It’s Over But It’s Not Over

I submitted my book to the publisher this morning.

I was editing it literally up until the last minute. I proofread it twice, and I was feeling good about it. Then my friend Jen proofread it and found like 30 more typos. Then I imported it into Word (I wrote it in Google Docs; more on that in a future post). Word found like 30 more typos.

This last week before it was due was supposed to be “simmer week” where the manuscript sat there, complete, just chilling like a lemon meringue pie taking time to set. But I kept waking up in the middle of night thinking of a cool fact I’d left out, or a turn of phrase I realized I’d overused and needed to fix. Just two days ago I found out about a whole other incident that coloured part of the book and required some fresh edits.

It became clear to me this week that I could sit on this manuscript for a year, and re-read it 10 more times, and there would still be errors and slips and little things I’d regret.

So the only thing to really do was to bundle it up and hit send. Adios, my lemon meringue friend! May you gel up nicely and travel well!

This is the end of one part of the journey (A BIG PART, I am going to sleep in SO HARD this coming week), but it’s the start of another. What happens now is marketing work, putting together promotional material, creating some supporting pieces to hand out as freebies. Working the socials, reaching out to bookstores, walking the beat. There’s also proofreading the layout when it’s ready, answering questions for my publisher, and fretting, so much fretting. So there’s still a lot left to do.

But for this weekend, at least, I plan to take a deeeeeeep breath, put my laptop away and not even think about looking at it, and maybe get some pie.

(Want to know when it’s published? You can sign up to my newsletter in the box on my author site to get notified directly.)