Proofing and Public Speaking

By Johnny D. Boggs

Yesterday was one of those days I dread.

First, I had to get the final proof of a forthcoming novel for Kensington titled Longhorns East – shameless self-promotion – back to the production manager.

That’s never fun. Well, it’s fun to know that you’ll have a book coming out – in September – but that also leads to all sorts of stress.

Did I hit my goal? … Am I catching everything that needs fixing? … Does it read the way I want it to read. … Bigger question: Will anybody actually want to read this? I mean, it’s about a cattle drive to New York City and it opens in 1840 England! … It’s also my first original trade paperback. If the sales aren’t there, that’s when novelists get dropped.

There’s no job security in this business.

And you never know what the reading public will like and buy.

For me, the deadline for final corrections is more nerve-racking than the deadline for filing the manuscript. I’m confident that copy editors and main editors will catch the silly mistakes, question the parts that need questioning, offer erudite suggestions (or orders) and turn what I’ve written into something better.

But once I send in the final fixes, it’s all over but the worrying.

And then there was the rest of the day.

I had to give a talk for the Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library on the newest nonfiction book, American Newspaper Journalists on Film: Portrayals of the Press During the Sound Era (McFarland), at the Santa Fe Woman’s Club.

I know. It’s not that big of a deal. And I speak in public often. Have for decades. I’ve acted in theater (still waiting for some company to announce auditions for Mary Chase’s Harvey (Elwood P. Dowd or any part!), Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind (the Reverend Jeremiah Brown) or Sam Shepard’s True West (either brother, but I’ll do the producer, too). I’ve been a talking head on documentary television shows. I get interviewed by newspaper reporters and magazine writers fairly often.

Besides, this is a library fundraiser, and I’ll do anything to help libraries. But then, paranoid as most authors are, I worry about trivial things like How Many People Will Show Up (maybe more this time, since they serve alcohol) … What Kinds Of Questions Will They Ask? … And I have to give a talk. Keep them entertained. Remember not to say anything that will turn them off. But what if they don’t laugh at my jokes?

High pressure. Maybe even more pressure than writing a Western novel that opens in England and focuses on a pre-Civil War cattle drive from Texas to New York City.

It’s a lot less stressful sitting in a room all day just typing ... with nothing to disturb you but doggies that demand attention and spam telephone calls that interrupt your train of thought.

But – and I tell every beginning author this when I’m speaking to beginning authors (which I have to do March 26 for New Mexico Writers):

It’s part of the job.

Wreck Bay moves one step closer

 Good morning! I'm late with this post for three reasons. First, because things have been a little crazy here in Ottawa and I've been distracted by news and social media for days as my city's occupation continues, the prime minister invokes the Emergencies Act (despite all the hand-wringing from civil libertarians, a much tamer tool than its predecessor the War Measures Act), our police chief is forced to resign, and the area around our venerable Parliament buildings has been turned into a giant trailer park party. Picture this scene clogged with idling, forty-ton big rigs.

Secondly, because my beloved dog Eva, on whom my fictional dog Kaylee is based, has fallen seriously ill, but that's not a subject for a blog post.

And lastly, because in the midst of this chaos, I've been racing to finish the final draft of my latest Amanda Doucette mystery before the submission deadline, which was yesterday, February 15. I am a few hours late, but it's done! And that's what I want to write about today. 

Now the in-house editorial process begins, which grinds exceedingly slow. The release date has been pushed back from this fall, and now lands with a thud into the middle of post-holiday January 2023. Ugh. In a recent post, I mentioned that the publisher's marketing department didn't like my chosen title THERE BUT FOR FORTUNE, the title of a 60s protest song and very apt for the story. I have now come up with another one, which has passed the test. WRECK BAY.

So tadah!! Announcing the title of my forthcoming fifth book in the Amanda Doucette series. WRECK BAY! I am not unhappy with the title, which refers in the book to the hippie commune set up at the edge of Long Beach near Tofino on Vancouver Island. It has a nice ring to it and, with its multiple layers of meaning, will suit the story well enough. 

So onward. I expect the usual to-and-fro between me and the editor, in which aspects are expanded, clarified, and polished. I like this part of the process, provided the editor likes the basic story to begin with. In the past, I've usually had very few major editorial quibbles and the small ones are easily resolved. Editors generally have not asked for major shifts in the storyline (like "I hate the ending"). Having an open mind and a supportive, perhaps even enthusiastic attitude from the editor makes this an opportunity to make a good story great.

In my last book, I did have a peculiar experience with an overly enthusiastic proofreader. These are the people who don't change the story substantially but pick apart the exact choice of words, grammatical structures, even commas (the bane of every writer's existence). Copy-editors and proofreaders have to be detail people– one might even say micromanagers– by nature. and for a big-picture person like myself, they can be frustrating. But I want it to be ungrammatical! That's how this character thinks!

During the last proofreading exercise, I learned something new. Apparently the newest stye guidelines discourage the use of foods to describe features or traits of the characters. Gone are "coffee-coloured skin" and "chocolate brown eyes". I did briefly wonder - what do they want "mud-coloured"? Foods conjure up vivid sensory impressions, both delicious and unpleasant, beyond the colour. Chocolate is a whole lot more appealing than mud. And what about the adjectives that are both food and colour, like honey, caramel, orange, etc?

