‘First Pass Proofing’, in fact, for The Gathering of the Lost—which is the time when I get to have my final look at the manuscript, hunting for errors, from typos and missing punctuation, missing words etc, through to the final chance to plug any continuity or character errors that may still be lurking in the manuscript.

As always, the turnaround timeframe is incredibly tight, hence the shortness of this post as I focus on staying ‘head down and tail up.’  I am also concentrating on not letting the quest for the perfect end product become the enemy of what is already good—always a sound principle at this stage of a project.

And overall, I have to say that there is a lot here that is good. The Gathering of the Lost story is definitely rocking along. (Happiness! 🙂 )

But first pass proofing is also a process of considerable trepidation, because despite this electronic age, proofing is still done by hand, in coloured pencil, onto a single-spaced manuscript—which gives a whole new dimension to the phrase “reading between the lines.”

Especially, dear readers, when what has to be read and made sense of from between those lines is my handwriting, which once famously gave rise to the query: “is that handwriting, or did a cockroach just run through the inkwell and all over the page?” 😉

So in fact, we’re talking about considerable trepidation here, on my part anyway, as to what the end result will be!

But there you have it, a brief soliloquy on the vagaries of proofing—to which, right now, I had best return else I shall not make that oh-so-tight deadline!