A Wild Book Appears

It is weird seeing your book printed out for the first time.  You know you’ve written a lot of words, but to see the chunk of paper that it takes up really brings it home.

You hold it, hefting its weight and think “finally, it’s done.”

But of course, it’s not done.  It’s nowhere near done.

At this point I’d like to thank to my test readers, who each took away a small tree’s worth of paper and spent their free time reading those words that I’ve written.  Your feedback has been great – and I’ve been happy to hear that you all enjoyed the book despite those spelling and grammatical errors which I managed to read over a hundred times and not spot.

I’ve had the recent task of going through that feedback – correcting those spellings, removing those extra commas… (well some of them – there is an ongoing debate about the use of the Oxford comma!) and in some cases rewriting scenes to add a little more depth or clarity.

Some of it has been fun (some typos created some very unintentionally funny sentences), some has been frustrating (we all have days where we just can’t think of a different way to phrase something), but overall it has been rewarding to see the story having the rough edges knocked off.

Not much more work to do before I try my hand at sending it out to publishers.  It’s hard to know when it’s ready, because as the saying goes “A work of art is never finished, only abandoned.” 

It’s scary, but I guess I’ll just have to send it and see what happens.