The Proof is in the Pages

Christmas Day. Finished the “proof pages” for my novel The Devil’s Mambo and my short story Marine Tiger. I’d been warned that going over proof pages was like watching paint dry. Proof pages are the pages from the actual novel printed on 8-1/2 by 11 paper. It’s the author’s last chance to find any typos, errors or inconsistencies. Previously, I’d worked on the copy-edited manuscript. Manuscript with hundreds of corrections and post-it notes. The Copy Editor will not only tell you if your grammar and punctuation are wrong, they’ll also let you know if the model of a car is the wrong year, if a bottle of wine is the wrong vintage, if you said your character had brown eyes in one chapter and then blue in another. Even make sure your time-lines are correct. My copy editor did an excellent job. And though my double-checking all her comments and corrections was also a bit tedious, there was still some room for new paragraphs, or even new chapters, if I needed to write them. You still get to be creative during the copy editing stage.

The proof pages? Excruciating. You find something major you want to change, but you can’t unless you’re gonna pay for it out of your own pocket. So it’s really about finding tiny typos or inconsistent dates and names. You have to carefully scrutinize every single word and it makes you want to bang your head against the wall it’s so boring. But I’m done.

Now I’m off to finish Revenge Tango, the sequel to The Devil’s Mambo. Time to be creative and deal with all sorts of other headaches, like figuring out where the damn story is going...