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The Galley Arrives: Reading My Own Book Like It’s Someone Else’s

March 8, 2025
Jerry Strayve

By Jerry Strayve

There it was, sitting on my desk. A single, pristine copy of Braxton’s Century, Volume 3—the very first galley proof. The one and only physical copy in existence at this moment.

Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months…. had been spent writing the book. How many times had I read the manuscript, tweaking, tuning. Hours more spent reviewing the content editor’s and line editor’s work. More tweaking, more tuning.

One last time to edit before going to press.

I picked it up, turned it over in my hands. It had weight. It had presence. Unlike the thousands of times I’d scrolled through the electronic version, making revisions until my eyes crossed, this was different. This was real. And now, the real work began: reading my own book as if I’d never seen it before.

The “Who Wrote This?” Phenomenon – Every author experiences moments where they come across a passage so good they can’t believe they wrote it. And then, right after, they find a sentence so clunky they wonder if their cat took over the keyboard.

Gremlins in the ATTACK! If disaster struck—say, a catastrophic coffee spill or an overzealous pet deciding my galley was a chew toy—it would be a literary extinction event. Future scholars would mourn its loss. “Here lies the only copy,” they’d whisper, placing a memorial bookmark. Meanwhile, I’d be sobbing into my now espresso-stained, dog-mauled masterpiece.

The Phantom Typos – It’s a universal truth that typos only reveal themselves when ink has permanently dried on paper. Somehow, errors that were invisible in digital form now dance mockingly in front of you. “Pubic” instead of “public.” A character mysteriously changing names. A sentence so garbled you wonder if a ghostwriter (a literal ghost) took over. Armed with a red pen and caffeine, you prepare for battle. The Phantom Typos may have won this round, but you will vanquish them!

(Well… most of them. One always survives.)

  • The “Just One More Change” Dilemma – The book is done. Done. But is it? There’s always that one word you could swap, that one sentence you could tighten. And yet, at some point, you must accept that perfection is an illusion.

Despite the trials of the Galley Read, holding this book in my hands is an exciting reminder: it’s almost time. Braxton’s Century, Volume 3 is nearly here, and soon, readers will embark on this journey themselves.

Pre-sales are opening very soon, so if you’re eager to step into this world, stay tuned! In the meantime, I’ll be making one last pass through the pages—armed with a red pen, a cup of coffee, and the eternal hope that this time, this time, I’ve caught everything… at least almost everything.

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