This afternoon I was on the phone with my friend the minister, hearing about her latest fling, when the doorbell rang.  I opened it to see a UPS package.  Inside were the 400+ pages of my book!

It’s really amazing to see each step of the book as it starts to look like, well, a book.

Until now all I’ve seen are manuscript pages, which are double-spaced text pages printed out of Microsoft Word or somesuch.  They don’t look any different from anything else you might print.

Page proofs are different.  They are pretty.  They are designed, numbered, laid out, justified, font-ed, etc., as actual book pages.  They ARE gonna be an actual book.  Whoa…

This is the last time I get to read the book before it goes to press.  I have a week and a half to go through it and make corrections.  Meanwhile a professional proofreader is also reading the proofs for typos, and someone is creating the book’s index from these proofs.

If you click on the fuzzy weird picture above you *might* be able to see the scanned title page… uncorrected… squeeee!  …  yes this is what passes for fun for a book geek like me! 🙂