I had a start with the website and many chapters were already basically written. It was an opportunity to improve the style, to check for errors, and to add new information. he really new experience was creating a book and there were so many decisions to be made — program to use, paper size, fonts, layout, positioning images and so on. The next blog will talk about this in more detail. It took about eight months to write the book and then came the lengthy process of editing and reworking. To improve clumsy sentences, correcting typos, punctuation, headings and captions, page numbering, page headers and footers, endnotes, bibliography, a general index, an index of Morkel family names and so on. The process seemed endless and took as long as writing the book. An author cannot proof read his own work. My wife Barbara has been proofreader for he website and did the first proof reading shift. I tried to find a professional proof reader. This is not as easy as it sounds. With a few queries on the internet I had quite a list of names with fees varying more than ten fold. The challenge was how to choose a reliable one. I had a bad experience with the proof reader I used for my autobiography, she came with good references and was very friendly but I found she wanted to ‘improve’ my writing style, whereas I wanted the more mundane corrections of typos and punctuation. When my wife looked through her work she found more than forty errors to be fixed, and after printing we found a further ten or so. I located a proof reader used by a publisher but she insisted on a MS Word document, whereas mine were either Psges 09 or a pdf.
