The Proof is in the…

… reading. Those few of you who have taken up following me on Facebook will be aware that the final proofs for the Solo Wargaming book have arrived and, by the time you read this, should have been read and returned. I am not entirely sure I am the best person to do this, but needs must. I think that I am far too close to the text to discover any great errors or mistakes – so far I have run across 4 things or so that could or should be amended. As a novie book writer, I have no idea whether this is good or not.

Anyway, I teased on Facebook with the start of the table of contents. If you want to see it, you’ll just have to use the link above and go and have a look at at what is in Chapter 1 and the start of Chapter 2. So here I will show something else, which does not appear to have anything wrong with it.

This is, obviously, a section of the list of references. A long time ago, when I wrote the Polemos: SPQR rules, Mr Berry remarked that he had never seen wargaming rules with references and footnotes before. That was, probably, true, and it is broadly true of wargaming books in general. As someone of a vaguely academic bend, I do referencing and footnoting and so on. Publishers, on the whole, do not much like footnotes, as they use up a fair bit of real estate on the page, and they prefer endnotes. However, Pen and Sword have not complained, and so the text has footnotes, to tell you where I get the information and ideas from. As someone who worked on the edge of academia until fairly recently, I live in fear of being accused of plagiarism. So, as much as I can, I have documented where the stuff comes from.

The above image also shows the rather alarming variety of what I have read, from something to do with Aztecs to Macbeth, science fiction to the history of Israel, and all sorts of points in between. I even managed to cover a bit of World War Two and Napoleonics, which I do not, on the whole, wargame very much. On the other hand, as the regular reader of the blog will be able to establish, I do read quite a lot. Mind you, not everything I read is documented here, which is probably just as well for the sanity of the said reader.

It is, as I hinted above, a rather strange experience, proof reading the final text. I submitted the manuscript to the editor about a year ago, so far as I recall, having already, of course, proof read it once. Then I got the copy editor’s comments back, which I suppose counts as a third proof read. Then I got the first proofs back, which was a third proof read. I believe that the publishers sent it to an independent proof reader as well, which would be the fourth. And now I am doing it again, so the fifth proof read. I am willing to lay money on there still being some errors, typographical, logical, or grammatical left.

As I said, I am maybe not the right person to proof read at this stage, although I am the inevitable proof reader. I am, as the last paragraph suggested, very close to this text, even though I have not seen it for a few months (quite deliberately). Nevertheless, as I was reading it this time I found I knew what came next, and what went before, and all the points in between. I even knew what I was trying to say, even though, on occasion, I would not put it like I did last year. Things move on: a book is a snapshot of a set of ideas at the time; they are printed on paper not written in stone and can, and do evolve.

As an example, when I was a paid employee, we got a paper back from the journal after it had been refereed. The referee’s comments were positive, except that they had a question: ‘You write this here, and yet you wrote the exact opposite in a previous paper. Could you explain what has changed?’ Um, no, not really. Things move on.

So it is with the book. My ideas, some of which have been blogged here, change. I have been engaged with skirmish level wargames, and with the Italian Wars I have read a bit more about warfare and a bit more about wargaming. My ideas have evolved. The book is not my definitive and everlasting last thoughts on the subject.

That said, I still like it as a text. I hope it will be useful to wargamers generally and to solo wargamers, be they full-time solo or part-time. There are a lot of ideas in it, I think, some of which, after my re-reading of the text, I might try to develop myself. One of the challenges of how I chose to write was to not be didactic, and not to supply any complete rules for anything. The idea was to challenge the creativity of the solo wargamer. It seems quite likely that I have ended up challenging myself.

So, what now? The Text will, presumably, go for printing and will then launch itself on the world. This, of all of the processes, is my least-liked bit of publishing. I really do not like looking at the final product, at least initially. When I was publishing academic papers I had to get someone else to open the packages – this was in the days, of course, when you received a bunch of printed pages as the paper. It is perhaps a psychological oddity, but there it is.

I hope that some people will read the book. No doubt some will not like it very much. Some might find it too obvious, or boring, or it might just not cover their own favoured periods in their own favoured way. That is life, and that is publishing. I’ll try not to take the criticisms personally, and hope that many more people will find something useful or encouraging in it. I suppose, on that note, I’ll wind up by showing you the final paragraph of the whole thing.