I finished proofs for How to Plant a Billion Trees on Monday morning. I also had proofs due for a companion essay that will come out from Ecotone soon. I went back and forth to ensure that the changes in the one manuscript were the same in the other. I think I got whiplash.

I tried to explain to my grad students last week why proofreading is so hard. “It’s the last chance to see what kind of nonsense you wrote before the rest of the world sees it!” Proofreading is really meant to only capture misplaced commas and words, but I, dear reader, found whole sentences that required reworking. It’s a hard thing to do—write a two-pronged book—one prong about childhood molestation and abortion and the other about forest fires and their capacity for persistence. There is meant to be a metaphor, but if you overplay it, the comparisons sound trite and if you underplay it, the point of pairing the two stories is confounding. I don’t want to confound. I don’t mind complicating thing, but I hope that I also clarify ideas too?

My student asked, “How can you even find typos? Doesn’t your brain just read over them?” “Yes!” I told him. “That’s why there are typos in the first 14 versions I’ve revised.” But at the proofing stage, somewhat like the proofing stage during bread week on the Great British Bake Off, it’s all or nothing at this point. Readers, (hence the dear readers address above) could pull your book apart like Paul pulls apart poorly risen bread. The crust could split. The dough could be dense. Where are the air pockets?!?!

If I put on these “public eyes” reading glasses, then all the flaws out themselves. It feels very precarious—like hiking down a sandy, slippery Grand Canyon in shoes with no tread—what if I miss something? What if this doesn’t read like I think it reads? What if the whole project makes no sense and I wind up in the middle of the Colorado River with neither boat nor paddle?

For people less self-conscious than I, they with more self-confidence, maybe this process doesn’t feel as discombobulating. I feel like I’ve been a box with a bunch of rocks and shook about by potential audience, doubt, and also hope. Bruising! That’s what it is! As bruising as all these metaphors.

I’ll stop talking about this book for a bit and turn my overly metaphorical eye to larger concerns, but let me tell you, after I finished proofing, I took a nap for an hour. Then 6 hours later, I went to bed and slept until 8:45 a.m. That is super late for me. No surprise, I suppose, after all this baking and downhill slide-hiking.