Patience, Back

I gotta slow down.

That's a lesson I have to internalize while I'm working. Drawing to the end of a project feels like holding my breath through a long tunnel (we still do this, right?) and glimpsing the daylight peeping at the far end, until the circle expands and enfolds me. After months of rewrites, revisions, betas, more revisions, reading and re-reading, the pace of the piece picks up, until there's little time to breathe. It's thrilling, exciting, a relief that the end truly is in sight, and that I can pick up yet another WIP and start again because I'm a lunatic. The "Publish Now!" button is so very tantalizing, right there, under my fingertip... click me... click me now...

I need to stop listening to buttons. The buttons are liars. The buttons are in cahoots with the gremlins.

The gremlins are ultimately driving the urgency, I believe, stoking the coal in my eagerness boiler, if I'm allowed to mangle a metaphor. The gremlins do not care about proofreading and make a convincing argument that scanning the text for what feels like the umpteenth time is a waste of effort. When I find myself being lulled by text-to-speech, I know my heart's not in a good place for editing, and that's the "in" that the gremlins are waiting for. And then I click the button, and the revision goes through, and tee hee I find another typo.

Pesky, pesky gremlins.

I brought some of this on myself, insisting on launching Trouble on June 1st, and experimenting with pre-orders, which meant the final text had to be locked in around May 25 (which is silly, because it was an eBook, but OK fine, Amazon.) Do you know how many gremlins were hard are work between May 26 and June 1? I think they brought friends. There must have been a wedding or two. There were certainly more exciting gotchas lurking than I had the capability to see. Luckily, ebooks can be re-downloaded, so I don't feel terrible about those pre-order readers stuck with a bad copy. The shame of the gremlin-induced rush lingers on.

There's a paperback coming, and after a pair of proofs I did dial in both the cover art differences, and some of the errors that inexplicably hide until the text is in print. Even while preparing the print-ready PDFs, I found a not-ready-for-release stray linebreak that annoyed me enough to re-export and re-process both the eBook and soon-to-be-print editions with the fix.

I need more patience back, before the paperback. I also need to learn my own timing: how much time do I allot between the "finished!" draft, the gremlin discovery and eradication programs, and the multiple iterations needed to do the best job I can? I don't know. I'm still learning that, learning my own pace for polishing.

I'll get there, and I have to remember the rhino is a steady-plodder and not a savanna sprinter most of the time. It can be motivated into swift action, but its strength is also in its ability to lumber with menace. I need my MS to respect me, too, and all the gremlins hiding inside. And I need more than one pass where I plan to touch nothing, slow down, and look.

🧩🦏 

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