I’ve been copyediting for the same small press for about nine years now, mostly natural history and local history titles, the kind of book where somebody spent four years researching chestnut blight or a defunct railroad spur and needs somebody else to catch the dangling modifiers before it goes to print. My actual job, all day, is marking things up in the margin. A query here, a strike-through there, a little arrow showing where a sentence actually wants to live. I go home most nights and, apparently, cannot stop.

It first became obvious to me with a rulebook, one of the heavier games in my collection, where I sat down to learn it solo before teaching it to anyone else and found myself, twenty minutes in, actually holding a pencil over the page. Not editing the rules, they weren’t mine to edit, but marking where the layout failed me, where an icon showed up on page fourteen with no key until page thirty one, where a sidebar interrupted a sequence of steps at exactly the point I needed it not to. I wasn’t playing the game yet. I was proofing it.

I think the honest version of this is that I don’t experience “confusing” as a feeling so much as a location. Somewhere on the page, a specific paragraph or a specific icon is doing the confusing, and I want to go find it and fix it, the same reflex that makes me useless at just reading for pleasure without a pencil somewhere nearby, even on a novel I have no business marking up. Marcus, who sits across from me most Tuesday nights, has stopped being surprised when I sigh audibly at a comma splice in something I’m only reading for fun.

It does make me a genuinely useful person to teach a new game to a group, if I’m honest about the upside. I’ve caught real errors in printed rulebooks this way, missing steps, contradictory examples, an icon key that quietly vanished between two printings. Doreen at the used bookstore three blocks from me thinks this is very funny, she’s watched me flip through a stack of paperbacks and set aside the ones with a typo on page one like they’ve personally wronged me.

What I haven’t figured out, nine years in, is whether the job caused the habit or just gave the habit somewhere respectable to live. My mother says I was doing this as a kid, correcting the grammar in birthday cards, which suggests the job found me rather than the other way around. Either way it’s not something I can turn off at five o’clock. The manuscript on my desk this week is about wind patterns over the Blue Ridge, three hundred pages, and I already know I’ll be doing the exact same thing to whatever board game I open tonight, pencil in hand, looking for the place where the sentence, or the sidebar, forgot what it was trying to say.