The Cover Is In!

There is that feeling when you write that last word on the page, and you know the novel is finished. You look at the document sitting in your computer... you stroke the words on the lined paper in a notebook... you see those last words and think:  I wrote a real book!

Then there is a long process - usually very long - before you get to the next time you feel that way. There are queries and contracts and revisions and edits. That real book starts feeling like a work in progress again. But one day you open up your email and you realize....I wrote a real book!!

And that's the day you get the cover of your book.

So last week I got mine. I guess this makes it official.  :)

Good Thing Friday: Everything's Amazing

It's been a difficult week for me. It shouldn't have been, and yet it was. And I found myself doing the thing that most annoys me...I whined. Not necessarily in that high, sing-songy whiny way that kids do, but whining nonetheless. Complaining. Ranting, even. I promise, it wasn't pretty. Good thing I'm home alone most of the day.


I'm not one for popping youtubes up on the blog very often, but every now and then I find one that just fits. This one was making the rounds on facebook a while ago, and I'm sure most of you have probably seen it. Still, it's a good one to be reminded of again. When I tempted to yell at appliances and stomp my foot at electronics and snap at my kids for being...well...kids.... I remind myself, Everything's amazing. Why am I not happy?

So for my good thing this week, I'm putting up this oh-so-funny reminder that life is really pretty good. Even the things I think that aren't.

When Nothing Is Good

Several months ago, when the airline went down on the Hudson River and everyone survived, the common reaction was "What a miracle!" So much, in fact, the media named the incident "Miracle on the Hudson."

At that time a friend of mine who lives in New York - somewhat of a faith skeptic anyway - wrote me to say, "What kind of miracle is it that the plane went down and no one got hurt? Wouldn't the bigger miracle have been if the geese had flown the other way and nothing had happened?"

This made me laugh, because every day in America thousands of flights take off and land with no incident. According to one website, there are 1300 that take off every day from New York alone. That is a lot of miracles that no one notices! Until something went wrong, no one cared about how often it went right.

This morning my husband sent me this article, and if you hang with me here, you'll see how this all ties into my life and writing.

When Nothing Happens

  By Brian Friel


Ten years ago this month, federal technology managers were logging extra hours and getting their final plans in place for overcoming the looming Y2K computer challenge. If you recall the hullabaloo, computer experts worried that six-digit date codes -- 11-01-99, for example -- would cause computer systems to go haywire when the date turned to 01-01-00. In November 1999, agency information technology chiefs developed patches to deal with the problem, including rejiggering the code to eight digits, with four digits for the year.
 
At the end of the following month, IT managers spent their New Year's Eve in the office, just to make sure nothing bad happened. From the Defense Department to the General Services Administration, from Social Security offices to the White House, the managers saw midnight, Jan. 1, 2000, come and go without a hitch. They had spent the previous four years and more than $8 billion to make sure nothing happened. And nothing happened.
 
Much of what government does can be measured by a similar standard. Nothing happened? Mission accomplished. Preventing terrorist attacks or foreign invasion, preserving protected park land and avoiding airline accidents are among the government goals that share the absence of a result as the hoped-for result.
 
Of course, none of those goals is easily accomplished. Each takes a great deal of labor, technical expertise, planning and execution. They're the kinds of goals that keep federal managers up at night, because even with strong leadership, failure always is a possibility. Enemies with evil intentions lurk around many corners, and accidents ignore zero-tolerance policies. Even one failure can be catastrophic.... After nothing happened, government IT bosses patted themselves on the back, but no one else did. 

So why did my wonderful husband send this to me? Because I've been buried this week in my galley proof, proofreading. Line by tedious line. Nearly 90,000 words worth. Checking for errant commas, dropped letters, spacing issues, typos, accidental shifts in tense. Hour after hour, days on end.

And what do I have to show for it? Nothing. Except eye strain and four baskets of clean, unfolded laundry.

Will anyone read my book and say, "Wow! What an excellent job of proofreading the author and editor did! There's not a single typo!" 

No.

But if I miss that mispelled word, if I miss the dropped letter that changes the to he, they will notice then. And not in the way I want them to.

Writing - and publishing - is not just about the big things you do that everyone sees. Sometimes it's about the big things you do that nobody notices.

I need some Lysol over here!

This is me. I'm officially seeking out a hazmat suit now, because there is a plague on our house.

In the ten weeks the kids have been back to school, seven of them have seen at least one home sick. We've gone through three flus and three colds, and this morning when I went to wake up my littlest, she was asleep amid a pile of kleenexes.  When I woke her up and asked how she felt, she answered, "A little cruddy."

