It's Out of My Hands
Good news! The new book is in someone else's hands!
Bad news! The new book is in someone else's hands!
I handed the new book off to its first eyeballs other than mine for the first time this week, and it's always a strange, harrowing experience. It's momentous, as well, one of the biggest steps in getting a book ready, and a major inflection point in the process.
Here's a taste of how it goes:
Ten seconds before hitting 'send': "This is garbage, I hate this, why do I bother trying? No one will want to read this sh*t, I should just bin it and start over."
Ten seconds after hitting 'send': "These characters are my children and if I hear a word against them I will rend your soul from your body!"
Ten minutes after hitting 'send': "Let me take a look at this again and try to see it through their eyes... oh, this needs to be changed! Why did I repeat that word? That's a weird sentence, let me fix that..."
I made 26 changes to the first chapter before I had to consciously stop myself and close my computer. The time that the baby book is away is the time to gain perspective and distance, not obsess over it and make changes that your beta readers don't know about. It's hard to do! For me, there is genuinely a huge perspective shift the moment I send the book out that I can never manage before that moment. Just knowing someone else is seeing it helps me see it the way they do, and a whole bunch of stuff suddenly becomes clear.
But you have to wait. It's not fair to make what you sent out instantly obsolete, and what's the point of asking for feedback if you're just gonna change a whole bunch of stuff before you get it (thereby negating it and wasting everyone's time)?
There is a ton of other stuff that needs doing in this time, and editing is not one of them. Title, description, cover, all those things I can't/don't do while I'm still writing the book? Now's the time. Don't mistake, I set aside plenty of time for fretting, second-guessing anddrinking hand-wringing, too!
Now please excuse me, I'm off to do one or all of those things.
Bad news! The new book is in someone else's hands!
I handed the new book off to its first eyeballs other than mine for the first time this week, and it's always a strange, harrowing experience. It's momentous, as well, one of the biggest steps in getting a book ready, and a major inflection point in the process.
Here's a taste of how it goes:
Ten seconds before hitting 'send': "This is garbage, I hate this, why do I bother trying? No one will want to read this sh*t, I should just bin it and start over."
Ten seconds after hitting 'send': "These characters are my children and if I hear a word against them I will rend your soul from your body!"
Ten minutes after hitting 'send': "Let me take a look at this again and try to see it through their eyes... oh, this needs to be changed! Why did I repeat that word? That's a weird sentence, let me fix that..."
I made 26 changes to the first chapter before I had to consciously stop myself and close my computer. The time that the baby book is away is the time to gain perspective and distance, not obsess over it and make changes that your beta readers don't know about. It's hard to do! For me, there is genuinely a huge perspective shift the moment I send the book out that I can never manage before that moment. Just knowing someone else is seeing it helps me see it the way they do, and a whole bunch of stuff suddenly becomes clear.
But you have to wait. It's not fair to make what you sent out instantly obsolete, and what's the point of asking for feedback if you're just gonna change a whole bunch of stuff before you get it (thereby negating it and wasting everyone's time)?
There is a ton of other stuff that needs doing in this time, and editing is not one of them. Title, description, cover, all those things I can't/don't do while I'm still writing the book? Now's the time. Don't mistake, I set aside plenty of time for fretting, second-guessing and
Now please excuse me, I'm off to do one or all of those things.
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