I flinch every time I think about doing it. I drag my feet worse than a kid going to the dentist. Yet I know I must do it. I must ask someone to proofread what I write. No one writes well enough to not need a copy editor. No one reads well enough to catch every mistake in a manuscript.
So, no matter how I felt about it, last year I took a draft of my book of selected columns to my daughter, the English teacher. In the evening after putting her children in bed, she grabbed her red pen and began slashing her way through the pages. She noted duplications, misspelled words, lost commas or run-on sentences. She read columns she had missed or forgotten. She scribbled me notes on ones that amused or touched her. She said she knew exactly which of her five brothers I described in a column about a pokey child.
She was wrong. That is the son who I taught me the patience I needed for the one she named.
At one point her husband asked her, “Do you remember what we used to do before you started proof reading your mom’s book?”
She finished the book. I began repairing my errors and deleting duplications. I chose my title: “Twenty Gallons of Milk” and declared it ready for publication. I submitted it to the publisher.
An editor read part of the book, looked over the rest and told me it was too long for most readers. The expert suggested the book needed editing to change from the rules for newspaper style publishing to the rules used by book publishers. They offered to do it for more money than I take home in a couple of months. He suggested I might extend the title to “and other columns from the El Dorado News-Time,” write an introduction, an author’s biography and an acknowledgment.
I sighed, went to the computer and began typing.
I looked at ideas for a book cover. One idea would have involved an artist. To inspire an artist whom my daughter knew, I sent her a copy of the column ‘Twenty Gallons of Milk.’ She saw a mistake she had overlooked. She said, “Mom. you have to have the book edited again.
Hesitantly, I asked the city editor to help. She graciously read during her off hours. Reluctantly, I asked and a friend’s husband read pages between tending machines at work.
That meant I had two sets of pages with slashes and comments. My shoulders sagged at the thought of turning all those pages and fixing my errors. I set a goal of completing the chore before the spring rush of activities overwhelmed me.
The spring rush came earlier than I thought. Two-thirds of the way through making the corrections they suggested, I realized I had copied the book twice and had edited columns in both sections of the double book. I would have to do the work all over again.
Discouraged beyond belief, I closed up the boxes holding all the proofread pages and put them aside. I never wanted to see that book again. It was the middle of the summer before the rush of activities ended and I felt ready to tackle the task. I opened the box, fixed the corrections in a day or two and submitted the text for publication.
The publisher sent the prepared book for my inspection and one last opportunity to make corrections. If I had more than 50 corrections, I would have to pay an additional fee. I loved the way it looked. I asked around for one more proofreader.
A friend recommended a retired English teacher with an eagle eye. I don’t know this lively lady very well, but she says she reads published books with a correcting pencil in her hand. Cringing like a beggar, I asked for her input. She actually seemed delighted to do it. A couple weeks later when we met again she told me, “If I read a page and it did not have a red mark on it, I thought I needed to go back and re-read it.”
Page by page, I made the changes, sent the revised version back to the publisher and paid the fee. They sent me one copy of the book to proof for publisher errors.
Proud as a new mother, I opened the book and began counting, not fingers and toes, but pages.
The idea for the book began when an occasional reader would ask if I ever intended to write a book. I finally have done just that. It just took twenty years of writing columns, two years of converting all of them into a digital format and 18 months of proofreading.
Last week, the boxes of published books arrived at my house. This week, we have them for sale at the El Dorado News-Times. Finally, I am free to do something else. And I will - as soon as I remember what I used to do before I began the proofreading and editing this book.