Hair-Raising Page Proofs

I got the page proofs back from my publisher last week. It’s hair-raising to see a manuscript that has always been in manuscript form suddenly formatted like a book. Everything you’ve written suddenly seems so permanent.

I did the most thorough line-editing job of the manuscript that I’ve done in years. I couldn’t make myself read it on a macro level–it’s too late to do any major changes–but every spelling error I found became frightening. How many more are there? How many did we miss? And all the weird grammar stuff that I never solved. What about that? What will people think of me? OH MY GOD, MY INEPTITUDE WILL NOW BE FULLY EXPOSED.

I spent four hard days on it. Smoking. Behaving horribly towards my wife and child. Needing a vacation afterwards. ACK!

While feeling this I’m simultaneously aware of all the people out there who await this moment and how happy it will make them feel. And don’t get me wrong, there was a part of the hair-raising that involved that–WOOHOO, FINALLY HERE I AM. But I guess seeing all the pent-up power that is a book–my book–so close to release, is simply daunting.