Late last evening, I uploaded the final copy of the book to the publisher.

I should feel relieved, I suppose, having finally finished months and months of work that started back in November 2006. But I have a problem with second guessing myself…and probably will never be happy with anything I write because I’m a perfectionist.

There’s always something that could be done better. A description here, a plot twist there. When is a book just good enough? And do I want to settle for good enough or press onward for great enough?

I think if I worked on these novels until I was 100% happy with them I would never get anything published, and would wind up with a stack of manuscripts in my house.

So what’s next? A few things…

I submitted a book of poetry to Amazon’s Digital Text platform for the Kindle. It’s stuff I wrote years and years ago in the same time period as Pear in a Bowl. It’s not a large enough collection to warrant publishing in book form, so I’ll see what people think of it in digital form.

It’s a group of poems with very religious undertones. Back in my middle school and high school days I was very into the church, and many of these were written during that time of conflict. (note: these are now available in digital text format for the Amazon Kindle)

NaNoWriMo is also just around the corner. Rachelle and I will start that process on November 1, and I’ve already decided what I’m going to write about. I had originally wanted to do a sequel to the current story, but I think I want to wait and see where it goes first. So I’m completely switching genres and moving into historical fiction. We’ll see what happens.

I also have the novel I wrote last year - the first one from NaNoWriMo. That’s a full length novel that I haven’t even looked at since I finished it. Editing will be a huge chore - I don’t know when I’ll be able to start that one.

Finally, I have two other novels that are in-progress. One of them will likely not get touched for a long time. Ironically, it was based on a serial killer (but from the perspective of one of the victims) - however, only a few months after I started it, a book and movie were published about the same general story. I was not happy. So it’s being shuffled away for a rainy day. The other in-progress book is sci-fi, and it’s the one I started on my writing retreat back in April 2007. That one really interests me, and if it wasn’t time for NaNoWriMo, I’d work on it next.

I don’t know if this is the typical life of the writer, but I have to say it’s mentally draining, and somewhat frustrating. I want to just sit down and write, write, write…but then work gets in the way. I wish writing could be my life’s work.

Oh well - thanks again to those of you who have provided encouragement and advice along the way. I hope you’ll continue to stick around and see where this year’s writing competition takes me!

Cheers!

This sarcastic entry was posted on Sunday, October 7th, 2007 at 11:09 am and is filed under Books, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.