News has been pretty thin on the ground this week. I’ve been busy doing what I call the Galley Proofs on the next Ali Reynolds book, Smoke and Mirrors. ‘Galley Proofs’ is a term that sticks in my head from my senior year of high school when Pat McAdams Hall, my best friend from fourth grade, and I, were co-editors of the school newspaper, the Copper Chronicle. The paper was published once a month. Once the articles were written, edited, and sent to the printer, it was our job to organize the pages and send them back to the printer at Bisbee’s Brewery Gulch Gazette, (Yes, there was an actual brewery on that street back in the older old days. Clearly, at this point the 1960s are the “old’ days.

Then on the night before the actual printing, Pat and I had to go to the printshop and peruse a paper copy checking to see if there were any remaining goofs. Somehow, in our November issue, we failed to notice or fix a place in our joint column where we referred the Thanksgiving turkey as being ‘born’ rather than ‘hatched.’

These days New York publishers use some other term, one which definitely doesn’t stick in my head, but it means the same thing—editing the copy-edited manuscript after it has been formatted and typeset in the way it will appear in the actual book.

This is not a time to do a complete rewrite. It’s one last chance to check and fix typos and echoes. I’m sure everyone knows what typos are. Echoes are repeating the same word or phrase in close proximity. I happen to be someone who does a lot of those. After all, if it sounded right the first time, why not use it again? In my last copyediting go down, not with this publisher, the copyeditor was so busy readjusting my characters’ names that I caught way more echoes than she did.

But with that bad taste still in my mouth from a month or so ago, I was dreading this one, especially since, for some reason, Smoke and Mirrors was a really challenging book to write and took far longer than expected. So I was surprised when the book moved smoothly along, shifting seamlessly from one character and location to another.

In order to facilitate that, each chapter is time stamped at the beginning with the location, date, and time of day displayed in bold print directly under the chapter designation. But here’s the rub. I’d be reading along in the text itself when, wherever the term A.M. appeared, it was a bold print, A.M., thus making it look like A.M. was most important word on the page, which it wasn’t. Then, later in the book, when the term P.M. appeared, it wasn’t in bold at all.

Prior to that, I had circled and complained about all those offensive, bold-faced A.M.’s, because I felt they were disruptive, but I hadn’t done anything about them. But then, when I saw that one plain-Jane P.M., I hit the wall. I couldn’t do a global search and replace because there were a lot of bold A.M.s in the chapter headings. Instead I had to do a search-and-destroy scroll through the entire manuscript. Fortunately I had circled all of them in red, so they weren’t that difficult to find.

All that being said, I’m sure a couple of sneaky typos are still lurking in there, and I expect my faithful SERs—Sharp-Eyed Readers—will weigh in on those.

Late last night, I sent the Galley Proofed manuscript for Smoke and Mirrors back to New York, ten days before the deadline. Now it’s time to go back to Unnamed Joanna #22. There’s a timing tangle at the beginning of the book, and I think I’ve finally figured out how to fix it.