Published!

 For decades, it has been my dream to write and publish a book. And finally, after starting and stopping so many manuscripts, I am here. A published author. It feels glorious and horrible and surreal all at the same time. I'm terrifed, to be honest. What if no one buys it? What if people do buy it and they hate it? Will they laugh at my stupid attempt to add to the literary world? Well, that might be better than no one buying it. 

While I'm pondering all the feels I'm going through, I still have the process fresh in my mind. Writing a book is hard. Everyone knows that. I knew that going into it and still I felt led to do it anyway. And here's the funny thing. Writing is the easiest part about it. It's the not-so-fun stuff that will make you lose your mind.

Microsoft Word and I are not on speaking terms right now. It gave me so much trouble on what should have been simple tasks, like, for instance, going back and adding a table of contents...why did that screw up every single page's format? Why?? Getting the margins right, I gave up on. If my book's print doesn't look as uniform on the page as most books, I'm sorry. I could not fool with it anymore. I asked AI for help and it made it even worse. And just when I thought I had it all perfect, I uploaded it to KDP and it looked totally different from what Microsoft Word was showing me. Make that make sense. I think this part of book publishing took more effort than writing the darn thing! 

No one tells you how much you will absolutely hate your book before it's over and done with. It's not like a newborn baby where all the pain and suffering diminishes as soon as your little bundle of joy is in your arms. No, writing a book is not like that. You will grow physically ill toward the end because you despise what you have written so much. You will hate the cover design, your pen name, the words you wrote, everything! I'm hoping I can one day look at my book and be happy about it, but I am pretty grossed out about it right now. 

Everyone says to self-publish is the best route, but they don't tell you how much harder it is. I mean, sure, getting an agent and a publisher to accept your work is nearly impossible, but after that they handle most of the designing, marketing, all that jazz. I used to think only writers who weren't "good enough" for publishing the traditional way would self-publish, but I am learning more and more that is not the case at all! But now that I have published this way, the hard part is finding the who, what, when, where, and why to marketing my book. And I'm clueless! So I am open to any advice about this matter. 

You don't realize how maddening editing is. I like how the bare bones of the rough draft fleshed itself out over the months, but man was it a difficult road! Every time I'd change something, I'd want to change it again, and again. If you aren't careful you'll erase the whole point of your book by over-editing. Under-editing is not the path to take either, but after a certain point, I just had to be done with it. 

There are so many other things about the process that I could write about, but I will save that for another day. Time to homeschool the children...