Editing two books

Since before the break, I've been editing two monographs. The last few weeks, it's become more intense, working with the texts (and their respective writers, one of which is helping out with the editing) in relation to the evolving layouts. There are a lot of moving parts. Today's adventures included giving one text a new ending and reorganizing the other to give it a new opening and, partly to make it fit and partly to eliminate repetition, to cut it in half, roughly. At the end of the day, I felt like steam was pouring out of my ears. And there are still several more rounds of editing until everything goes to the copy editor in mid-February. It's a necessarily incremental process: I think I'm catching everything, but actually I'm just focused on the standout issues, so much else gets by me.