The third batch of edits for the second volume of the biography arrived in yesterday’s mail. David is up to Chapter 17, while I am finishing up Chapter 6 this weekend.
Stacking up simultaneous galleys is only part of the reason Im working so much more slowly than David. It takes much longer to find a lost citation, for instance. At one point I spent literally all my working time for three days trying to find a particular section out of one of Ginny Heinlein interviews (which I finally concluded was not in my working notes at all). Now, some days “all my working time” might not amount to more than 15 minutes or half an hour . . .
Plus,the most frequent recurring editorial direction (other than “cite or revise”, which keeps me honest but is still very time consuming, see above) is “rewrite – Heinlein POV” Which is to say, a good deal too often I’ve written remarks or passages that imaginatively re-create Heinlein’s state of mind and are written as if Heinlein were saying these things. As Robert James said in reading the very first, roughest draft, it was as though Heinlein was a character in a story. In the first volume there was a longish passage that was very literally done that way, an explicit dramatic narrative. That all had to be rewritten to save the factual material and eliminate the dramatization.
Now, often enough, as David cannot know, Heinlein did in fact say these things, and I can simply cite the letter or whatever. But it’s not always a simple matter — sometimes I’m doing the biographer’s task of summarizing a whole series of letters, none of which has sufficient citability on its own, but come up to a cumulative effect. Explanatory footnotes often result from this kind of edit.
But much of the time, the imaginative re-reation is actually not closely supported by the documentation — and in any case, the tone and style set by the first volume dictates a more objective treatment this time around. This is possibly the most time consuming edit to deal with, because each such passage is embedded in the overall narrtive flow and has, not onlly the factual detail of the instant to deal with, but itts contribution to the past and the future of each thrread of the narrative. What can be eliminated and what preserved is sometimes not a simple choice.
Which all translates to time-consuming, slow going thtrough the narrative. In the midst of this avalanche of galleys and edits and academic papers to be written, and commercial book introductions amd Heinlelin Center and HSSWT. I’,m averaging only 3 manuscript markup pages per day. That translates to probably 6 months of editorial rewrite.
With any luck, as I put each of these other projects to bed, progress will speed up.
