steph: oh my god

So, I’m sitting on the couch with Adam, after having just woken up (we’re in Cleveland, staying with my parents), and I go, “Hmm, Brain said the proof should’ve arrived by yesterday,” and then it dawns on me: I haven’t even checked to see if UPS maybe left it here at the front door.

I get up.

My parents’ house is small, and the placement of the Christmas tree disables easy access to the front door, so I have to be careful that I don’t knock over the tree (it’s fake) while opening the door.

I slowly open the door (I’m only able to open in a few inches, again, because of the tree), look down …

Wow. It’s there.

Adam jumps up off the couch and I tuck the package against my chest and hurry into the kitchen, where there’s more light. It’s Christmas morning all over again. Adam’s getting anxious because I have the package, not him.

I open it, next to my ma who’s making breakfast and in front of Adam, who’s looking over my shoulder. “Oh my God,” I say. “Oh my God.”

I take it out, and Adam and I look at each other.

Avery is beautiful, people. Beautiful.

I expected the cover to look – I’ll admit it – kinda cheap-looking due to the fact that we had very little money and had to go with the cheapest kind of cover stock. Well, this cover was perfect! The illustration and title stand out beautifully on the stock the printer offered to us and, quite honestly, I couldn’t have asked for anything better (except maybe a hard cover, which we all know can’t happen for a long long time or until one of us three inherits some cash). The back cover looks great, and so, too, the spine: everything’s perfect!

So, we open it and get our first real look at the paper. Of course, Adam and I had seen the paper before, but we’d seen only one sheet of it, and you can’t tell much from one sheet. I mean, who knows what it’s going to look like in book form.

The paper is exactly what we could have hoped for. The color (off-white) is just right and so is the texture. I turn the pages and still can’t believe I’m holing Avery in my hands (I still haven’t surrendered it to Adam) and I finally get to the first illustration: gorgeous. I turn the page and

Shit.

The layout’s messed up.

Here’s how it’s supposed to be: Each illustration is always only on the right hand side of the page, and each story always only begins on the left hand side of the page, on the back of that illustration. This is not the case with the proof, where some stories have somehow shifted themselves out of this formula. In addition, page numbers are always only on the right hand side of the page; again, because the story layouts have been shifted, so, too, have the page numbers.

Shit, I think. Shit. But as I continue to look through Avery, I can’t help but be amazed at how great the illustrations look and how great the font we chose looks and how wonderful the cover is and the paper is, etc. We seem to have made all the right decisions! I mean, I can’t even articulate how little choice we had in many matters, though, concerning paper and cover stock, etc. We were pretty much at the disposal of Park Printing and with what they could offer us for our measly few thousand dollars.

So, you could imagine the breath I took once I could actually see the cover, see the paper. Brian (and everyone at Park Printing), I can’t tell you how lucky we feel to have found you.

By the way, we’ve already found two typos in just our quick initial perusal. Oops. Guess our copy editing wasn’t as keen as we thought it was.

So, anyway, I call Brian. He’s such a nice guy, really, we couldn’t have asked for a better printer to work with. He always seems in a good mood and it’s obvious he loves his profession (I always remember the first time we met him: he took us around the shop and couldn’t stop touching all the different kinds of paper they had laying around. This is the guy we want, we knew right then and there) and so he comes on the phone and I tell him how beautiful it all looks and then I have to say, “But, um, the layout seems messed up a bit,” and I go on to explain it to him, thinking this is going to be a huge problem and he goes, “Well, we can fix that easy enough, and if that’s the only thing that’s wrong, that’s actually really great.”

And, suddenly, I feel calm.

He explained to me that they had to run Avery on two separate machines because of the color and that they therefore had to split up the PDFs we sent them, which meant they had to do some guesswork once each was finished and the book was ready to be assembled. To make a long story short, all I have to do is write some instructions onto the proof and they can go ahead and run it again.

I’ve already done so, but I’m going to take the week to copy edit Avery once again, just to make sure we haven’t missed anything. We’ll have to send him another PDF, though, with the typos fixed, but he said that shouldn’t be a problem.

So, what the heck does this mean?

It means that Avery is already beautiful and nearly ready for her 500 print run. Get your copies now while you can! With the subscriptions and some of the first issues already purchased, and with the contributors’ copies we’re dishing out, there are only a few hundred left.

As I sit here, finishing up this blog, I can’t help but think: we haven’t even had our one year anniversary, and Avery’s sitting on my parents’ steps, just waiting. Andrew, Adam … I can’t believe we actually did it.