July 4 - 7, all sortsa shit (Patreon)

Last week I got the comic done and did shipping and there were things that I wanted to write about but now it's this week and who even knows what those might have been. 

Oh yeah! 

I had declared the book design done done diggity done and the file had been sent off to the printer and they were preparing a dummy copy of the book for me. That same day, merely by chance, I was all "Hey Lucy, wanna skim through the PDF?" because she just happened to be walking behind me at that moment and when we got to the section with her guest comic she pointed out that pages were not, it turns out, in order. In fact, they were decidedly OUT of order. 

Oh shit. 

Fortunately, the dummy copy the printer is preparing is completely blank, it's just to show me exactly how my book will feel and look EXCLUDING any images (so I can evaluate the paper weight and how the cover's French Flaps will look in real life, that sorta thing), which buys the designer and me some time to fix up those out-of-order pages. 

But this revelation put the fear of god in me and --ok, ok, I shoulda done this already, I know, I know, don't rub it in-- I realized that I really need to print out the entire 268 page document and read every single line on every single page, cover-to-cover. I don't know, when you've gone over all these pages for as long as I have, they all kinda blend together, it's hard to notice what's wrong any more. BUT that's no excuse. I'd been focused solely on looking over the ~*design*~ of the book's content that I'd neglected to re-visit the content itself. 

Matt and I laid down on the floor and went through the entire goddamn thing in one evening. I counted eight missed typos (some of them more egregious than others) and one misplaced gradient on a leg. Then Lucy (you may remember her from earlier in this story) selflessly volunteered to be a second (third) set of eyes and reviewed the pages over the weekend. 

She found... significantly more typos than I did. Also, we have very different opinions of when and how one uses a hyphen, it turns out (I am 100% positive hers is the correct way, but I've been misusing my hyphens consistently for decades, it's too late for me to attempt to change that now) 

Today I trimmed down her list of corrections to just the typos, dropped words, a FEW of her suggested hyphen changes (should that have been "hyphen-changes"? I just don't even know any more), and even a couple alternate word suggestions-- which, combined with my own notes, amounted to 39 requested corrections that I sent on to the designer. 

But hey, once the designer finished those 3.25 dozen little changes, the insides of the book will FOR REALSIES be done done diggity done and then I can send it on to the printer!