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burt's bee lip balmImage by ayustety via Flickr

I've got my galleys for The Bride and the Buccaneer! Now I need to gather my red pens, my manuscript, and my lip balm.

Why lip balm? I do the final read-through of the manuscript aloud, and this chaps my lips. In the old, pre-Bluetooth days it would also garner frightened looks from people around me in the coffeeshop. They would see this woman talking to herself, gesticulating wildly, and move to another table. But I've learned that reading the manuscript aloud is a good way to catch typos. Your mind tends to fill in the blanks while you're reading. That's why you can look at a sentence like "Hr ns ws rd frm cryng" and figure out it means "Her nose was read from crying" without too much difficulty. Your mind fills in the missing vowels.

The other thing that happens is I'll take a break from reading the manuscript, read my daily paper over lunch, and find myself reading it aloud with my lips moving. Sure catch a lot of their typos that way.

But I'm excited because galleys = book. It's the last step before publication, and now I'm really looking forward to holding my own copy of The Bride and the Buccaneer in December.
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