Sigh. So she's home today.

And it's not just my house. In my writing group of seven women, two have the flu, one has strep throat and ear infections, one had a horse fall on her, one sprained her ankle playing tennis, and one had an as yet undiagnosed illness that is leaving her spinning with dizziness and in pain.

We don't even all live in the same country!!

Sometimes I wonder if God lets us get sick to slow us down. This weekend my obligations towards publishing multiplied in both size and stress. I got my galley proofs (Woo Hoo!!!!  It looks exactly like a real book!!!), am deciding on cover designs (hopefully done after about a hundred trials and tweakings), rewrote the blurb for the back of the book (which took way, way longer than it should have, because hey - this is the one on the back of the book!). Literally on Friday night I disappeared into my laptop and didn't emerge until this morning, when my husband went back to work and I had to get the kids up and off to school.

The plan was, of course, to disappear back into the manuscript and work on proofing the proof.

But then I woke up my daughter and...snot city.

So now I'm tempering my obsessive reading with some Cyberchase, cuddles, and picture books. Which, as it turns out, you can still do with a hazmat suit on.

We've Come To The End

Revision are done. I can't believe it! These are the words of my editor as she sent the last of the notes: "We made it! Wonderful story, beautifully told." (Isn't she the best??)


It isn't the first set of revisions, of course. There were the critiques from my writing group after the very roughest drafts, and then again after I thought it was "all done." Between requests there were tweakings, and right before NorLightsPress asked for the entire manuscript, I went into panic mode and did more revisions.

So this hasn't been the first edits, but they are the last, and more significantly, they are the professionally driven ones.

As I come to the end, this is what I've learned: Even the little things can be hard to change.

I don't know if it's my rebellious nature or my resistance to change, but even many of the seemingly "happy-to-glad" changes I initially resisted in my head. These small changes: the movement of an adverb from the beginning of the sentence to the middle; the change of one word to another; the rephrasing of a paragraph that seemed awkward.

There were times when I said, "Of course! That makes so much more sense!" But there were times when I thought, "But I like it that way."

Until I actually made the change. And the lightbulb went off. It is much better this way!

This is something else I've learned: Even making small changes can make a big difference.

The paragraphs I wrestled with rewriting; the  dialogs I had to tag; the sentence structure I had to change. Even when I didn't want to do it. Even when in my head I thought, "There's nothing wrong with this..."

When it was all said and done and I sat back and looked at it and realized, Wow! This flows more smoothly, makes more sense, sounds more powerful.

Which is why my editor is brilliant. And why we writers need brilliant editors.

And the wisdom to listen to them.

Writing=Marketing

I know I've read a million times that once you get a publisher to pick up your book the juggling really starts. You not only have to be able to write a book, you have to write a book at the same time as you are editing the last book, and working on marketing for that book or a previous book, even if that's just getting your name out there.

I had no idea how hard that really is. I'm a bit obsessive and I don't like switching gears. I've found that, despite all my determination, if I begin the day thinking I'm going to do "just one or two things" to help market myself, I never get around to writing, because there is always one or two more things, which lead to more things, and it never ends.

Quickly I realized I was doing all editing and marketing work, and very little writing. And I convinced myself that was what I needed to do to get this baby out into the world.

Unfortunately, I really missed writing. That was the whole reason I'm where I am. It's not the promise of being on the bestseller list or anything. Heck, for that I could dream to be president, or CEO of a major company, or an Oscar winning actress. I'm here because writing is like breathing... I need it to live.

So I divided up my time into marketing/editing days, and writing days. When I have writing days, I try not to do any marketing things (like writing emails and surfing the web for reviewers and figuring out twitterdom). But how do I take chunks of time to just write and not feel guilty about it?

Shelli, over at Market My Words, had an awesome interview Tuesday with author Alyson Noel. And Alsyon, after several paragraphs about how she markets herself, said just about the wisest thing I've read about writing and marketing:

The truth is, and this may not be wildly popular but I believe it to be true—the absolute best thing you can do to market yourself as an author is to write your next book! At the end of the day, that’s all your readers really want from you anyway. And with books getting such a short shelf life these days, the best way to ensure yours books maintain their space is to keep ‘em coming, to build up a nice backlist for your readers to explore and for bookstores to reorder with each new release.

So now my writing days are just a secondary marketing day!  Yay! Somehow just thinking of it in that equation lessens that frantic feeling that I need to be doing something, and feeling like writing isn't getting my novel sold any faster or wider. 


Less guilt is good. Writing time is even better.