Sturm und Drang und Papier: Or, Paper Tigers and Teapot Tempests

[truepenny]

Cory Doctorow opined this past weekend that there are two kinds of writers: those whose teeth are set on edge by an uncollapsed wave-form and those who cannot abide a collapsed one.

matociquala is among the former. I am one of the latter.

This goes a long way toward explaining why I hate page-proofs so very damn much. Because of the little voice singing in my head, It's too laa-aaaate. If the book sucks, I can't fix it. And yet? I have to Read. The. Entire. Goddamn. Thing. AGAIN. Ergo, the stack of paper sitting on the corner of my desk like an Adamsian guilt god makes me feel inadequate and fretful without my so much as having to read a single word of it.

I know perfectly well that I'm blowing the whole thing out of proportion, and also that if the book truly and honestly sucked, somebody would have said something by now. But part of me, like a spoilt child, refuses to be comforted and refuses to be rational and adult about the whole thing. It just wants to lie on the floor and kick its feet and howl.

But I think, instead, I'm going to go have lunch.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I wrote a new end for Prize in the Game in page proofs.

I read it, did the corrections, walked up to the post office to post it back to NY, on the way back realised the end sucked, emailed pnh to ask if it was OK to write a new end, wrote a new end (with the subject line "Urgent aesthetic problem"), got his email saying it was OK and emailed him the new end.

The new end isn't perfect, but the old end sucked.

So the moral of the story is, page proofs are not too late.

However, if you're reading the paperback and it sucks, then it's really too late. I heard a story about John Updike reading a famous award-winning book of his to his kids, from the mmpb, and correcting it in marker as he went along. That is too late. I have come to accept that chapter 32 of The King's Peace is never ever going to get fixed at this point.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

So the moral of the story is, page proofs are not too late.

-->They are if it's a mass market original. The economies are very bad in MM for wholesale rewriting of chunks of the book. If your sales numbers are very good (100K first printing), then it's okay, but for the midlist folks who have MM originals with a first printing of 20K, it may hurt the bottom line.

(A lot of that depends on if publishers typeset in-house or with outside typesetters. As a text manager, I like shipping the typesetting to a third party. As an author, I'd probably prefer in-house typesetting, since the cost analysis is not so easy to say "X dollars charged to this book.")

At the very least, it's probably nice to send the managing/production editor a token gift so they won't think of you as "that annoying author who rewrites her books in second pass and makes extra work for me," but rather as "that nice author who sent me a chocolate bar."

[(Anonymous)]

Tell you what, you just send me the page proofs, and I'll read 'em for you.

Is that selfless or what?

Yeah, Ok, I guess it's "what."

[veejane.livejournal.com]

You could always do what I do to make it interesting the 100th time through: read the whole thing backwards (in segments). Start at the end, read a sentence (start-to-finish), read the previous sentence, and so on.

I find it's a prefect exercise for catching punctuation problems (although not so good for catching paragraph-level problems). Side benefit: whole new story!!

Not necessarily one that makes any sense.

[cheshyre]

I am not an author, but was going to make a similar suggestion; pegkerr once wrote

I personally read both copyedit manuscript and typeset galleys BACKWORDS -- word by word. That way the meaning of what you are reading doesn't trip you up, and you see things with a new eye.

Good luck, and nice meeting you @ Boskone

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Good luck. And yes, the waveform-idea is cool but also a useful insight, one that explains a few things that had puzzled me.
Back in the eighties, if you tried to change much of anything in page proofs, your mm editor would probably come and find you and persuade everybody, including the local SWAT team, why Any Changes Were a Bad Idea. Dunno now, with some companies but not all doing computer typesetting, but back then I don't think any amount of candy bars would be enough compensation for the pain involved.