The Book That Will Not Die

Sigh. The editor at McGraw-Hill told the contractor doing the final mss. and pouring the text into pages that I would be answering the author queries. Didn't tell me, so the first I heard of it was two weeks ago when the other contractor contacted me with chapters. I like the other contractor but that doesn't mean I'm actually enjoying the work that much. I am filling in nutrition analyses on recipes. Mostly, the dietary fiber content is missing, but that still means recalculating the whole recipe on the online electronic recipe calculator. And the problem with that is that the recipes missing the fiber numbers are the ones where the "author" supplied the nutrition info. So when I do the recalculation, it inevitably turns out the numbers are wrong. All the numbers. What appears to have happened is the "author" tweaked the recipes but didn't bother to re-do the nutrition info. It is, like, the one thing I didn't think I had to check on the originals -- I figured where she lifted the nutrition info along with the recipe, the nutrition info would be correct. The other thing that I'm doing is filling in holes I really, really, really hoped the editors at McGraw would deal with -- like, do fresh blueberries and dried blueberries really count as two separate foods? Basically by the time this is over I will have written the whole damned book, in the most inefficient way possible. And the worst of it is, it isn't remotely the book I would have written. For one thing, I hate peaches. Every time I have to calculate the nutrition info of a recipe with peaches in it I think, "What the hell am I doing this for? I'm not putting peaches in anything!"

Well, no. The worst thing is I'll be lucky if I get $2,500 for this. I bet the "author" is getting at least $10,000.

In other news

I finished chapter 3 of the manuscript I'm ghosting this morning at 7:52 am. I've now done the front matter, chapters 1 - 3, and chapter 6, for a total of 357 manuscript pages. This makes me feel less bad about it having taken a month; that's a lot of channeling what somebody else would write if they could, um, write. I have about 48 hours left to finish the rest of it, and of course I had to sleep all day today. I know I can make it coherent; I just don't know that I can make enough of it coherent enough fast enough.
And, yes, not only can I rant endlessly about the news business, I have some good rantation stored up about book publishing, too. Mainly, I was trying really, really hard to make this not be one of those books where, um, chapters 1 - 3 are coherent and then the whole fucking thing just falls apart. However, no such luck. Because it is, as always, more important to get the book out in time for the New Year, New You promotions than to have a coherent book.
The folks in charge keep telling me I shouldn't be trying to make a perfect book. When did maintaining alphabetical order become perfectionism?