A lot of times newer writers ask when you know something is done and ready to publish. Often the answer is some variation of “when you’re so sick of looking at it that you need to get it out the door before you light it on fire.”
So true.
Last night I hit publish on four Excel guides. I literally wrote a novel’s worth of words about Microsoft Excel.
Why? Because I’m weird and I actually find solving problems with Excel fun.
And I have fiction writers’ block at the moment because I’m not sure what novel to write next, so while my back brain works on solving that problem I had to do something to keep busy. (Last year I wrote a random cookbook when this happened.)
It was fun writing the guides at first. Asking myself things like how do you teach someone about pivot tables? Or how do you calculate a factor for AMS that accounts for KU borrows? Or how would you build an advertising tracker that calculates whether an ad was profitable or not? (Something I’d been doing manually up to that point.)
But by the time I had to redo all of the images in all of the files because I decided they were too blurry. And by the time I finish formatting each of them in Vellum, trying to decide which annoyed me more–an extra space above an image or an indented paragraph after an image. And by the time I decided that in the ebook form I really needed to split out sub-headings for some of the chapters into their own chapter so users could easily find those sections…
Yeah. By then I hated the guides. I’d seen those words so many times.
So so many times.
I was done. Get it away from me before I take a sledge hammer to it.
I get like that with novels, too. When I’m at the point where I think I’d rather poke sharp knives into my eyes than read the darned thing one more time, I know it’s ready to go.
(By then the creation part has long since passed and it’s just little fiddly bits and finding those last five typos that you swear weren’t there the day before.)
Of course, I’m actually not done just yet. I still have to do the paperbacks…
Sigh.
And publish to Kobo and Nook. And set up on AMS on the books. And…
Yeah.
Good news is I’ll be ready for a brand new project come Friday. And it won’t involve Excel. Yay!
Bad news is I have to grit my teeth and push through today. (After I take the pup in for x-rays and have lunch with my grandma whose brother just died. Because some things matter more than the writing.)
M.L. Humphrey 