The PDF of the proofs has been returned and are out of my hands, assuming nothing goes wrong and I have to print the pages out and courier them or something. And I handed them in only half an hour past when I wanted them gone. (Also, two and a half days before deadline. Go team me.)
I’m going to get up and walk away, have a drink, and then try to do something with the pile of paper in the folder marked ‘Hearthcraft’ that’s sitting on my writing desk.
Hello internet-world. There hasn’t been much going on, other than trying to keep up with the same old same old.
I can tell you with great joy and pride that Misspelled, the anthology in which not one but two of my dearest friends have had short stories published, is now available for purchase and consumption. Apparently they have a copy for me as thanks for editing the stories, but I’m going to go out and buy one anyway, because buying stuff your friends have written is cool. Heaven knows enough people have done it for me.
I finally got the new MP3 player yesterday, so I can distract my mind enough to fall asleep promptly again. I loaded it up with the scores I would wear out if they were on cassette or LP, and a bunch of different versions of the Bach solo cello suites. Because I am lame and predictable, that’s why. (My falling-asleep music, my playlists.) I wanted one in blue, but all they had in stock at the time was black and pink. I did not get the pink.
First thing this morning, Sparky trotted into my office to grab the metronome. He wanted to bring it to the potty with him. If I thought it was loud in my office yesterday, it was a hundred times worse in the tiled echo-chamber known as the bathroom.
We had our annual toy-themed vernal equinox ritual led by the inimitable t! Monday night, and it was terrific as always. This one featured a sandbag toss after a snow-melting/spring-coming meditation. Tuesday’s weather was stupefyingly warm, almost seasonal, and scads of snow melted. Sparky, HRH, and I were on the back deck without coats playing in the sun before dinner and HRH said, “Geez, we should have had t! do that ritual weeks ago!”
On Monday I proofread the pregnancy book from the intro through to the end of Chapter Seven. Stetted a bunch of my punctuation edits, left others in (I opted for consistency within the same invocation, as opposed to consistency throughout all invocations. You will never know the difference, gentle readers.), found more errors, changed my mind about others. I even edited my comments (yes! because I need more work!). The proofs will go back today come what may, hopefully by lunch so that I can sit down and go through the printout of the hearthcraft book and start scribbling all over it. Because that deadline is coming ever-closer, and I’m very uncomfortable/unhappy with where things stand. And I’ve been away from it for a week doing the proofs, and there was the Easter trip to see the parental units. Maybe that will help; a bit of distance is usually a good thing.
Bad fibro day so far, though. I can’t feel or control my hands and feet very well. So of course I want fondant Easter eggs and a latte, which will only make things worse with the sugar and caffeine.
Stupid page proofs.
I’m going to STET all the punctuation corrections I did. I think. Maybe. Well, I’ll take it on a case-by-case basis.
I’m catching other errors on the second go-through. I wish inconsistencies in phrasing through rituals etc. had been caught in copy-edits. I wish they’d been more stringent. This will teach me to crow about an easy copy-edit review.
I want these gone, gone, gone by tomorrow. I need the time to finish the other book, you know, the one that needs to be handed in in a week or so?
Finished the first pass through the proofs! Now I have to go back and check the notes I made, and re-read the first half to make sure I’ve caught errors I found later. (A ‘censor’ is not needed for a ritual involving incense, whereas a ‘censer’ is. Am I ever glad I caught that one.) And now I’m wibbling about my ruthless elimination of commas for invocations in the latter half of the book; they do work well in some instances. Sigh.
I read a paragraph and choked up. That’s never happened before.
I see that a lot of the corrections I’m asking for in these page proofs are things that possibly could have been caught in the copyedit stage, but weren’t. I assume they weren’t pointed out because the copyeditor wanted to leave my prose as close to my original voice as possible, but I wish the slightly clumsy phrasings and inconsistent punctuation in invocations (ah, those commas) had been tagged earlier. Understanding what something says doesn’t mean there can’t be a clearer way to say it. And rereading it fully now, as opposed to going through the CEM edit by edit, I’m seeing places I wish had been pointed out. Oh well; if it’s crucial I’m correcting it; I’m correcting things to maintain consistency of formatting; and anything that misleads at first reading I’m correcting as well.
And still I’m pausing at other places and weighing how important a change would be. Sigh.
I veer between admiring how tightly certain sections are written, and wondering how other such messy bits got past the editors.
Just started chapter eight. I’ve done a chapter and a half this morning already, the same amount I covered yesterday. Fewer edits and corrections to point out today, obviously.
A birds has a syrinx, not a larynx. (Just for fun, the plurals are syringes and larynges. Heh.) Good gods, I don’t believe that (a) I wrote that, and (b) three editors missed it.
In other news, apparently I am the Queen of All Commas. All your commas are mine, mine, I tell you! Because after seeing the amount I have liberally sprinkled throughout this book, there cannot possibly be any left for other people to use. I use them for subclauses, but also to mark pauses and establish a rhythm in a sentence. And, er, there are, well, many of them, some in places where I now disagree with their use. Sigh.
Almost done Chapter Four; almost halfway through the 240 pages.
ETA: Done! And I’m at 109 pages or thereabouts. Off to get the boy.
Another chapter of proofs done. I’m about to start Chapter Four.
For every five or six instances of smacking myself on the forehead, there is an instance of, “Wow. I wrote that? It sounds, well, smart. And moderately deep.”