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ProofsJune 17, 2008 Yesterday I e-mailed the page proofs of Mud of the Place off to the publisher. They mostly don't make page proofs they way they used to -- if they did, I would have been FedExing or Express Mailing them back to Maryland -- but these page proofs still gave me a kick: they look like a book, not just a manuscript. Wow. Actually, it wasn't the actual proofs that I e-mailed back to the publisher; it was a five-page Word file of corrections. The proofs were a .pdf file; you can only comment on a .pdf file if you have Adobe Acrobat or if the creator of the file has it and enabled the comments function. Neither of us has the full Acrobat (from time to time I think about getting it), so I made myself a table, page numbers in the narrow left-hand column, comments in the much wider right-hand column. Worked fine. Most of my corrections had to do with formatting: Center all chapter numbers. No running head and folio on first page of chapter. Indent this and subsequent paragraphs. Don't break an ellipsis between the dots. Small caps didn't survive the transition from Word to the page layout software; they had to be restored. En dashes had a hard time too, and when you're writing about Martha's Vineyard they come up regularly: in Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road and Edgartown–West Tisbury Road. When a section ended at the end of a page, I specified a line of three spaced asterisks; otherwise only the eye keen enough to notice the extra line space will realize that one section ended and another began while the page was turning. I caught a few typos that had survived all earlier readings and edits: a missing close quotation mark here, one comma that should have been a period. Somewhere along the line I chose "OK" over "okay"; a handful of "okays" survived into proof stage and were caught. (I hope.) I wasn't too daunted by these: this was the first pass through Mud of the Place that I'd made in proofreader mode, not as a writer or editor. I'm all three -- writer, editor, and proofreader -- and I'm rarely able to disable two modes and read only in one: most of the time this is my strength, but sometimes it's a PITA, like when the editor starts second-guessing the writer, or the proofreader sees in excruciating detail what the editor could have done better. I can't do all things equally well at the same time, and most of the two-hat wearers I know say the same thing. When you look at something straight on, you can grasp what's on the peripheries -- but you can't see what's on the peripheries as clearly as you do when you look at it straight on. In my last copyeditorial pass I caught a couple of inconsistencies that might make an eagle-eyed reviewer crow: Jay and Rainey, for instance, arrive at the airport in Jay's old Volvo -- which supposedly is in the shop at the time. Now they arrive in Rainey's Saturn. The eagle-eyed proofreader caught a couple more, and she would be crowing -- "What idiot copyeditor missed that?" -- if she hadn't been the idiot copyeditor. Like Nick is erroneously booked on a Saturday flight that doesn't exist and on a previous day's flight that has already flown. Worse was Jay getting ready to "head west on 495." Hello? He's on 128, somewhere around Waltham. 495 is a ring road. It doesn't go west from 128, which is also a ring road, closer to Boston than 495. The writer grew up driving those roads; wouldn't you think she'd have known better? If you're in Waltham on 128, heading west on 495 makes as much sense as taking off from Earth and thinking you're going to follow Mars's orbit to get to the outer planets. Maybe the copyeditor screwed it up? I wish. Now Jay is thinking about heading west on Route 9, which is much more likely to get him to Worcester, where he wants to go. My editorial mind can't help wondering what other foolishness is hiding in those page proofs, waiting to jump out at an alert reader. But my writer mind is happy. In page proofs The Mud of the Place finally looks like a book, and the book is good.
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