Proof or Regret

My Writing Journey Part 22

One of the many steps on the journey to publishing is to have your book proofread.

Another person who can cast their eyes over your words to hopefully find those tenacious typos and grammatical errors that inevitably escape the writing and editorial process like they are members of some sort of editorial resistance hiding in plain sight of the enemy waiting for an opportune time to make their presence known.

It’s the final polish that can make the difference between a good manuscript and a professional one.

I was on a self-imposed deadline for one of my stories. I wanted it released to coincide with an annual event that featured in the book.
It was a shorter story of about 24K words, and I was running out of time.

In my wisdom, I decided to skip the proofreading step in the process. After all I had read and reread it multiple times.  I had done all the right things, printed it in different font to try and trick my brain into seeing it differently – used a ruler, line by line. It had gone through the hands and under eyes of an editor. She’ll be right mate.

Oh, how wrong I was. One of the things I struggle with at times is seeing typos on a computer screen. Give me a printed version or, better yet, an actual book and the typos jump out faster like a gymnast flipping over a vaulting horse.  I was dismayed to discover how many errors there were in the printed version and decided I should probably have someone proofread for me… and yikes.  Let’s just say the book didn’t make to the bulk printing stage.

 To make matters worse I was under a similar time constraint for another book. I wanted to give it as a thank you to the people that inspired it. Both the editor and proofreader pushed it through for me but that just meant some errors escaped detection.  With no time to get the mistakes corrected, I had to write a note with the book and say Hey, this a proof copy and it may still contain errors…

So, lesson learnt and proofreading is now a non-negotiable for my story manuscripts, no matter the number of words.