What I Learned from my Proofreader

I was naive last week. Naive to think that getting my book back from my proofreader would be easy. That I would just make the changes in a couple of days and whooosh, I’d be off to sending query letters. Yeah, that didn’t happen. Maybe it could’ve happened if I just pressed “accept all changes,” did a cursory clean-up, and considered myself done. But nooo, I wanted to learn from my mistakes. Oy vey!

Suffice it to say, I’m not getting to query letters this week as I’d hoped. This is a bit of a downer, but hopefully for all the right reasons. I am learning a ton from going through the proofreading (I’ll get to lessons learned in a second) and I’m really glad I had her do track-changes so I could see every last fix. 

I am also glad to say that through sheer brute force, I have cleaned up every track change she sent me. This means that after pouring through my book line by line in microscopic detail, I must now also step back and look at the big picture one last time and take time to re-read it. I started the re-reading process yesterday (out loud, as many people have suggested, which is such a good idea for editing but takes forever) and it’s been invaluable. For example, in one dinner scene my editor and I have both missed that the main character Will hands Molly a beer, and then a couple pages later hands her the beer again. Yep, re-reads are worth it. But, thankfully, there have been relatively few glaring moments like that and mostly the re-reads are re-affirming my belief in my book. It’s actually a damn good read.

So yes, thank you for your support of me sending out query letters. I’m fully anticipating I’ll be able to send that blog post out next week instead. Fingers crossed agents will be receiving letters soon!

For now, I thought I’d share the top things I’ve learned from going through the proofreader’s work.

• I need to learn more about commas. Sometimes I use too many, sometimes I use to few. I need to learn when to use them for pacing and when to use them just because they are grammatically necessary to use. I’d say at least 50% of my changes were comma related. 
• I’m inconsistent with single quotes and double quotes. For example, when a character is thinking something, I often put their thoughts (within the paragraph) in single quotes. But other times I put them in double quotes. Whatever I choose, consistency matters
• Aligned with quotes, I need to pay more attention to when I am capitalizing a sentence during dialogue (before and/or after quote marks) and when I’m not
• I need to better understand the nuanced difference between a dash (-) and an ellipse (...) within a paragraph
• Overall I need to be consistent with capitalization. If I say the Cube, I can’t also say The Cube. 
• I use ‘that’ instead of ‘who’ in sentences sometimes. People are people, people!
• I need to spell out numbers when they are within dialogue. I’ve usually gone by the rule that if it’s over the number nine, you can use the number, but apparently in dialogue you are always supposed to spell it out
• Finally I’ll say that I usually emphasize words but putting them in ALL CAPS when I really should be italicizing them instead. Duly noted.  

So yes, it’s been a long week. My eyes are kind of googly and I want to be done, but I have to remind myself that this is the good stuff. This is polishing the finished product. This is getting close to the finish line of this leg of the triathlon. And this is me bettering myself. So, yes, I’m glad to be here. And I’ve learned a lot.