Proofing challenges

 Proofing a book before you send it to your publisher can be the devil and all. You know that at the other end, you've got a dev editor and copy editors waiting to get their hands on it, and you feel like you don't want to produce anything too riddled with mistakes. Of course, everyone can make mistakes. It's almost unnatural for someone not to make mistakes, even with Grammerly shouting at you from every other advertisement that they can remove all mistakes. Yeah, I tried Grammerly, and when it attempted to turn a particularly moving scene into a scientific dissection, I wasn't impressed.

There are a number of things to do when proofing. First, check that you haven't don anything silly like leaving a sentence unfinished. That's happened a few times. Once, I even forgot to complete half a paragraph. It's a little troublesome when you're doing a scan read and you get an impression like when a record or CD skips. The issue when scanning is that your mind tends to naturally fill in gaps, so unless it's a really glaring issue, your mind can smooth over it.

Second, obviously, is little problems like duplicate words or sentences, in the order of "the the" or "and and". Or, worse, spaces put in by accident and the spell checker not picking it up as the single letters have some kind of language usage. I've done it more times than I can remember, in my writing and on this blog. They can really screw up the proofing, as it it can be difficult to spot them. See what I did there? For first-person narratives, it can be especially tedious. You need to filter through the idiosyncrasies to find the actual mistakes.

Third, and most obvious, are spelling mistakes. For standard words, these aren't a biggy. If you don't pick them up as you're writing, you can pick them up later with a spellcheck, which I usually do when I've completed the first runthrough after the manuscript is complete as a narrative. But for invented names, or unusual spellings, it can be a nightmare. For instance, one of my characters has the use name "Sedna", but due to fast typing stuff I can end up typing "Senda" by mistake, which can be passed over by accident but completely throw off the reader if it isn't caught.

There's also a fourth category that's worse, but also trickier to spot on a micro level. It's plot threads you've forgotten about. I've talked about note-taking before now, but even then it can slip. If you've had something inserted in an earlier chapter that references part of the subplot or overall theme, then forget to resolve it later, it just leaves a loose thread hanging in mid-air. No reader likes that kind of thing. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth upon completing the book, even if they don't consciously register it.

Oh well, that's my feelings on the matter. It's something to do, and it's necessary people should know writing isn't just a picnic. It's real work, with challenges and brick walls and deadlines to face. But at the end of the day, for someone who really enjoys it, there's nothing like finishing that sentence and sending off the manuscript to the next stage. Nothing in the world.