The pudding is in the proofs

(Actually that's not true – unlike Wilf, I don't eat in bed)

I FINALLY HAVE THE PROOFS OF MY BOOK! Now, it’s a long time since I worked in publishing (when I say worked, I mean I drank a lot of free coffee and checked a lot of indexes while coming to the realisation I do not have the skillset to project manage anything, even my own life), so this may well not be the technical term, but by proofs I mean that I have the ACTUAL LAY OUTS, in final page form, complete with numerous typefaces and cool illustrations and all the clever little design details that upgrade a plain old Word document into a book. And design and production having done their part, it’s now my job to go through it looking for mistakes to correct.

The important word here is mistakes – because it’s already been laid out, this is not (I am reminded) the time to be adding vast amounts, or even removing whole sections, which will throw everything else in that chapter off. In theory I think I’m really supposed to be just catching the typos like the one below or the recipe in which I convert 85g to 30oz of butter (no no no! Though also… yes?) but in reality it’s impossible to go through and not want to make other little changes to make it flow better. It’s the funny thing about books; I can spend actual hours reading through a 600-word piece for a daily newspaper, making sure everything about it is absolutely perfect… yet you get so little time to go through an actual printed book that sometimes you only realise you’ve said LOVELY three times in the same sentence when you’re in a studio recording the audio version, and by that time it’s way too late. (I assume works of literary art, where every word is as perfectly selected and placed as if it’s in the National Gallery – have you read this by the way? you must, but warning, it’s devastating – must take longer to produce. Or maybe not, probably the authors of such things are just better writers.)

I have never met a less sentimental creature

Anyway, I won’t waffle on too long here, because I was pulled up for that at a family party on Saturday evening (by the two nice people who actually seem to read this, everyone else said, oh, has your book got a title? we didn’t know that!) but I thought perhaps some of you might be interested in the process.

I like to see my proofs in physical form, because I find it hard to focus quite as hard on a screen, and also, because paper doesn’t have other tempting tabs to distract me. I suspect I’m a dying breed in this; I was speaking to my friend Caroline Eden over the weekend (who has a book out soon too, Green Mountains, which I know will be brilliant because it follows Black Sea and Red Sands, both of which were just superb and won heaps of awards) and she says she now prefers to do it on screen, because you can search the text. I admit this is a useful function to find out how many times you’ve called something lovely (27 currently), but until it also flags up lovelies in proximity to one another, it’s not enough to sway me.

Anyway, I like to sit somewhere quite dark (bed is ideal, especially at 7am) with my print outs, and a cup of tea, and the dog, and go through it with a Kings and Queens of England ruler (rather than one of those see-through ones) and a pencil, to the sound of Spotify’s Heavy Rain (10+ hours) soundtrack. Or a blizzard one, I’m not fussy. Just something that makes me think I don’t want to be outside. Then, of course, I have to input all the marks into a PDF, because it’s 2025 not 2005, and sometimes the PDF doesn’t save and I have to do it all again, and I wish it were 1995 and I could just send the corrected proofs back by bicycle courier, but we can’t have everything, and if it were 1995 I’d still have some very bad haircuts to come.

“ooh, that colour really doesn’t suit you,” as my housemistress (nb not Eleanor Roosevelt) brutally, but not unfairly observed after my friend did this to me. Didn’t stop me rocking an amazingly cool FCUK t-shirt on my politics A-Level school trip though did it

But! Having done that, I’ll read it all the way through, out loud, to try and catch any final errors – this is hard on the voice, but worthwhile in my opinion, so much easier to catch repetition etc – and then I’ll send it back, and then I’m not sure if I’ll se it again until it’s AN ACTUAL BOUND BOOK!

Pre-order link here, just in case you thought I’d forgotten (I did)