I finished editing Home Attitude: Everything You Need To Know To Make Your Home Smart today, and submitted the manuscript to CreateSpace, an Amazon owned company, for interior editing. They have a process to apply special fonts for chapter numbers, a big first letter of the first sentence in each chapter, renumber the table of contents, and embed my images (36 of them). I expect to get a proof from them in less than ten days. I will be able to make one last pass at the editing before the next steps.

I actually enjoy editing. I learned a lot about this from Kathleen Imhoff, a friend and former librarian, who has edited hundreds of books. One thing she taught me is to eliminate unneeded use of the word “that”. I selected a short piece of news from the WSJ this morning, and it contained 10 thats. None of them were needed. For example, read “But many investors are concerned that the steady rise in U.S. indexes has left shares looking expensive.” Then read it without the that. I have seen sentences with four or more thats. I was guilty of “that” overuse myself in my first book back in 2001, but Kathleen has since taught me the lesson well. Home Attitude will have 12 thats out of a total of 47,276 words. All but a couple of them were in quotes from references. There are some legitimate and needed uses for a that, but not many. 

Stay tuned for Home Attitude.