This freelance gig is at the same publishing house as last year's gig, but the project I'm on is very different. I'm looking at ebook versions of the publishers backlist, i.e. books that have already been on sale in print. There isn't time to read each book so I look for anomalies in patterns, i.e. font changes, style changes, punctuation and spelling errors, credit or title errors, etc.

Skimming books versus reading them means that by the end of day I have all kinds of bits and willies stuttering through my brain. I did a book on Einstein and didn't realize what a pacifist he was; did a book on the Partisans of Vilna, which was where my stepfather was from before he went into the camps. I did a book on chastity and why girls should save it for Jesus until marriage and followed it with a romance novel where basically everyone was giving it up to anyone named Cade or Buck or Chastity or Freelance.

I'm getting a wide view of the bread and butter of publishing, or what makes the presses turn (or used to). Death shows up repeatedly, mostly in how to avoid it, and every few books I do seem to have the word 'Heart' in the title. Though so far there's no 'I Heart Death,' so I'm planting that in my file to use it on a future project. I Heart that title.

I still need my book runs to clear my head when I've been staring too long at the screen and this go around I'm finding hard copies of a lot of the cookbooks I did last time. It means I'm building a kick-ass cookbook collection, which I mindlessly flip through when I miss the dog.

Speaking of the dog, a new run opened and we took her there this weekend. Joe's taken her there during the week, but it was nice to walk the piers and then walk along the water.