaries. I found an exactly even split: six of the dictionaries used "email," and six of the dictionaries used "e-mail." (I, even at that time, preferred email, and that seems to have become standardized for normal use.)
Then there is copy editting. Copy editors are usually those who have taken relatively useless college degrees, such as English literature, or history. Their actual ability to edit copy varies tremendously. Oh, and, of course, when dealing with publishers, you are usually dealing with American publishers. Particularly when you are dealing with technical subjects. (American publishers are not inherently better than any others: they just have more money. This gives them outsized influence in the industry, quite beyond their actual capabilities.) So you get assigned an American copy editor. I don't particularly mind Webster's dictionary, although I prefer the Oxford English dictionary. However, I have, probably by the time I wrote my second book, come to loath and despise the Chicago Manual of Style. I hate it. I use the Oxford English Dictionary. I have written that into my contracts with technical publishers: it's going to be in English English, not American English; and it's going to follow the OED, not Chicago.
Of course, none of the American publishers have a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, and, in any case, their copy editors have no idea what it is or says. And, even if they do know the differences, as I say, their ability to edit copy varies enormously.
Gloria was always my copy editor, and, when the American copy editors would send back edits, Gloria would edit their edits, making corrections, oftentimes to errors in my text which they had never even caught, and then I would fight, on Gloria's behalf, with the American publisher and copy editor.
There are multiple rounds of copy editing, depending on the publisher. And then we move into a new field of editing, known as galley proofing. This is when the typesetters set the text, which has already been copy edited, and introduce a whole new world of errors, that neither you nor the copy editors ever considered.
When I wrote my first book, it dealt with, at certain points, the very basic issues of machine language. This is programming with the op codes themselves, not even using any assembler language. Therefore, I was making reference to the various classes, and families, of central processing units, or CPUs. One of those, popular at the time that I was writing the book, was the Intel 80x86. This was simply a shorthand reference to the fact that Intel produced an 8086, an 80186 (yes, there was one: it just didn't have much of a market), an 80286, an 80386, and promised but hovering on the horizon at the time I was writing, an 80486. When we got back the first set of galley proofs ...
Well, I should tell the story of editing, and its relation to accounting and auditing. Nobody in security likes auditors. Nobody in finance likes auditors. In finance they say that auditors are the ones who come through after the battle and bayonet the wounded. But, in reality, the auditors are actually your dearest friends . I explain this by asking people who has written books. Not many have. I ask who has written articles. More have, but still not a majority. I ask who has written memos. *Everyone* has written memos. It is unfortunate that memos usually go out in rough draft, because I'm trying to make the point that you cannot edit your own copy. You know what you meant to say, and, when you go to edit it, you read into it what you intended to say, and you do not notice your errors. This is why you need auditors, both in finance, and in security. You need someone to catch your mistakes. Someone who isn't you.
When I got the first set of galley proofs, it was the first third of the book. It was 140 pages long. I went through it for eight solid hours. I sweat blood over it. And I found twenty errors. Then I gave it to Gloria.
Gloria found four mistakes on the first page.
For one thing, Gloria is far superior to any copy editor I have ever known, and far and away superior to me at this process. Gloria's second advantage was that she's not me. She found my mistakes, because she didn't write it.
Anyways, one of the mistakes, which the typesetters had introduced in this round of the editing process, was taking the 80x86, and reprinting it as 80[multiplication sign]86. Even the publisher got a good laugh out of that.
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Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html
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