And on the seventh day we drank ....


So, in the past 7 days at the book publisher, I worked about 75 hours to make final changes to get a 900 page, 4-color firefighting book out the door.

After all was said and done, it proved to be a somewhat satisfying, albeit exhausting experience.

On the technical side, we had to collectively brainstorm to overcome a series of hurdles:

The 20 gig 4-color book came to us on a combination of 25 CD-Rs and DVDs. Our server was at capacity so we decided to buy an external hard-drive. I was given a credit card and tooled over to CompUSA in Framingham to buy a 120 gig Maxtor external drive which was USB 1.0/2.0. I didn't realize my duel 1 GHz did not have a USB 2.0 card, but I quickly realized this when I started copying over files and the estimated time was 13 hours.

Luckily, a colleage had a USB 2.0 PCI card, so with a little elbow grease I was transferring data quickly.

To add to the fun, our Xerox 7700DN color printer showed a warning that its fuser had about 1000 prints left before it died. Seeing as how the book was 900 pages, and we were going to be doing 4 or 5 rounds of changes - we needed to find a fuser ... fast. Our normal vendor informed us that the part was on bac-order and would take 30 days to come in. Then I frantically called 40 Xerox parts re-sellers around the country.

No one had the part. Then I posted a plea to a Google prepress group. Someone replied the next day that he knew of a supplier in France who had one. So we found somebody in the company who spoke French and dialed away. The problem was that they had the 110 volt and we needed the 220 volt (or vice versa).

Luckily, at the end of that day, I happenned to call an outfit called Cognito in Lower Manhattan and they had the part. The Fed-Ex'd it to us the next day.

While all these technical hurdles were being solved, I was working 10+ hour days making the corrections and printing them out, changing the Printer's toner and print cartridges, and routing them through Editorial via sneakernet.

As all this was going on, PDFs had to be mad to get approval from the organization we were publishing the book with and there were a lot of last minute art and layout changes. Then on Tuesday at 8 pm, my G4 crashed. I spent 2 hours running disk utilities and starting up in the terminal screen to run the fsck command to no avail. The next day my colleague who had the USB 2.0 card surmised that my video card had died. One was ordered for next day delivery, but that left me searching through the company to find a spare Mac. The G3 at the freelance station was not reading the USB 2.0 card, so I took my screwdriver and header down to the Production Editor's office to user her G4 400 MHz machine.

As this was happenning, my new duel 2 GHz G5 with 1.5 gig of RAM arrived, but I had no time to set it up. It taunted me from its sleek black and silver box.

Her Quark wasn't working so we had to re-install. Obviously, everything was rendering slower and printing slower .. but it would have to suffice. Then, when the marketing designer came in we realized I had installed her copy of Quark and she had 24 pieces to get out that day.

So, we had to re-install my version of Quark 4.0. The problem was that we only had it on floppy. The Production Editor's computer was not reading the floppy drive we had. So, then we had to break into a meeting my colleague was having with the president and have him come down and burn a disk image of Quark 4.0, update it to 4.1.1 - and keep making changes.

The next day, my computer was fixed and I moved back to it. We decided to ship the files to our printer on our Lacie 60 gig pocket drive to avoid having to burn 30+ CD's. But we hadn't put out the fire yet, no pun intended.

As all of this was happenning, about 25 of the 37 chapters had been approved and we had to Flightcheck them. The plan was for me to upload the finished jobs to the server for my colleague to Flightcheck while I continued with changes. I had uploaded the 12 gigs that were done so far when he came over to inform me that because I had connected to the Windows server via SMB, the files had been stripped of thei resource forks and I would have to re-post. Luckily, via USB 2.0 - this only took about 30 minutes.

Luckily, we caught this the night before it had to ship.

So on Friday - I was 50 hours into the project and it finally wrapped up around 2:30 pm. All the while, I had other editors continue to ask me about their covers and interior pages and reprints that I owed them. Everybody was a bit on edge, and btting horns so to speak, but we pulled together and got the job done.

After it shipped we got an e-mail from the Vice President of Design and Production that we were going to have a 4:15-4:45 meeting to duicuss all th ancillary materials that needed to get completed to support the book. At this point, although happy this first edition book was done, my eyes were glazed over and my head was pounding. I was amazed that we weren't going to rest for a day.

Luckily, when I got to the meeting room, I discovered that the e-mail had been a ruse to bring the 12 production , editorial and photo research people together to open a few bottles of Moet champagne. Sipping the bubbly from the red plastic cup, my mind uncurled and I reflected on the week that was.

People were talking about how the new book with the slick design would change the fire fighting education market (a market 9 months before I did not even know existed). I was glad I could lend a hand for the final two weeks in birthing a baby that some people had been working for 2+ years on.

And who said that textbook publishing was staid and dry?