First pass pages.

I received my first pass pages on Tuesday.  I let Dwayne read the acknowledgments for the first time and I cried a little and he cried a little and then we went out to dinner because what else were we going to do on First Pass Page Day?

For those of you who don't know, the pass pages are unbound, but they show exactly what the printing will look like on the pages of the final book.  I've been reading books for all but the first four years of my life (and even then I was always looking at picture books), but it never occurred to me that so much work went into this.  Books actually have interior designers!   Who knew?

So one really fun thing the designer did for FREEFALL is have the time stamps for the start of each new scene in Seth's handwriting.  (Or, at least, I think it's supposed to be Seth's since it isn't mine!)  See?  See?

Also, the running heads (that's my name and the title, I've learned) are on the sides of the pages as are the page numbers.  Like so:

   

(This doesn't look quite right since I took the pictures at different distances.  But in real life, the text is the same size on both pages and the running heads match up exactly.)

And the best part of all is that it's set up so that the running heads are printed near the top of the page at the beginning, but gradually move down so that when you get to the end of the book, they are near the bottom of the page.  So if you flip the pages quickly from the start to the end (you know, like those little flip books where you can make stick-figure drawings into live-action stick-figure drawings?), you can watch the title as it FALLS DOWN the page! 

My job for this part of the process is to read through everything on the pass pages and look for errors.  (And Pulse will have a proofreader doing the same.)  So it isn't all fun and games here.  But it's still pretty exciting!