August 24, 2026
In June, I reported to you that I had finished my draft of Toil and Trouble. I did not say that the book was finished, however. Since then, I have revised and edited the entire book before I left on vacation. This involved re-reading the whole thing, marking it up, and then entering all of the changes into the Scrivener document. Now, I have a completed first draft.
But the book wasn’t finished. I have a laundry list of things to do before I can send the book to the publisher. But I crossed one of those things off the list this weekend.
I have a friend who has a cabin in the woods. My house is actually in the woods, but her cabin? It’s not my house. I can sit and work for hours there with no one to interrupt me, and no pesky chores to distract me. She and I went to her cabin in the woods and I worked for two days. Now I can say:
I HAVE FINISHED THE REFERENCES FOR MY BOOK.
There are 404 citations and 111 references in my book, which I have now cross-checked, formatted, and hunted down. I was careful when I did my research to take notes carefully so I could find the things I wanted to quote and where they came from. I also tried to cite them in the correct format, even though that format is Chicago Manual of Style, and even though I have never used Chicago before. I used every trick in the book I know, and I know lots of them since I used to teach this stuff to college first year students.
Even being very careful about doing everything right, there were four or five references that each required much digging and searching. One source I used was a copy of an essay from a textbook that had been put into a teacher’s reading packet. That’s a garbage source, so my hostess (who also happens to be a librarian) and I had to hunt down the original textbook…which isn’t in print anymore. Another source was a document from the US Congress from 1931, but it was also a document from the Smithsonian. And those are the ones I solved. There were a couple sources that were too hard to pin down, so I re-wrote the passages so I didn’t need to cite anything at all.
I am not complaining that this task took a whole weekend, however. It merely took a weekend. I know how bad this kind of work can be because it used to be my job. And it sucked.
After graduate school, I decided to work “in the real world,” which in my case translated to working for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a document preparer for the Yucca Mountain Project. I have all sorts of stories about that time, but the pertinent one here is when I was in charge of compiling a reference list of all the papers of all the scientists in my group (there were about 40). Each of them published multiple papers a year. I remember there being hundreds of papers the first year I had to make the list.
There were two problems with this job:
The person who had made this list had hand-typed each entry into the computer, one at a time. Each journal or book a paper was published in had its own style guide, so nearly every reference was slightly different.
I didn’t want to type that much, and I really didn’t want to deal with the multitudes of slightly different style guides. I still hate the different style guides. We should have one.
This was in the late 1990s, and I was a kid who had grown up with a computer at home and at college. I just knew that there was a better way. Surely someone had written a computer program that would automatically format references. Surely.
Surely not. I made it a research project and called all the librarians on campus and all the nerds I knew and no one had made such a program. Perhaps if I had met my future husband the computer programmer, we could have started a business to make one. Instead, I used a database program to make a clunky version of what I wanted. I still had to type each of the references by hand, but at least I didn’t have to re-type them when someone switched style guides.
This is a long way of saying that things today are SO MUCH BETTER. We now have programs that will do exactly what I wanted done all those years ago and more. The one I use is NoodleTools which I have access to through the college I work for. This tool can auto-fill a reference by searching up the ISBN of a book or the DOI of an article. It allows the user to type in information into fields, and then spits out a formatted reference or footnote in three different style formats. It will even make a bibliography or annotated bibliography for you. What I did over a weekend in 2026 would have taken weeks in 1999.
And no, it does not use AI.
So, huzzah for cabins in the woods, librarians, and citation tools! I’m one step closer to finishing my book.
On to the million other little things that need to be done before it’s due.