Thursday, August 9, 2007

HEALING WATER PAGEPROOFS

I’m reading pageproofs of my new historical novel, HEALING WATER,(Spring ’08). It starts like this.
1
Ma`i Ho`oka`awale
[THE SEPARATING SICKNESS]


The sheriff led us like criminals through the streets of Honolulu. A deputy walked beside me. I heard the squish of mud beneath his boots and I saw his large shape from the corner of my eye. But I did not look up.

My mother would be somewhere in the crowd. And my little sister, Kimi, and Kamaka’s mother, and Tutu, his grandmother.

This time, surely Kamaka himself would be there.

I was desperate to see them all. But shame kept my eyes on the ground. I could not bear to see the grief and pity on their faces.

It didn’t matter whether the people who watched us knew my name or the names of the other unfortunates with me. They still reached out with hands of compassion.

But the deputies pushed them back. “Don’t touch!” they snapped.

Did the officials know how long it had been since anyone had touched me?

Okay well, obviously I can’t type 217 pages in my blog so why not stop there?

Rereading it can be difficult enough. I wasn’t looking forward to another pass through. The last time we went through it with the copyeditor was downright painful. All that last minute tweaking, and perfecting, and fiddling with words when I was in the midst of another more exciting project -UGH!

At the time I was so sick of the whole thing I had the feeling like no one would even want to read this book.

But I’m over that now. This week, when I got the latest version via email I promptly printed it out and began to read aloud. And now I like it again. Such a relief!

This “last” reading assumes that we’ve made the right word choices, eliminated any redundancies, and resolved any problems regarding widows or other placement issues. (Widows are partial lines at the top of a page when the chapter comes to an end.)

This time we're looking for the teensy weensiest of details – missing quotations marks, extra spaces, and typos in general. Which is why I’ll be handing it off to my eagle eyed sister as soon as I’m finished with it.

(She caught the only typo in BLUE.)

I sure hope she can help me catch any missing macrons and okinas in those Hawaiian words!

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing that little taste of Healing Waters! I look forward to reading. Its awesome to have sisters who are really friends and can help us out with little details.

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  2. Yes, and also nice to have friends who tell you how to set up your blogspot. I got your message notification via email! Thanks! It really was simple.

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