I’m back, surfacing after roughly two weeks of reading the page proofs of Fear on Four Paws, one of the most stultifying and yet terrifying tasks in an author’s life.
It’s dull work, reading something you’ve read so many times before. It’s easy to dismiss the need to go through these proofs, which are laid out and designed like they will be in the final book. After all, my agent has read these pages. So has my husband and the few solid beta readers I trust to be honest. My editor has read it – twice. And the copy editor will read it again, once she inputs my changes.
But then I see it: the em-dash that should be a hyphen. The missing “a” that gives a sentence sense. And I realize – this is it! If I miss anything this time through, it will go into the finished book. And I freeze in fear.
Silly, right? But such is the life of an author. We work so hard to get our dream onto paper, and then something as basic as a typo can derail us. But the truth is, anything can derail a reader. If the illusion our world has created breaks, even for an instant, it may not win you back – and the book is lost.
And so we read and worry and worry and read. Sometimes, the issues that come up at this stage have to do with production: The two flipped pages nearly gave me a heart attack. At least, until I realized that copy hadn’t been lost, merely misnumbered (page 15 should be page 16, and vice versa), which is an easier fix to make. (And which the wonderful copy chief has already fixed for the e-ARC).
Some things make a sort of sense. For example, the few pages where a female dog becomes male – or, well, takes the male pronoun (“him” and “he” instead of “her” and “she”). I mean, I remember changing the gender of that animal, not that such a mistake is in any way good.
Some things, though, I don’t know where they came from. How could I have forgotten that Pru is on the phone and therefore cannot see the man she’s talking to “as he looks over his glasses at her.” Ahh! How can I use the same exact compound adjective to describe two men in two subsequent paragraphs?
Who wrote this thing?
Who, ultimately, is responsible for catching these mistakes. Oh, yeah, right. Me.
It has scared me silly to see these mistakes this late in the process. And that, I guess, is why I’ve been so focused, diving head first through these pages. Because as much as I dread seeing these mishaps, I have to – before my readers do.
Even if you miss one or two tiny details — Pru and her animal partners in crime and crime-solving always draw me into the story so deeply that I will forgive and even overlook those tiny flaws, eager instead to discover how things will work out for these characters I care so much about. Which is proof, I think, that you are an awesome author!
Thank you, Beth! But it’s because of readers like you that I want to polish this to as close to perfection as I can!
I think you can be sure that despite multiple eyes reviewing the text at each stage of the writing/production process, some truly stupid mistake will slip through. Maybe perfection isn’t allowed in this business?
Yes, it’s the asymptotic approach to perfection! Still, we can’t not try.
Isn’t it amazing? So many eyes, and still the errors hide in plain view.
the little devils…
I just love this series!!
Thank you so much, Nancy! I hope this installment entertains!
Call me finicky, but if I come across a content-related mistake in a novel (like a wrong name), it catapults me completely out of the story. So, I appreciate it SO very much that you go through all that proof-reading. By doing that, you let me immerse into the story completely and keep the fiction alive for me. Thank you so much for that.
You and me both, Katha.
I agree–a mistake, be it typo or misspelling to brain hiccup, breaks the spell for me entirely. One of my greatest fears is that when I’m proofing something I wrote, I stumble across something and I find myself asking, what the heck did I mean by that?
Then you understand my terror….