Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Wrestle Me (adult title) and musings about proofreading

Wrestle Me 
is a fun novella (for adult readers) by Mysty McPartland.  I am not a wrestling fan but this was an intriguing read for me because I liked the characters.  She is a snarky defensive reporter and he doesn't want to be prejudged as some dumb jock and they have excellent chemistry with each other.  The love scenes are sizzling and the description of what goes on in the ring (and out of it) kept my attention.  There are the requisite 'bad things' in their pasts and they are surprised to discover that they do indeed have things in common other than their lust for each other but the story flowed nicely for me and I enjoyed it so much that I had to consciously focus on what I was supposed to be doing which leads me to say...


For truth in advertising, I will mention that this is one of the titles that I was recently assigned for proofreading but it was a great read and I really enjoyed reading it while I was checking for errors.  This has been a learning curve for me (and, looking at the excerpt, I see that some things were added AFTER I proofread it so not ALL errors are mine, lol) and I am learning a lot about the industry from the nuts and bolts end as it were.

I have been interacting with several authors (although not the abovementioned) and lurking on various loops and have watched the process from different vantage points and have been fascinated. The author consults with all of the characters dancing/stomping/growling in his or her head, a story gradually ends up being written (some seem to let it flow whereas others seem to carefully plot out everything and some do a combination of the two), it is polished/strangled/rewritten, a concept is pitched to a publisher (unless it is being self-published), a critique partner may be consulted or beta readers are used, an editor (or two) polishes and tweaks and then the lowly proofreader (that's where I occasionally come in) tries to catch all of the dropped punctuation, inadvertent name changes, mis-spelled words, etc.  Let me tell you, I now have much more sympathy for those errors that I find when I am casually reading for entertainment (!) because I NEVER catch all of the errors, no matter how many times I read the manuscript.  I think that there is some saturation point and one ceases to see things after awhile.  The work returns to the author who accepts or ignores suggestions and eventually the story is published.  I am pretty new to this end of things so I was really startled to discover that this particular title was on Amazon (I know, silly me) and I did the happy dance when I looked at the back of the title page and discovered that I am credited (which is good and bad I suppose since, as I said, I know that there are always going to be things that I have missed).

Anyway, I really did enjoy reading this story and since I wasn't able to figure out how to reach out to the author herself (one of these days people need to remember that not all of us are on Facebook, lol)...I figured that the next best thing was to write a review!  If you are looking for a quick escape and a light contemporary romantic read...give this one a try...and let me know what you thought!  My Amazon review is at this link.

4 comments:

  1. Very cool. It's so easy to make mistakes like that and over look them while reading.

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  2. Yes, it's amazing how many things get by that you look at later and think, 'how could I have missed that?'

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  3. It does sound like a pretty interesting book.

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  4. I enjoyed it, it was a nice change from the paranormals and the more intense romantic suspense titles I have been reading.

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