Kevin goes out of town today for almost two weeks, most annoying. This is part of the job; he's heading to Caltech to give some talks and do math with some folks. But I don't like it, I don't. A few days is no problem -- it's nice to have the place to myself for a few days. But anything beyond that is too darn long.
I spent a fair chunk of yesterday working on the galleys for BiM. Very few line-edit errors left, as far as I could tell. I caught a few wrong-way-facing quote marks (created by quote marks next to em dashes, which the program had trouble choosing correctly), and then a whole mess of section breaks that were in the wrong places. Mostly extra breaks in sections that should have been a coherent whole -- there's a whole bunch of complex section formatting in this book, so I can't blame them for getting confused.
Also de-italicized an occasional word like 'boychik' or 'rasathi' -- they had gotten most of those, but there were a few remaining (mostly embedded in a larger italic section, so in roman, and harder to catch as a result). None of the 'foreign' words in the book are italicized, both for political reasons and practical/esthetic. It just looks goofy to me to italicize 'idli' but not 'dal', just because one of those words has made it into Merriam-Webster's and the other hasn't yet. They're both part of my native-spoken English, and it feels odd to italicize them and put an additional emphasis on them. For a longer discourse on why one might not italicize such words, see Gloria Anzaldua's La Frontera / Borderlands.
Upcoming: breakfast (steamed bao), straighten up a bit, put galleys and author photos in the mail, read another story in the zeppelin book (which I am enjoying quite a bit more than expected, given that I'm not particularly a zeppelin fan normally), exercise, and then go to the cafe from noon - 4 and write. Sounds like a good day.