My first pass pages! Love the “Author Set” note at the top.

Another milestone complete in The Chance You Won’t Return‘s journey to publication–first pass pages!

First pass pages are another round in the editorial process. This time, edits are really minor–removing an extra comma here, changing a word or phrase slightly there. By this point, the book should read almost exactly like it will come publication. Reading through, I marked any pages with edits with blue sticky notes, because otherwise it would have been so easy to miss changes when I sent them along to Candlewick.

At this point the manuscript is still unbound, but its pages are printed to look like they will in book layout. After seeing the manuscript as a Word document for the last few years, seeing it looking almost like a real book is pretty exciting.

I’m also a big editorial nerd, so I had fun reading through the manuscript and catching any stray errors. It’s like Where’s Waldo? but with fewer striped shirts and more em dashes.

First pass pages also means that we’re one step closer to ARCs and seeing The Chance You Won’t Return as a real-life book with a cover and bound pages and a spine so it can sit on a shelf. I’m going to have to break out all the happy gifs when that happens. In the meantime, here’s my post-first pass pages happy dance:

Onward and upward!