WRITING IS EASY; GETTING A BOOK READY, HARD
I have been MIA for a number of weeks here, and it has been for a necessary reason: once I got Pride’s Children, Book 1, out of the category of ‘writing’ and into the category of ‘prepare a product for market,’ I was completely out of my areas of expertise.
But I have also been in an area where my basic do-it-yourself nature has taken over in a big way, AND I have had little that I felt was useful to other people.
You can’t teach people how to learn. They have their own individual methods by the time they are past young adulthood: a combination of their predilection, say, for audio over visual, or kinesthetic over being lectured to.
Adult learning is Self taught
It is because people have to become fast at learning, once they’re out of school.
School should be focused on 1) basic knowledge of the world, and 2) developing the capacity to teach yourself anything you need (which doesn’t preclude more formal academic learning, if desired).
So, in the course of writing, I first started thinking something I could write on this blog MIGHT be of assistance to another writer learning to write. Then I moved to a stage (long-term readers might remember) when I explicitly cautioned people that I was writing not so much to provide instruction in my particular methodology, but to provide entertainment at how convoluted and ‘special’ that methodology had become.
Pick the best teacher – only rarely another complete beginner
Now I’ve moved to the stage where few care what I have to say precisely because I’m such a beginner at most of the remaining tasks of publication that there are far better teachers out there, and my bumblings aren’t even special any more, and therefore have little entertainment value.
Do you, Dear Reader, need to learn how quickly a graphics file with layers (Pixelmator, Photoshop) gets humongous? If you do your own graphics, you already know. If you don’t, and have no intention of ever trying, you don’t need to know. Really, you don’t. If I write it, you’ll skip it!
So I haven’t had much to write about that I would spend time turning into a blog post.
Have I been idle? You can bet your sweet biffy I haven’t.
In the interim, however, I have been working my little tail off (while sitting in this chair and trying not to let the enormous amount of time in a sitting position make the sciatica and mobility problems any worse).
EVERYTHING else has gone on the ‘To be done when I get this thing up on Amazon’ list.
A very long list that includes anything I could put off or postpone (even though I’ve been postponing since March, when I finished the what I thought was completely finished and polished version of Book 1):
- Routine maintenance on the ol’ body.
- Sorting out paperwork.
- Making anything in my workflow better and more efficient.
- Dealing with clothes (and the season has now again gone back to cool, and I think I bought two pairs of shorts I haven’t used over the summer – that’s all).
- Vacations.
- Getting a new assistant and working with her/him to organize this place.
- Holly’s Tiny House pictures
- CFS posts and walking posts and house posts
- … (I won’t bore you – you each have a list like this)
I foolishly thought that if I just concentrated, I could get this thing up on Amazon, and get to writing/revising/editing Book 2.
But the time has now occupied FIVE MONTHS of my life.
Where DOES the time go?
Graphics took a good three months – I had a lot to learn, have (I think) blogged about it a bit. However, I was not willing to put my new cover, the final product of said graphics, up too soon. Jinx? Dunno.
I’m getting to the point where I must COMMIT – and it will be time to do a cover reveal very soon.
All this, of course, at the extremely slow pace of my brain-fogged thinking apparatus, which still (thank the Lord!) operates for a while every day even though it is mostly sidetracked at the station.
Getting to Mt. Doom and actually tossing The RING into the fire
One of the interesting things that happened as I spent a LOT of time on things I am NOT good at (yet?), was that Fear, or what Stephen Pressfield calls Resistance, or possibly self-protection (if you never publish, nobody can fault you for being too revelatory, or a terrible writer, or full of yourself) gets a HUGE second chance.
And had to be battled back down to its homunculus size. Several times. Possibly more than once per ITEM (editing, formatting an ebook, graphics, Amazon keyword – all count as items), because in each new field of endeavor you are an ignorant beginner again and should not dare to have an opinion or tread where the angels don’t go).
To summarize this all up: I have been incredibly busy, incredibly productive, incredibly frustrated. And life has had its own little share of cherry bombs and landmines.
KNOWING there is a light at the end of your tunnel, and not a train
But I am getting extremely close, since:
I FINISHED FINAL EDITS.
In that department, once the proofers and the beta readers have had their say, it will be done – because most of my part is done.
Don’t quote me. And I have no idea how long it will take me to do the book description’s final version, or to rewrite the tiny Prologue if I’m going to, or to create front and back matter and then credit Oxford University Press properly for allowing me to use quotations from the King James Version of the Holy Bible, or a hundred tiny details like that.
But that final editing thing? It was a bear I didn’t expect to see coming out of the woods – and it is finished. Done. Vanquished. Vanished. Vamoosed. Va-beared?
Except for typos – and any extremely unlucky plot holes, etc., my lovely helpers may turn up.
Thank you, Gentle Reader, for your patience.
The now Extremely Near Future
I will soon be asking for a bit of help from readers, so if you’ve always wanted to be part of the team who gets the eARC (electronic Advanced Reading Copy) of a novel, or one of the Influencers in the adoption of something new, there will be opportunities. And much gratitude.
So thank you ALSO for keeping me functioning and working all this time.
This, the first time, will not happen again. Do you remember yours for a big project?
Thanks to Quozio.com for the quote software.
liebjabberings 