If I recall, the new guidelines were because such adjectives were often used for characters of colour and might be subtly demeaning in some way. For over twenty years, I've been describing Green's wife (white, although Jewish) wife as having chocolate brown eyes. Similarly, I think white as well as ugly when I read "he had a face like lumpy dough" or cauliflower ears. 

Regardless, in this book I have tried to avoid all food unless it's on a plate. Fortunately there are a lot of words in the English language. What are your thoughts both as reader and writer? Writers, is this a new thing?

Edits and markets and bloggers, oh my!

Barbara here. This week I am well on my way to the publication of my next novel, the first in the Amanda Doucette series, entitled FIRE IN THE STARS.  Monday I sent the proofs back to my editor after spending a week combing through them trying to third-guess my second-guessing brain. Research has shown that when you read, you see what you expect to see–what makes grammatical sense or what you think is there. Once you've written and rewritten/ reread your precious work-in-progress a dozen times, you can practically recite it from memory, and in a sense, your brain does. It jumps ahead from word to word, barely noticing the transposed letters, the missing word, and the wrong character's name. Quite simply, the brain puts it to rights for you.

Authors try to outwit the second-guessing brain by reading aloud or reading backwards, but I find the former too tedious and the latter too arduous when the manuscript is over ninety-thousand words long. Other authors rely on their rushed, distracted copyeditor to catch it all. An ill-advised approach, trust me. Still others get their spouse or friends to read it. Every fresh eye helps. I tend to read as slowly as I can without falling asleep, and hope for the best.

This time around, I made a few content changes in the proofs, which my editor will no doubt wince at, because at this stage, the book is already laid out and any changes mess up the layout. I found very few actual copy errors in the proofs, but whether my second-guessing brain outwitted me or not, only time will tell, when readers begin to send in their comments. "Loved your book, but just so you know, for second printing, on page..."

So now the manuscript is in the production line, the cover is finalized, and the cover copy all set up. In a month or two, the advanced reader copies will begin rolling off the printing press. And that brings me to the job on my plate for yesterday. Back to writing, you might think. You'd be wrong. The first few chapters in the second Amanda Doucette novel, entitled THE TRICKSTER'S LULLABY, are sitting in a scribbled heap on the coffee table beside my feet, but I haven't been able to get to them for over a week. First, those proofs, and yesterday, the publisher's marketing document. My publisher calls this the Author's Grid, and it's an Excel document (I have a headache already) containing all the marketing information that might be relevant to the novel. Media contacts I've made, bookstore and reviewer contacts, conferences and events I plan to attend, suggested search keywords for the novel, even the names of my federal and provincial members of parliament! Do you think they can help?

This grid serves as a partial stepping stone for the publisher's marketing plan. They have their own grid, I assume, and there is likely overlap, but in this brave new book biz world, increasingly it is the author's individual connections and networking that help to spread the word. The publisher will send out numerous ARCs to the major review sites both in Canada and the US, but  the number of reviews in major print newspapers is shrinking daily. Papers devote entire sections to the latest trends in automobiles and real estate, but reviews of the arts manage at best a page or two, much of it syndicated rather than local. But that's a rant for another time.

Nowadays, publishers, authors, and readers rely increasingly on online reviews, whether on Goodreads and Amazon or on dedicated book review blogs.  Although in theory, anyone can design a wordpress page, claim to be a book reviewer, and request review copies, there are some well respected book reviewers who provide informed and objective reviews and whose opinions carry great weight in the book world. This is where the author's connections become invaluable. Word of mouth, networking with other authors, and attendance at conferences all help us learn who might be interested in our work.

Media and bookstore contacts are another area where the author's personal experience is important. Every time I do an event in a store, I make a personal connection with that bookseller which helps when my next book appears in their catalogue, or even better, when my publisher sends them an ARC.

Some authors are wonderfully organized about keeping track. Names and addresses of contacts, websites, blogs, and so on–all in a neat little file. I am not. I tend to rely on my increasingly fuzzy memory, and hence there I was yesterday, staring at the blank Excel spreadsheet of my Author Grid, trying to remember what bloggers I've met, who might be interested in hearing about my new book, who have I talked to in radio or TV. It's a job that took much of the day, while my dogs waited with increasing impatience for their walk. But it's done now, and sent off. Back to the grand, creative life of a writer!

Except that now I have remembered two radio interviewers whom I forgot to put on the list. And there are surely other book people inadvertently missed or as yet unknown. So if you are a mystery blogger or a bookseller interested in an ARC, please drop me a note and I'll add you to the grid.

A change of scene

Well, I’m finally in the home stretch of completing the new novella, basically in the someone-needs-to-pry-this-from-his-fingers stage. It’s been a tough slog even though the number of words used are pretty small. It’s tough when you have two other jobs that require your full-time attention, but that’s not a complaint — just a statement of reality.

Today we have to travel to the eastern end of our province for a memorial service for a very dear friend whose 75th birthday would have been today. I’m going to use the car trip to take one last, long gulp at my ms before sending it off to my editor late tomorrow. I want it on her desk first thing Wednesday morning.

I’m hoping the change of scene from my cramped studio will help me see my prose with refreshed eyes. I’ve often had great success doing my last look this way.

The drive is only 4+ hours. I’m lucky this is a novella. Otherwise, I’d probably have to force my wife to drive to California while I work!