The Terror of the Finished Manuscript
Yesterday morning I made the last couple of tweaks to the first complete draft of my new book and I am now in a state of high anxiety, a state that I anticipate being in for the next few months at the very least. There’s a lot said about the terror of the blank page, although I’ve never really found this an issue. The question has never been “what on earth do I write?” but “which of the many things buzzing around my head do I want to pick?”
The real terror, to my mind, is the terror of the finished manuscript. What if the thing I’ve spent over a year of my life on turns out to be shit? The MA programme at Bath Spa was a wonderful safe place to try out stuff without fear of embarrassment, but I’m now about to start the long process of sending this thing out into the real world. Here’s a chronological list of things that could go wrong (all of which I am envisaging right now):
Beta readers hate it – since these are friends and family, this could be especially awkward
No agent will touch it
An agent will take it on but won’t be able to sell it
It’ll get sold to a rubbish publisher
It’ll get published and ignored
It’ll get published and reviewed badly
No-one will buy it
People will buy it but will start looking at me in a funny way
And that’s just the first few that came into my head.
The worst of it all is that I suspect it doesn’t get any easier. Why am I doing this again?
