Dear Supporters
I'm delighted to announce that the completed manuscript for 'Trans Britain' was sent to Unbound on Saturday afternoon. They've got a copy editor already lined up to start work on it this week!
The last piece of the jigsaw arrived in the early hours of Saturday. Professor Aaron Devor holds the world's only research chair in Transgender Studies and set up the Transgender Archive at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. He had enthusiastically agreed to write the book's foreword and, in order to do that, he had been spending the last couple of weeks reading the draft manuscript. That makes him the only person besides me and Unbound to have read the book! His contribution was waiting in my inbox as I awoke on Saturday morning. (He likes the book by the way).
So, with Aaron's words swiftly edited (to change those pesky North American spellings) there was nothing else but to grasp the moment and email the whole thing off to the publishing team.
What happens now is the magic that professional publishers do. It's the stuff that your pledges have financed so that the book can emerge as a highly professional finished reality in the shops on 25 January 2018 (you'll get YOUR special first edition copies a few weeks before that).
My work is far from finished too. It has been an intense four months since you helped the project hit its funding goal back in March. Coordinating the work of over twenty busy contributors has been hectic, but very rewarding too. For the next couple of weeks I get to rest whilst the editor gets to work. After that there will be things to tweak and then a whole series of things that Unbound will need me to do over the months ahead, culminating in signing over a hundred copies (for those who pledged for those) and preparing to promote the book.
So there will still be reasons to update you in the months ahead. In the meantime rejoice! The most critical stage of creating the book has already happened!
Best wishes
Christine