"Pictures, man! Pictures!" -- Faye L. Booth

I admit it: I haven't posted in a week. Not only have I been proofreading, but I've been traveling at the same time.

Here I am, somewhat wiped out and thoroughly unshaven (though I don't think I'm exactly that color in real life), hugging my proofs (and the attached safety-green Post-It notes).

Eliza Graham commented that her eyes hurt when she was finished proofing. (As a side note, Amazon UK sent me an e-mail this morning letting me know that people who enjoyed Brian McGilloway's Borderlands ought to get with the program and preorder Eliza's Playing With the Moon. Nice to know that Amazon is out there pushing your title. [Of course, I preordered it already, but it's the marketing thought that counts.])

My eyes don't hurt. My brain hurts. Yet it's been fun looking at all those official-looking words, on pages cut down to book size. Indeed, I couldn't resist getting out the scissors and cutting along the trim marks to see if it really looked like the page of a book. It does. In fact, here's a photo of my page 203 slipped into Jonathan Drapes' hilarious Never Admit to Beige (right after Jonathan's page 202). (Not that my book's hilarious. At least not intentionally. Beige was just close to hand.)

Looks like a book, doesn't it?

I'd like to say that the proofing process was an unadulterated joy, but, in the Mike Barnard tradition of transparency, I'll tell the truth instead. It was a little tricky; trickier than usual, I suspect, as the partial translation from Americanese to English posed some odd problems. (More on this in a later post.)

I also discovered that the copyeditor, who in our previous exchange raised so many excellent points, has a passion for exclamation marks. Indeed, his passion for them almost rivals my own intense dislike of them; as Fitzgerald remarked, exclamation marks are like laughing at your own jokes.

I will, reluctantly, use an exclamation mark when someone is shouting, or even, well, exclaiming with sufficient force. But I found that exclamation marks had been added to almost every one-word thought or interjection in the text (especially one-word profanities, of which, I must confess, there are many).

The problem is that my characters often use these sorts of interjections in a tired, resigned, or wondering fashion, whether the dialogue is internal or external. To my mind, there is a world of difference in tone between:

Christ. It was going to be a long day.

and

Christ! It was going to be a long day.

(Indeed, when one comes to cases like "Great. More e-mail." versus "Great! More e-mail!" the exclamation mark can change the whole meaning of the passage, or render it highly ambiguous.)

Many of the characters in the book are rather tough people, and are therefore inclined to give orders in a rather flat tone rather than yelling; that is,

"Out." He gestured at the door. "Now."

reads rather differently if exclamation marks are added, and tells us something quite different about the speaker. So the profusion of excess "!" marks--about fifty added, and forty-two of them I couldn't stand--caused me to utter a number of exclamations of my own.

Editor Will Atkins, however, is apparently unflappable. He responded to my snippy, hysterical e-mail (and it takes a real wordsmith to be both snippy and hysterical at the same time) by assuring me these were all problems that could be solved, and represented the copyeditor's suggestions rather than a final draft, and that he certainly didn't want a text of which I didn't approve.

Mollified, I got back to proofing. (It occurs to me that an editor's job, working with novelists all day, must be a bit like working with preschool children all day, except that writers are allowed to stay up much later and therefore get much fussier.)

I think that after these changes are made, we will have a clean text. (Christ! I hope so!)