I had two unusual dreams last night. They were nearly identical.
In both, I had finally received the proof pages of "The White Crack" from
Ravi at Moon Lith Press. They were horrible. Some of the pages were
printed sideways. The type was unevenly set, the lines of print wavy,
the letters squashed. Some of the pages looked as if the type had melted
or the page had been photographed under water. The table of contents was
utterly unusable. I woke from both dreams with an uneasy feeling about
the book.
Which is unusual. I had been feeling very positive about the book,
even proud of my work on it. There was really only one issue that I
felt a little uncomfortable with. There were two poems titled "White
Crack" in the collection Don made for "The White Crack." He decided
to put "The" in the title of the one that begins, "This is a photo of
me at the White Crack." However, that poem had already been published
(in "Pinyon Review") as "White Crack," so I decided not to change the
title the way Don had. Instead, I changed the other poem, which starts,
"Far away from any place you could call home," to "The White Crack."
I thought I had a pretty clever reason for doing so. According to
the dates of the poems, it is the earlier of the two. I wanted to
call attention to that fact and draw a connection between the title
of the poem and the title of the collection. Don had told me that the
White Crack campground was the site of a powerful spiritual experience
for him. I wanted to suggest that the entire collection sprang from
that inspiration. (And, honestly, I wanted to draw a little attention
to myself for having figured out Don's poem-dating scheme.)
Then, as I was looking for some photocopied articles on Buddhism for an
essay I was writing, I came across a printout of "White Crack" (the one
I had decided to title "The White Crack"). In what looked distinctly
like Don's handwriting, there was a copy-editing mark that indicated he
wanted the word "though," which had been on a line by itself, appended
to the end of the previous line. If I followed that edit, then the poem
fell neatly back into its original three-line stanza structure.
I was thrilled to have been able to figure out one more "author's final
edit." I instructed Ravi to make these final changes and get back
to me as quickly as possible. She said the results should be ready for
my review this morning.
So I had been looking forward to seeing the final copy--until I had those
dreams last night. My unease grew as the morning went by without a call
from her. When she hadn't called by 1:00 PM, I called her.
She sounded distressed. "I've tried to make the changes you indicated"
she said, "but PageMaker won't accept them. Every time I try to finish,
something else breaks. And the table of contents won't come out right."
I told Ravi about my dreams. "Maybe Mr. Flint is trying to tell us
something," I said. "I wouldn't put it past him. He's communicated
with me that way before."
She was astonished. "I didn't want to tell you this before," she said,
"but while I was working on these changes, my daughter spilled a glass
of water on the table of contents. It was under water."
That settled it. We kept the stanza structure, but I reverted the titles
back the way Don had meant them.
He's a man who knows what he wants.
After all that work, and my efforts in February to "let go" of the
process and trust the outcome, you'd think I'd be ready to accept the
run of 500 copies that Moon-Lith gave me at the end of the month. At
first, I was. I was elated that the book was out and done and ready for
shipment. I already had several orders! I put the first copy I pulled
out of the box on the floor in front of the altar and lit a candle, then
I started wrapping up the first orders for delivery. I was gleeful all
night.
A week later, after the first orders had shipped, I took a closer look.
And the closer I looked, the more disturbed I got. The
page numbers on the verso pages (left-hand side) were aligned to the
left margin--which was good--but so were the page numbers on the recto
pages! What could the printers have been thinking? No book in the
world is paginated that way!
Then I noticed that "Juice," the poem inside "Rewrite #108," had not
been italicized. Again, this was something that was correct in the
proofs they had shown me, but was wrong in the final print run.
But then I found the real clinchers. Not only had Moon-Lith failed me,
but I had failed myself. I found several typos and spelling errors in
pages I had proof-read and run through Microsoft Word's spell checker.
These I should have caught, but didn't. I would like to blame Microsoft
Word for not catching the spelling errors, but some of them were so
egregious that even I, who has never learned to spell a word more
complicated than "police," should have caught them. One that lept off
the page at me was in "Headache," the very poem I had added over Don's
original intentions, and to which I drew attention in the Editor's
Introduction.
I couldn't let these errors go, and I couldn't send as poor a copy as
this to the Library of Congress. I went back to Moon-Lith, watched
while they hand-entered the corrections, and had another 250 copies run.
I kept the original 500 bad copies, but I don't intend to sell them.
Since the copies I have sold are a revision, I should have changed the
ISBN, but that would have meant further delays: contacting the Library
of Congress for a new control number and R.R. Bowker with an updated
Books in Print entry. So I didn't change the number, which means the
few people who got copies of that first run now have collector's items.
I paid for the second run out of Beautiful Dreamer Press's funds, since
half the mistakes were my own. But that's going to make money tight for
the last book. The initial investment into BDP was $7,500. I added
approximately $2,500 to that when I closed Don's and my joint account.
Will $10,000 be enough to get all three books published? We'll see.
