That Time of Year

The Have-Read, To-Be-Read, and Am-Reading piles

Each spring I write (ever briefly) about the annual two-week stretch where the world stops and I make final edits to the novel coming out in June.

It's that time again. The proof pages to my June novel Fallen Sparrow arrived this week.

Some people love this stage of publication – you haven't looked at the manuscript in months, you can read it as a reader might, (hopefully) genuinely enjoying the book upon arriving at it with fresh eyes. Not me. I sit under a desk lamp, as if beneath an interrogation light, and sweat out every punctuation mark, slowly combing through the pages, hoping and praying that the plot holds up, that I don’t find a typo (which, of course, is unrealistic), and that I genuinely like the book while reading it as a reader might, but knowing all the while that, as my extraordinary editor reminds me in her letter, This is the last opportunity…

Happy reading. See you in two weeks.