Lars isn’t the only one reading proofs lately. Author A.L. Kennedy writes about reading through the proofs of her new short story collection. Proofs, she says, “are also a source of almost primal panic for the writer.”

If your proofs are awful, wrong, badly-spelled, oddly-italicised and otherwise dysfunctional, they are a very real demonstration of both your complete powerlessness within the editing process and your witless lack of talent within the writing process. They alarm, containing, as they do, all manner of peculiarities and absurdities which have been added by strangers for no clear reason, along with the plethora of screw-ups which are utterly your own fault. How did you miss that non-agreeing verb? Did you ever know what this final sentence means?