On Sunday, I finished going over the galleys for The Curse of the Campfire Weenies. They were pretty clean. I made 25 changes, which isn't really that much. Eleven of the changes were single words. I only added two or three whole sentences. But every time I go through galleys, I can't help wondering about the diving line between art and obsession. The single-word changes fell into two categories. In some cases, I replaced a word because it was wrong, or because it was okay but a better word came to mind. Here are some examples of that.

Wrong word:
"I looked under the cabinet...."
Oops. I meant either "under the counter" or "in the cabinet."

Better word:
"Jimmy could get down by himself."
"Jimmy could climb down by himself."

The other category is where the struggle comes in. I always try to avoid unintended word repetition. For example:

"Deal with your own mess," I added as the rock dropped in place. As I walked away...

Here, I use "as" in two sentences in a row. I changed the first one to "after." I do that sort of thing a lot through the whole revision process. Once in a while, I have to sacrifice the perfect word for the sake of avoiding repetition. But I always wonder whether the reader really notices any of this. Maybe he does on a subliminal level. Or maybe I'm just being obsessive. Here's the thing that raises this doubt in my mind. I can pick up any of my books and find dozens of cases where I missed an unintended repetition. Which means that I didn't notice it the first twenty or thirty times I read the passage. So maybe it doesn't matter as much as I think. Which doesn't mean I won't be just as obsessive with the next galley.