by G.M. MallietI am now at what might be my least-favorite stage in getting Book #2 out into the world: going through the proofs.
Just before Christmas, a four-pound package arrived from my editor via UPS. I had been expecting this, and I knew it was no present. It was four pounds of pages of my book, typeset to look exactly as the book will look when it is a "real" book with a cover and so on. My job, should I choose to accept it, is to go through the over three hundred pages of this book, which I feel I have already read a thousand times, looking for errors. No wonder I let the package sit on my desk, lumpy, accusatory, and unopened, until after Christmas. I just couldn't face it.
Why? Because this is the stage where I see all the things I would have done differently. I have a theory that once a book is written, no author wants to revisit it, for just this reason. All you see is what you want to change, but you can't. Once the book is typeset, there's no chance for major surgery.
I will see the book yet again before it goes out. This will be the checking copy, in which I check to see that the small changes I make now have been inserted and haven't screwed up something elsewhere along the line. That I don't mind so much--by then, I suppose I've become fatalistic about the whole thing. Sink or swim, off we go.
So, what's the cupcake photo about? A new cupcake store just opened a few blocks from me. I'm on page 161 now of my four-pound monster, and it's taken me three days to get there. When I get through the whole book, I will be first in line for my reward.
p.s. The photo is from a cupcake store in Utrecht, not here in the US. I pretty much love everything about the Netherlands, and this is just one more reason why.
