Behold! The proofs!

Mixed emotions as the first proofs of my literary almanac arrive

The Book Lover’s Almanac: In shops soon. Hopefully.

All jobs have highs and lows and swings and roundabouts, and writers are certainly no different. Nobody likes being told their idea isn’t going to sell any books or receiving a tweet from a reader that their latest title stinks. Everybody likes publication day and emails from people they’ve never met who enjoyed their work. For me, the arrival of the first layouts of a book manages to combine both the best of times and the worst of times.

My first reaction is very much like the start of Ralph Vaughan William’s A Sea Symphony. The text for this comes from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. “Behold, the sea itself,” it starts, and continues:

“And on its limitless, heaving breast, the ships;
See, where their white sails, bellying in the wind, speckle the green and blue,
See, the steamers coming and going, steaming in or out of port,
See, dusky and undulating, the long pennants of smoke.”

This is very much how I feel. All those months (years?) of hard work, pitching, researching, drafting, rewriting, are finally revealed in all their wondrous majesty, bellying in the wind not in my slighty badly formatted Word document, but on virtual pages with shiny images selected by an expert with a far better eye for what works on the page than me. A quick whizz through and it looks great, colourful, intriguing, and (let’s be honest) just the exact right amount of dry wit. And, yes, there is my name on it, giving my ego a nice bounce. Three cheers for me!

Word Perfect: Um…

At this stage I’m just looking at the images to make sure I’m happy with them and nothing weird has accidentally crept in. I’m also giving it a very quick once over that it’s also the right text. This is not as uncommon as you might expect. When bestselling lexicographer Susie Dent received the first printing of her book Word Perfect (a “brilliant linguistic almanac” said her publisher John Murray), she was horrified that said publisher had mistakenly used an early version of the text rather than her corrected later one. Susie described herself as “gutted” and told The Times: “I just opened it up and saw there was something wrong in the acknowledgments. And then I had to close it because I felt a bit sick. There are quite a few errors. I haven’t counted them and I don’t really want to.” Even just thinking about this story gives me slight pins and needles.

What I don’t need to do right this second is look through it with my fine tooth comb. That will come later down the line. So really, this is not a long or difficult job. Indeed, it’s quite an enjoyable one since I’m seeing all these images for the first time. Of course I’ve discussed with the publisher what kind of thing might work well, but not the specifics. It’s all fresh, all steamers coming and going, dusky and undulating.

And this is where the emotions start to get mixed because I know that the next time I see this, when it comes back to me with a few alterations - pictures swapped in, page numbers added, index finished, and so on - I will have to look through it very carefully indeed. Obviously this is part of the job description. It’s not as easy as simply sitting down at the typewriter, bashing away for a few months, then swanning off to the French Riviera while my underlings get my words of genius bookshop-ready.

But still, I don’t like it. At the start of each book, I’m hugely enthusiastic. I enjoy the research and the writing process, even when it sometimes gets a bit sticky or hits something of a dead end. I enjoy the second draft rather less, and further drafts even more rather less. Simply going over the material again and again rather drains my delight in it and the more it goes on the more I start to question how good it is. A joke that’s funny first time round is hard to evaluate the fifth time you’ve looked at it. Is that charming little anecdote about Oscar Wilde actually just a bit of a literary cliché? Does anybody really want to read three sonnets of dubious quality about the Nile one after another? I’m hoping that they do. By the end of the process I’m glad to see the back of it.

And then there’s a fairly long period when the publisher makes sure I’ve done what I said I was going to do and that they’re happy with it (and most importantly cough up the next slice of my advance money). During this time, no longer faced with the manuscript on a daily basis, I start to recover that initial love of the work. But then the proofs come back and not only do I have to look at the text this time, I have to examine it for mistakes which is not my idea of fun. Of course somebody else has already done this and my thanks for assiduous editors are always heartfelt, but still it’s my responsibility to make sure nothing rong gets through. Once I’ve done this, then had a final check, I really am sick and tired of the whole thing.

And then there’s a fairly long period before it actually ends up on my doorstep and in the shops several months later. At that point, when it’s more ladders than snakes and not so much Stuck-in-the-mud, the game feels worth the playing.