Kelsey Jackson Williams

. . . and it’s away!  Shortly before midnight last night I hit send on the e-mail which delivered a full manuscript of The First Scottish Enlightenment to my editor at OUP.  Alert readers may have noticed that my actual submission deadline was the end of July rather than the end of August.  They may also have noticed my over-enthusiastic conference attendance for much of the summer.  The two combined to put me behind schedule, but after a punishing few weeks I’ve nonetheless succeeded in sending the manuscript off before teaching begins.

In the spirit of this series of blog posts – which were, at least notionally, intended to be about the process of completing a book project – I thought I’d share the academic life-lessons I’ve learnt over the last couple of weeks.  They’re all extremely obvious, especially in hindsight, but maybe that’s also why they’re worth talking about.

V. You don’t need to chase that citation.  Much of my time over the last few weeks has been spent in university libraries trying to chase up obscure books I thought I should probably look at and cite (anyone familiar with Aristide Joly’s 1934 Université de Paris doctoral thesis on the Duke of Perth?).  But very few of these have had any material impact on the book as a whole.  Many more or less frustrating hours could have been saved by simply accepting that it’s impossible to ever be completely exhaustive in your research.

IV. Don’t think about publication.  I’m bad about keeping my head in the present at the best of times, but I’ve been finding myself particularly side-tracked worrying about reviews, about what colleagues will think, and about what the overall reception of the book will be.  The rational part of me knows, though, that such thoughts were less than helpful in bringing this project to its conclusion.

III. Obtain image permissions well ahead of submission.  I really wish I’d done this.

II. Read your publisher’s style guide.  This is something I actually did do, but even so I found myself having to make last-minute changes due to not having read it with sufficient care.

And crucially . . .

I. Use bibliographical software and/or maintain a running bibliography.  I wrote my bibliography from scratch between Tuesday and last night – it was absolute hell.  Next time I think I’ll have a go at using EndNote or Zotero or something similar.

Despite my questionable life choices, the book is still finished!  Now time to prepare for the new semester’s teaching and begin thinking about what comes next (the answer, of course, is lots of carved stones) . . . .

Copyright © 2018 Kelsey Jackson Williams