We’ve got a new James P. Blaylock project in the works — with our designer at the moment, in fact — illustrated by his friend and compatriot Tim Powers, with a meddlesome afterword by William Ashbless.

…Metamorphosis: three stories, each one involving a man who discovers that he has come to dwell, for an hour or for a lifetime, in a house and in a mind not quite his own. Each one opens doors onto rooms of illusion, radiance, regret, and dark enchantment. Welcome to the stories of three young writers, stories written in collaboration with James P. Blaylock. Welcome to the borderland of illusion and reality.

Well, today I began my last task in the production process. I am proofreading the typeset version of the book, also known as the first-pass page proofs. What this means, basically, is that I’m looking at the book as it will appear in print, searching for typos, errors in formatting, and any lingering mistakes that I might have made. It’s a rather tedious job, not least because I’ve already read this book through about five times, and frankly, I’m a little sick of it. Don’t get me wrong: I like the book. I think it’s one of my best. But it could be a masterpiece on the order of A Tale of Two Cities, and I still wouldn’t want to read it five times through in less than a year.

As I find mistakes, I correct them in pencil and then lay those pages aside. When I’m done, I’ll send those corrected pages — not the whole book — back to my editor. He’ll pass them on to Tor, where the changes will be incorporated into the final version of the book. The goal, of course, is a book without any typos or mistakes of any kind. In practice, this is virtually impossible to achieve. Why? Let me explain it this way: The book is 140,000 words long, give or take a few thousand. Each word averages about five letters. (Really: next time you do a word check in Word check out the other document stats. You’ll probably find that your average word length is about the same.) That comes out to approximately 700,000 characters. There are paragraph breaks, too, and also punctuation, spacing issues, etc. But let’s keep the number round for the sake of simplicity. 700,000. Okay, now let’s say that my editor, and the copy editor, and the proofreader, and I manage between us to make it 99.999% perfect. That would be pretty darn good, actually. And it would still leave us with seven typos.