Support4Change Blog

February 9, 2008

Categories: Miscellaneous

By Arlene Harder, MFT

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Be sure to see Ten Days Until My Valentine Gets to You (It’s now five days.)

Publisher’s Special

Purchase Ask Yourself Questions and Change Your Life before end of March and get a discount. See “A Few Notes” below.

A Bird on a Light Outside the Sydney Opera House
To have a picture on this page I grabbed this photo from my “Lights” pictures you can see at the Visual Viewpoints on Support4Change.

I have forty minutes to finish this blog. That is when Luckie comes to help me put the finishing format touches on Ask Yourself Questions and Change Your Life. Tomorrow I have to send the file to the publisher, who will send it to the printer on Monday. Horray!!!!

One of the advantages (and disadvantages) of writing for the Internet is that you can almost always change what you write after you’ve posted it. Want to add a few more comments? No problem. Want to correct a fact? No problem. Want to add an adjective? No problem. Want to correct spelling that slipped through the spell-checker (like their instead of there, and think instead of thing)? No problem.

That’s not the case, as every writer knows, when your work is published in a bound volume. Then the words remain stuck, immutable, silent witness to your lack of skillful editing. More than one writer has said she doesn’t read her books after they are published. She’s tired of thinking about them, writing, rewriting, editing, writing, etc., month after month.

That’s where I find myself today. I like how the book has turned out. I like the fact that a publisher (Personhood Press) thought it good enough to take it on and promote it (though I have the lion’s share of that work yet to do). I like the fact that my part-time assistant, Renee, was able to do the final proofing and could prevent me from making a total fool of myself by inadvertently leaving out a critical word here or there. I like the fact that Luckie (the graphic designer from Kinko’s) has come to my home several times and taught me how to use InDesign CS3, the Adobe program I’m using to format the book. Today he’s helping me put the finishing touches on each page.

And most of all I like the fact that there is a deadline! I have to finish, whether or not sometime in the future I may discover that I would have done it differently. What I’ve done is what I’ve done. Now, after Luckie leaves I will send the files to Cathy Winch, the publisher.

Then, I will take a deep breath, go outside, sit out on the deck (it’s one of those delightfully warm days in Southern California), and read the rest of my John Grisham novel, A Painted House. And I will wonder whether Grisham thinks about having mistakes in his books when he hands the manuscript to his publisher. (Of course, he has a big publisher with lots of copy editors who take the brunt of editing off his shoulders). The only thing that makes me feel a little less pressure is that I sometimes find errors in the writing of even the most famous of authors produced in the best of publishing houses.

Anyway, before Luckie comes, I want to tell you about a “Tax Game” I am creating. Look for it here within a week. Before then, I may write on some relationship/love topics (after all, this week has Valentine’s Day in it). But soon you can be the first to play the game and see whether you would be any better at balancing the budget than the guys and gals in Washington are doing with contentious constituents.