Progress with the manuscript

Progress Bulletin for To Heal the Fractured Earth - Well I submitted the completed manuscript to the publisher, O Books, on 18th January 2010, and on 26th January it was forwarded by the Editorial Manager to a copy editor. As far as I understand the system, the copy editor will check sentence structure, readability, that kind of thing, picking up missing words and grammatical errors, and then return it to me as a copy edited manuscript for checking through. However careful we are to check thoroughly, read carefully, even have peer reviews of our work, a few errors still inevitably creep in - or rather do not get eliminated! Apparently there is only one known book that had absolutely no such mistakes in its final published form - I will find out which it was for a later blog, unless someone can meanwhile tell me!

Does this mean that the Editorial Manager had no substantial editorial changes to suggest? I assume and hope so! After all this is probably my third or fourth rewrite - each time the structure has been reorganised and evolved into a "final" version that I am happy with - at least for now. There comes a point in time in the development of a non-fiction book when a line has to be drawn, and any further ideas, developments etc need to be kept for a reprint or later edition.

For example, I learnt today (from an article by Marguerite Theophil in The Times of India), that whilst Carl Jung popularized the Wounded Healer motif in recent times, the idea is not only traced back to the Centaur chiron, but also to Plato, who recognized that the best physicians had themselves suffered, and were therefore better equipped to understand and heal the ills of their patients. I need to go back to that idea and store it away for future reference.