Iterations of XDM
Work hours for today so far= 10
Work hours for the week so far = 47
Work hours expected for tomorrow = 4-8
Howard and I keep throwing each other off. He’ll call me to request a layout shift. I scramble to get it done. I call him back to tell him that the shift requires other shifts. Those other shifts change the shapes and locations of the pictures he needs to draw. This throws him off his game because he is back to figuring out what to draw instead of pounding through pictures. The fact that he is stressed about the quantity of remaining pictures, sends me back to the layout to see if I can re-arrange and consolidate, or eliminate, some of the picture spaces. I scramble. I can. I do. Then I call him to tell him what I did, which unsettles him yet again because we have to make sure that I have not eliminated spaces he already had ideas for. I didn’t. During this whole process we run into to communication trouble because Howard’s printout no longer matches what I have in InDesign.
“the picture on page 29”
“Page 29 has no picture.”
“Yes it does. The orc picture.”
“Oh. That’s page 27 now, but I moved the orc to page 57. He fits better there.”
“So am I drawing a picture for page 29, I mean 27?”
I finally had to create a new printout and drive it down to Dragon’s Keep just so he and I could be talking about the same layout. Things will change yet again after the meeting tomorrow morning with Tracy and Curtis. Hopefully those changes will be tweaks rather than major rearrangements, but there will be changes. There are always changes. Every time I look at the document I end up jotting down a page full of notes about things I need to fix. Every time I look at a page, I find something wrong. And that does not even count the editorial comments that I have to go through and enter. However the editor is working on a copy of the document that is at least 6-7 iterations old. Many of the layout changes are a result of her early comments, but most of the layout she is looking at is out of date. Not all of it though. And the text has not changed. And she is catching all sorts of things that need to be fixed in the text. Fortunately most of the textual things to be fixed are small. This is good. We don’t have time for major fixes.
Have I mentioned that this process is crazy? …and yet I think we’re going to manage it.
While I was at Dragon’s Keep handing over pages to Howard, I was able to show the pages to my friend Janci who was also there. She took a look at it and said “Wow, this is looking really good.”
I really needed to hear that, because all I can see anymore are the things that are broken. Only they are not nearly so broken as they used to be. And I had to search to find broken things to show her. This thing keeps transforming and each iteration is closer to being done.