On totally not freaking out no not even a little

TYPING. DELETING. CUTTING. PASTING. EDITS. REVISIONS. MICROSOFT WORD.

This has become my life. Waiting with baited breath for my editor extraordinaire to send me snippets of her comments that I eat up like tiny rainbow nuggets (uh, Skittles?), immediately incorporate, then send back to her asking for more comments. Poor, poor Aileen. (Looooove you!)

See, the thing is, I’m still aiming for a December release. It’s official. Well, officially self-imposed. But look! Up at the top of the screen! It’s a bird it’s a plane it’s in writing! And as silly as I know it is to get wrapped up in a deadline that I SET FOR MYSELF, it’s still something I’m desperately striving to meet. Which means I’m just a little bit crazypants right now (well, more than usual, at any rate).

But! Other than the general state of panic that I am living in, things are going well! The revisions of the book continue to make it stronger and better than ever, although in a mildly ironic twist, the experience of editing has meant I’ve actually ended up adding MORE WORDS to the book. About 10,000 more, in fact. Granted, I cut a lot of stuff first, and then rewrote that stuff, and THEN added more, but still. I always imagined editing as taking a giant machete to my hopes and dreams. And it is. But then it’s like wrapping those cuts in fluffy gauze and building the book back up into something even stronger.

See? Imagery. I’m totally a writer.

Of course, at some point, I have to recognize that I need to either be happy enough to publish, or I need to not publish yet. And knowing that I’m the kind of person who could nitpick until Kingdom Come, I’m hoping that it’s the former. But even with my precedence for being extremely impatient and driven by immediate gratification, I will do what’s best for the book. FOR THE GOOD OF THE BOOK. It’s gonna be a thing. There will be rubber bracelets and everything. Still, with every change and every rewrite, I’m happier and happier with the strength of the book overall, even though the story itself hasn’t really changed one iota since finishing. So that’s the good part. The story is the same, it’s just the outlying things, you know, like characters and dialogue and whatnot, that are changing. NBD.

Anyway, this has all pretty much just been one long-winded update on why things aren’t quite ready yet. But soon! And as soon as I’m actually able to forcibly shut myself off from my keyboard, I will be sending the final version over to my copyeditor for a last read-through, to catch all those typos and grammatical errors and places where I just started typing and then forgot to finish my sentence so the line reads, “There was a.” A what? THERE WAS A WHAT?!

I’m so anxious to get a copy out to people to start reading and reviewing, that I may send out a few ARC (advanced review copies) to bloggers and whatnot before the final copyediting is done. People do that, right? I mean, that’s why it’s called an ARC, and not a Totally Perfect Copy? The first step is going to be getting bloggers to even agree to read/review my book in the first place, of course. Baby steps, baby steps.

So! That’s my totally not freaking out or panicking or going crazy or anything update for you all. Doesn’t self-publishing seem like fun?