At the end of last month I had eight copies of Francine is a Robot printed. Seven of these copies are with friends and the last one is with me on the desk as I type this. It’s actually quite pretty. I printed it on A5 to make it easier to read, and it has a large looping ring binder to go from page to page. The card stock is one level of quality above the standard, so the paper is heavy and thick, though still sharp at the edges. It is one and a half spaced, and numbered at 278 pages. It is sleek and it is chunky, and when I slap the cover there is a solid, satisfying thud.
That is where the niceties end.
Since printing it out, I have only been able to notice the flaws with the novel. It’s like looking at a patio slab and seeing a single ant, and the moment you focus on that ant all the all other ants come into view, and the patio slab was actually a swarm and you never realised it. I forgot to include a back page, so where there would normally be a blurb there is solely the final page of the book, final reveal and all. When I handed it to my friends I had to cover the back page in post-it notes. But, even without the post-its, they might not be able to read it. Whilst the font looked good on screen, in print it is indecipherable. It thins out at the top of curves, so O’s look like hugging parenthesis, b’s could be mistaken for h’s and so on. Not dyslexic friendly, at all. There are blank pages where a line break turned into a page break, the margins are too narrow on the recto page, and the page numbers are close to the spine instead of the outer corners. My chapter headers are blue, for some reason.
And this doesn’t even go into the text. Mike is more than halfway through the book now. He is reserving his judgement for when he finishes it properly, but in the meantime he is sending me texts. They don’t have any detail on them, just a page number. These are spelling mistakes he’s identified in the book, and he sends me them as he comes across them, and I have to sit and read the page over and over until I find the one he’s talking about. I can tell when he’s commuting through the frequency of these texts.
The largest distance between pages in these messages is seventeen. He read seventeen pages and did not find a spelling mistake. When he finds one I take a post-it note and mark the page. The book is now annotated with the rigorous ambition of a student looking to keep track of relevant quotes, except my post-its are not for words of wisdom, but missed steps and stumbling blocks. I’m being somewhat flippant in this post, hiding my embarrassment behind ironic prose, but it really is quite a sight, to see so many post-its popping out of the pages of my book, little gravestones for my mistakes. I swear to god I’ve read this book. I swear to god I know how to read and write and spell.
But, also, I received a voice note from another friend today, and he told me he was enjoying what he had read so far, and that I am a good writer and he is looking forward to reading more. I tend to find compliments like this physically painful, but I listened to the whole thing. I think I will save that recording and put it in a box, and when I am feeling sad I will take it out of the box and it will make me feel better.
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