Last week’s post was titled “On the Verge of Great Things.” This week finds us still there, teetering on the edge.

The process of proofing the book has now begun in earnest. Sarah, our Editorial Lead, divvied up the manuscript into three parts, and each section will be edited by a different person. Time is now of the essence; we have just about a week to accomplish this task, so splitting up the work will help us get it done efficiently. Doing it this way also offers another important benefit: it allows each of the editors to focus on the minutiae of the task at hand. Proofing is the very last editorial task before publication, our last opportunity to catch any typos or misplaced bits of punctuation that may have been overlooked at other stages of editing. It also allows them to catch any problems that might have occurred throughout the typecoding and design stages (though of course the goal is always to keep the manuscript error-free).

Those of us who have been working on this book for months are intimately familiar with the ebb and flow of the story. And this is a good thing: this familiarity allows us to speak about it more articulately, to see the book’s incredible potential with more clarity, and to have a better sense of what needs to be done in terms of the big picture to bring the book through to publication. In publishing, there are very few downsides to knowing a text so well. But if one is to be found, it’s that it can make you blind to some of the small details, especially the kind that need to be found during proofing. None of the editors working on the proofing are on the Wax Bullet War project team; though they may be familiar with it, they have a bit more distance from the text so that errors should jump off the page.

While our proofers are doing their thing, the rest of us on the WBW project team are still hard at work too—but you’ll have to come back next week to find out what we’re up to.

Until then,
Laurel