It’s also a time of finals. And finals can be (irritatingly) slow

Fourteen weeks after the first day of the second new year

Author has spent the last few hours wondering what she should write about in this week’s blog. But that’s not because of the lack of something to say. It’s because her mind is so tangled up in what she’s doing, and her gray cells are literally crashing out one after the other. Let’s see you try to get a coherent, non-purely-technical thought from your brain when it’s in that state.

And that’s something Author can talk about this week, being tangled up in the final, seemingly endless details. Those final steps before publication, the very final ones, can still take some time. You can still get stuck on them, find yourself being delayed by them, feel like they’re taking forever. In fact, it could very well seem like the theory of relativity is at play here, like time is slowing and as you approach the end... no, you know what, it’s as if you were approaching the event horizon of a black hole and time is stretching endlessly. Yes, that’s it, that’s what it can feel like. Especially if just before you got stuck you were already seeing the end, feeling like you’re almost done. On the one hand it all comes together, the covers for the two book formats, the book page on your website, all banners are ready for your social media sites, the book description and keywords and whatever else you need for the online publication pages are all done, yet your book isn’t going out because some last small tasks are taking forever. Tasks you must give all the time you need to, simply because they’re part of the work, and they’re important.

Everything is important. And it’s your book and you want it to perfect. But you’re at the point where you want to finish it, you want to publish it, you really really want to get on with that next story that’s pulling at you (and at whatever gray cells are still conscious in your poor, poor brain) but it just doesn’t end, something always seems to pop up, another detail that needs to be taken care of. Maybe the print cover isn’t ready after all because the spine needs to be amended to reflect the final number of pages in the book, a number you can only provide following the typesetting that can only be done as one of the very last steps. Or maybe after you’ve already finished typesetting your entire manuscript you go over your hardcopy again and realize that by the time you finished typesetting the last chapters you’ve learned some new things (about spacing, line-break hyphenations and whatnots) that you didn’t know when you just started, so that you now need to fix the typesetting of the first chapters again. Or maybe an image you want to put in isn’t embedded properly and you need to go head-to-head with it, see what’s gone wrong there. All kinds of details that you wouldn’t mind dealing with in the earlier stages of the books but that at this point only stand in your way to finally having your book published. Seriously, that event horizon idea is more accurate than you think.

You can’t wait to finish, to move on. You’re itching for a breakthrough. For that success you need to give you the emotional, financial, motivational fuel to continue. For the success that you simply want so much, of course you do. And it’s taking so long, time can stretch forever when you’re sitting for hours on end doing minute tasks. When you know that even when you finish them, even after you publish this, your first or second or third book, you’ll still need to wait days, weeks, months for feedback on your work—the event horizon feeling is no less there. And that’s without even talking yet about the waiting for your name to build, hoping to be included among authors whose names are already well-known. It takes time to build a name for yourself out of nothing, to build a following of readers for your books among so many others that are already out there.

And all that waiting can’t even begin until you finish those final tasks that are between you and getting your book published. Persistence is a good word here. You’ll need it. Persistence in the big things—publishing books and publicizing them and waiting for your name to become known, but also in the small ones—doing those endless small tasks on the way to each and every book. Persistence here means obstinately continuing on your tasks in spite of how endless and unending they seem. Because guess what, there will come a moment when you will raise your head from your laptop screen and your hardcopy that’s strewn all around it and realize that you’re done. That the final tasks are over. You did it. Just hit publish, and what you’ve worked so hard for will finally be out there. Now, that’s going to feel good.

This week’s tip from Author and Sister, just a small one that works: when a last task that just won’t make way for you to finally proceed to publication drives you mad, just get up, make yourself a cup of coffee or tea, with something sweet maybe, a cookie, a chocolate or cheese roll perhaps. Whatever works for you. Take them to the porch, the balcony, the window. Look outside, remind yourself of the world out there, of a time beyond, of a horizon. Give yourself a few minutes to breathe, to unwind that tension that’s accumulated in you. Then go back to that irritating task and just do it.