Galleys and other things The Henge Betrayed Refuge

On Tuesday the galley of Refuge arrived for a read through. Such an exciting feeling, and though I've published a number of books, seeing another child into the world brings sort of chills. But that's not what I want to talk about.

During the read throughs I found some typos, not the real ones where the fingers mix up the letters of a word and because all the letters are there, you see the word you think was there, but the kind the eye flows over. Form instead of from. A letter in the character's name Bram instead of Bran. Fortunately there weren't too many but it meant a line by line read of the novel and took an entire day to read the entire manuscript. My way of doing this is to print out the pages and use a ruler to isolate each line. Hopefully this keeps me from becoming too involved in reading the story. Several times there were places where I wanted to change the wording. I wonder if other writers think about their works and see places where the writing could be improved.

Perfection in writing can't be obtained. There's always something one would change.

The arrival of the galleys brought another reward. My grandson has been waiting for two plus years for this book. He's read the first one in the series twice. He wants to see all the books because he wants to create a computer game using the characters and story as the basis.

How do you feel when you receive the galley of a book? I think mine are mixed. Excitement plus a bit of stress because I need to finish the fourth one in the series.