Well, I didn’t intend to stop posting as soon as the Holidailies challenge ended, but page proofs arrived last week, and I’ve been head-down working through those.

Actually, there was a bit of a challenge involved with the proofs. I’d been informed that I should be expecting them to arrive last Thursday. Well, Thursday came and went, and no proofs. I figured that maybe there was some sort of delay with sending them, and I wouldn’t start to worry until Friday afternoon. Friday morning the doorbell rang, and Fedex delivered to me a box.

A large-ish box, actually. The 12×12x12 variety. My first thought was that maybe it was ARCS or something, except that I’d very recently asked my editor’s assistant about those and he’d informed me that I shouldn’t expect those for a couple of months yet. Plus, the box seemed a bit too light to be full of books. Also, the return address on the mailing label did not say Random House. Instead it merely had the address of the FedEx facility in Memphis.

I opened the box and saw this:

Beneath the mangled envelope was this:

What you can’t really see in the above picture is that the pages were quite damp. Oh, and it was also only the first 226 pages of the book. Moreover, beneath the stuff that was actually intended for me, was yet another envelope portion that was addressed to someone who was Not Me, and beneath that was a 3-inch stack of wet/damp paper that was apparently all sorts of sales information for the Random House Children’s Division.

Needless to say, I made a quick phone call to my editor’s assistant. He was accomodating and apologetic (even though he didn’t have anything to be apologetic for. This was a Fed-Ex screwup, I’m sure) and FedExed a new and dry copy of my proofs out to me. I, in turn, FedExed the stuff that was not mine back to them, so that they could figure out who was supposed to get it.

Still, even damp, it was very cool to see my book beginning to look like a book!

And here’s the dry version of the same. :)

Maybe this is what happened to the first set of proofs?