Galley Impressions

[mabfan]

I received my galleys from Analog today for "TelePresence."

For those of you who don't know, galleys is the name given to a story when it's set in type, but not yet published. Basically, it's the writer's last chance to look at the story and make corrections. Sometimes those corrections are needed because of a mistake you made when writing the story, but sometimes you want to fix a change the editor made. And sometimes it's just a question of making sure that hyphenated words are broken in the right place and that quotation marks face in the correct direction.

But for me, all that is secondary to the experience I have when I hold the galleys in my hand. For the first time, the story feels real. I start to read it again, and instead of seeing it as a manuscript I'm working on, I see it as a full-fledged work of fiction...and I find myself getting lost in the tale. For some reason, the story just reads better when set in type, and I sometimes find myself marveling over the work, even though it's my own. I'll come to one turn of phrase and say, "Wow. Did I write that?" Or I'll read a scene and get drawn into the conflict and the characters. The story is no longer an amorphous blob; it's a real story, a work of fiction, and something I can finally be proud of.

I wonder if other writers react the same way.

Comments

[neilfein.livejournal.com]

I have written a few songs that, while they sound good when I play them in guitar, I just can't get a decent version recorded. It honestly doesn't matter if I then go record a better version, but I've "broken through" once a track is committed to disc and I'm happy with it.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Isaac Asimov told the story of how he met a composer once, who had composed a symphony. He asked the man what it sounded like, and the guy replied, "I don't know. I've never heard it." Because unless an orchestra commissions you to write a symphony for them, you'd have to hire an orchestra yourself to learn their parts so you could hear the work you had created.

Asimov said it made him very glad to be a writer, as he wasn't dependent upon anyone else to appreciate his own work.