
A book is finished many times before it’s finished. I wrote ‘The End’ on the last page of the manuscript of Thomia just before Christmas last year. I revise as I go along, so by mid-January I had a complete ‘final’ draft, reasonably free of typographical and other errors. A select few friends and loved ones then kindly consented to read the manuscript for me, and of course they spotted many more typos, errors of fact and grammatical infelicities; worse yet, they didn’t all spot the same ones!
Having so many unnoticed blunders called to my attention at once gave me a few sleepless nights, I can tell you; what other errors had they failed to spot? Revisiting the text to make corrections also made me want to rephrase certain statements that I felt could have been put better, or at least more tactfully. Making all these changes then demanded another re-reading of the text to winkle out new typos and other nasties that had crept in – and well, you can guess how that went. By mid-August I was in a state of desperate confusion and had begun to fear that any further changes I made to the ‘final’ draft would make the book worse instead of better. Luckily, the publication process was now moving forward and the window of opportunity for making further changes was about to close once and for all. Like it or not, I had a final final draft of the book at last, a print-ready manuscript. No doubt there were (and still are) a few typos left in it, but spotting these and removing them is what we pay proofreaders for.
It felt marvellous, of course, to have a print-ready manuscript in hand after ten years of struggle. But as every editor knows, a book is more than just the author’s text. There’s always one more ‘last’ thing to be written or sourced: an epigraph or dedication, a preface, a foreword written by someone else on whom you have to wait, that bit of legalese on the back of the title page that no-one but the typographer ever reads. These, however, are mere fripperies. The serious stuff, especially in a big and informative book like Thomia, is at the back: scholarly notes to the text, appendixes, tables, lists of abbreviations or foreign words used in the book, plus a page or two of acknowledgements because, as Arnold Schwarzenegger rightly says, nobody ever makes it all on their own. Thomia, I’m happy to announce, has no appendixes or unwieldy lists, only a page or two of acknowledgements. And the endnotes are already done.
Easy peasy. Except, of course, for the index.
✴︎
In countries with well-developed publishing industries, indexing is a profession in its own right. The Chicago Manual of Style explicitly advises authors to leave this difficult and dangerous task to others, since we tend to be poor judges of the relative importance of topics and people mentioned in our own books and thus find it hard to decide which ones should be included in the index and how much weight should be given to each entry. But Lanka, sadly, is not one of those favoured nations. We have no professional indexers working here, at least not – as far as I know – in English.
Needs must when the devil drives, so, on Monday 9 October, I put my nose to the grindstone once again. Microsoft Word has its own indexing function, but it’s a dumb beast that has to be led and guided every step of the way, with frequent pauses for looking back and much forward planning. As is often the case with a historical work, especially one like Thomia in which much of the interest to readers is in the characters mentioned, it seemed best to me to compile two separate indexes: an Index of Subjects and an Index of Persons. I began with the latter, figuring that once I had it, I’d be able to put together a ‘cast of characters’ from the book and post it on the Thomia website. It would, I thought, be good publicity.
✶
The work of indexing produces a state of mind all its own, a blend of tedium, fugue and frustration that is still, somehow, curiously addictive and satisfying. If you’ve ever found yourself obsessively eating Tipi-Tips or popping the bubbles in bubble wrap, well, it’s a bit like that, only bereft of any sensual reward. I shut myself in my little room at the top of the house and pretty much stayed there, coming down only for meals and at night, till I’d finished my Index of Persons. It was a different kind of hell from the one I put myself through when writing, but I’ll spare you the gruesome details. Suffice to say that it took me until 6 November to compile an index of well over a thousand entries, covering 905 individual persons.
Not all the people mentioned in the book are listed in the index: only those who play meaningful roles in the story make the cut. Slightly over half the names appear in the text no more than once. Others, of course, are mentioned repeatedly. Reggie de Saram, STC’s legendary, long-serving warden, gets by far the most attention: sub-categorized by subject and listed in rough chronological order, his index entry takes up up almost a whole column, even though not every mention of him in the book is listed. Close behind de Saram come the men most often cited as the greatest Old Thomians: S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and D.S. Senanayake. Guess who gets the more mentions? STC’s founder James Chapman and the other eminent wardens also take up fair-sized chunks of the index, just as you might expect; next in prominence come other notable staff and famous old boys. STC’s principal adversaries, Barcroft Boake and Christopher William Wijeykoon Kannangara, also receive their due. The rest of the names on the list make up, as you may guess, a highly assorted and not always eminent company.
It took me very nearly a month to compile this Index of Persons. When it was done, debugged and (I hope) print-ready, I proceeded to generate a Cast of Characters from it by stripping off all the sub-entries and page numbers, and posted the result on the Thomia website with a little blurb at the top of the page encouraging visitors to look through it to see how many among their forebears, families, friends and foes – and, of course, themselves – appear on it. This, I reasoned, would help boost interest in my book among members of the Thomian community, whom I think of as the natural readership (though not, I sincerely hope, the only readership) of Thomia.
It worked pretty well. Subscriptions to the Thomia Mailing List have shown a distinct uptick in the days since I posted the Cast of Characters and started spreading the word about it across the interwebs. I have also had calls from one or two people complaining that I had spelled their names wrong. One of these complaints, I blush to confess, was from someone I’ve known since the two of us were classmates in Form I. But this kind of correction, however embarrassing, is always welcome; it makes for a better end-product. So if by chance you happen to spot any errors yourself, either in the CoC or excerpted passages from the book that appear on the site, leave a comment below and I'll attend to it as quickly as I can.
Some ‘corrections’, however, are not so welcome. My Cast of Characters hadn’t been up 48 hours before I received an email from an eminent Old Thomian sportsman who wanted to know why his name wasn’t in it. I explained, with some embarrassment, that his name wasn’t on the list because he isn’t in the book; his personal achievements, outstanding as they are (and indeed they are outstanding), have no place in the story I’m telling. He wasn’t at all happy with this reply, I’m afraid, and came right back at me with a long email that contained his entire curriculum vitae and much else besides.
I was impressed by this gentleman’s courage in protesting his exclusion as frankly and tenaciously as he did, but I earnestly hope no-one else follows his example. There wouldn’t be any point. As I’ve said and written repeatedly, here and elsewhere, Thomia is not a conventional school history, nor does it aspire to be. Like Pontius Pilate, I have written what I have written, and I’m afraid that’s that.
"Alea jacta est"..."maktub" and so on. Bravo. David