The Horror: They Always Come Back
(Neo and his favorite blankie: photo as stress relief.)
The thing they don’t tell beginning writers? The ghosts of books future come back to haunt you in horrible fashion—they just keep returning prior to publication. You write it or edit it, and that seems like a monumental task…but then the stages of pre-production leer out of the mist at you with precise if jagged teeth.
If you have a lot of books out in a particular period, and you’re working on creating more, this becomes particularly cruel. So while working on Weird and the Steampunk Bible, in come copy-edits on The Third Bear. Or, as now, Monstrous Creatures and Steampunk Reloaded return in spectre-like fashion just as final chapters and rewrites on Steampunk Bible must be done, along with intro, story notes, and whatnot on the Weird. O the horror. I’m not exactly complaining—having lots of books in the pipeline means you’re getting lots of opportunities—but anyone who thinks their involvement with the book is done once they turn it in will be corrected in their thinking by rude visitations…
July 4, 2010 at 3:51 pm
I always think of production stuff as the messy afterbirth.
Turning in the ms. is the big push, but just when you start to relax there’s more to do, and before you know it you’re reviewing copyedits, writing captions (I write mostly nonfiction, and it’s usually illustrated), and so on.
It can be crazy-making, especially when tasks for multiple books are demanding your attention at the same time, but the up side is that you can spend a day beavering away at all that stuff and feel well-deserved satisfaction at all the things you’ve ticked off the to-do list, without having to write any actual pages.