I’m in the final stages of preparing The City Between the Books and The Bridge People – two short(ish) stories that will be published jointly as an eBook in November (you can see the front cover in my previous post) – meaning that I’ve hit the most anxiety inducing stage: the final proofreads.

Over the next while I’ll be making sure that all the typos are picked up, there are no rouge elephants (as once appeared in a draft of a friend’s history book, and is still my favourite typo) and that it at least appears that I have some rudimentary understanding of the English language.

It’s not about content at the moment, it’s about finding the stupid mistakes. The ones that are honest typos, but which my mind insists that if a reader discovered them would mark me as an idiot to them.

Of course there will be some. At least one always gets through. Even writing that has had a dozen or more people scouring it to make sure it’s perfect will have the odd typo in it. It’s the way of things. They’re sneaky those typos, able to camouflage themselves amongst properly spelt words and correctly placed punctuation.

And that’s just the typos.

There’s always the risk when you’re doing the proofreads to second guess yourself, to start thinking that you should have written things a different way.

Sometimes, maybe, those thoughts are worthwhile. The second guess may actually be better. But most times – at a point when you’ve read it over and over, and others have too, and that sequence on page 17 was perfectly good all of those times before – it really is just anxiety and just needs to be sent to sit in a corner.

Yes, the next few weeks are going to be, well…yeah.

I’ll see you on the other side with a brand new something for you to read.