The Beast is Gone to Bed

As I sit here the PC is displaying the last of the files being transferred to the Wiley FTP server for my latest book, Dreamweaver 8 Visual Encyclopedia.

Oh.

My.

God.

What a long strange trip this has book project has been.

I started this project back in June, so it's been almost 5 1/2 months in the making, and let me tell you, this has been by far the most difficult of the four books I've written. Not because of the subject matter necessarily, but due to the unique formatting used in this series many of the topics have been more than a little challenging to write.

I'm thankful that the 80 hour work weeks are nearly over and that in the end this book should be really terrific. Credit for that goes in large part to my terrific coauthor, Sheri German, who I shanghaied into joining me in August. At that point in the project the book was little more than an extensive table of contents and a whole lot of sample files and attempts to get things into the format required for this series. Bringing Sheri on board helped get the book moving forward in a big way, and I know for certain that I wouldn't have gotten this done without her.

And how much work goes into writing one of these puppies? Consider this. The final chapter I submitted contained 184 individual screenshots of the Dreamweaver interface and covered the techniques contained in the letter F. Everything from assigning Favorites in the Assets panel to FTP-ing files to the server. 11,693 words in all and 22 MB of TIFF files for all the screen shots. And that's just one chapter.

So it's down the home stretch now. There are still edits to be done and questions to answer from the crew at the publishing house, but the days of chaining myself to the computer for extended periods of serious concentration are behind me. But I'm looking forward to a return to normalcy in my working life, and the chance to actually have a life once again.