Gaia Wild Inching Toward Publication
So I was up til 11:30 last night reading through the second page proofs of Gaia Wild. This is the stage where we’re not reading for content any more, but for mistakes — typos, dropped words, extra words, changes from the last round that have been missed, dropped folios, chapter-page number correlations … that sort of thing.
By the time the author is looking at second pages, changes should be minimal to nil. This is generally the last time an author sees his or her book. The publisher will then go through a couple more revisions in-house, correcting the minutiae. But as far as the author is concerned, this is it.
HOWEVER … that wasn’t the case last night. What I found were numerous “introduced errors” — mistakes made by a [probably exhausted, deadline-rushed] typesetter in the process of inputting the corrections from round one.
So it looks like we’ll go to round three. Sigh. It feels to me as though this book has been a long time coming — it was part of my original series proposal in the fall of 2003. So it’s been a five-year gestation period. Even elephants don’t carry their pregnancies that long–about 22 months, whereas this will be 60!
Funny though, it’s always worth all the work and struggle and mess-ups, all the detours and stalls and delays.
Sigh. Did I say that already? Sigh.
I WANT MY GAIA WILD!