It's always nice to begin with some good news. On Tuesday I received three boxes filled with about 60 books, restocking a few titles that I was running low on but also the second proof for THE AIR ACE PICTURE LIBRARY COMPANION, which is now being re-read yet again. I've also called upon the services of a second pair of eyes to make sure I haven't made any particularly egregious gaffs.
Proofing is a necessary evil. I'm not a fan... I'd rather get on with something new, but I also know I make a lot of mistakes. Not factual—I put a lot of time into research and double-checking facts wherever possible, but that can lead to glitches in the text. A lot of writers will belt out a first draft as ideas bubble up and, once that's written, will go back and revise. For the most part I revise as I go along, as I find new information or correct things that turn out to be wrong. I've been writing a lot of biographical sketches lately and nailing down dates is always a nightmare, especially on foreign strips which may have been published across Europe and South America at various times under various titles. I found myself constantly moving chunks of text around.
Similarly working on the introductions for the new book, I was constantly moving information around to make it flow better and tell the story more clearly. This can be as simple as altering a couple of sentences, shifting a couple of paragraphs to an earlier or later place in the narrative, or cutting out a whole section and reworking it for elsewhere in the book.
What this means is that, once I'm finished, I only rarely need to make any changes. I'll tinker with the text, but once it's done it's done. But it's vital to proof carefully because moving text around can lead to unexpected problems. A particular bugbear with writing about comics is describing what people do: they work, they illustrate, they paint, they draw... remove text and you can find that now you have adjoining sentences using the same word or phrase, and you don't want to describe someone as "illustrating an illustration" or say "he drew" followed by "he then drew" and "later he drew"—it might be factually right, but it reads like an unfortunate stutter on paper.
Proofing for me usually consists of weeding out these little artifacts left by shifting things around or adding / changing details as I come upon them. And typos. For a writer, my spelling isn't always what it should be. And I know what I meant to write, so I don't always see what I actually wrote. That's why a second set of eyes is necessary when it comes to proofing.
Getting this book and the fourth volume of MYTEK THE MIGHTY sorted has meant that my work on the ACTION INDEX has been a bit stop-start, although I have now got a list of the contents of the Summer Specials and Annuals sorted and I've scanned a whole bunch of covers. The next step is to read some of the later stories that I didn't read at the time as I was one of the readers who deserted the comic when it returned to the newsstands after a two month gap in publication. You could instantly tell that something had happened and the stories were somehow less Action and more tale-end Valiant (which I had also given up on a year or two earlier). Anyway, that's a whole other story... which I'm sure will be told when I get the ACTION INDEX into publishable form.
My trip to Specsavers to see if I needed new glasses was last week's cliffhanger. Well, the (more) good news is that my prescription has barely changed, so my old glasses will do me for another two years. Phew! That money is better spent on books. As there is no Paperback & Pulp Book Fair this month, I've treated myself to a bit of retail therapy and bought a few odds and ends that I've spotted on Ebay and some polypropylene bags to put them in. I'll have to wait until next year before I can get bags that will fit digest-sized paperbacks, but I can get started cleaning some of my older paperbacks, doing little bits of repair work to stop them disintegrating, and bag them up to keep them safe—something I've been meaning to do for years but never gotten around to.
Time to get back to the grindstone...
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