The End

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Starting At The End

It is a formidable task to get a book published.

If it were easy, everyone would do it and your shelf at home or e-reader would be filled with books written by everyone you know.

It takes a lot of determination to see a book through to completion and every time I have written “The End” on a manuscript there is relief and also a little sadness, because I’ve learned that writing the book was almost the easy part.

Of course there were days of frustration spent looking at blank pages and trying to work with characters who would just. not. co-operate. Who gave them opinions on how they should be acting and reacting anyway? Oh, that’s right, you did. But that was the fun part, getting to know them, giving them ownership over their own destiny within the world you’ve created for them.

On those hard days, you just told yourself you’ll get there, keep at it, one word at a time. Sometimes that’s all you needed, that perfect next word to suddenly have your imagination spark and the next three chapters would just write themselves.

Sometimes it was just about getting to that one word.

But now you’ve got your manuscript and you’ve written “The End” and, if you’ve never done this before, you’re now faced with the realization that, while this book and all its wonderful characters have made themselves perfectly at home in your little computer, getting them out there for others to meet is much harder than you’ve taken the time to consider until now.

Until now, getting to “The End” was the goal, but you quickly realize it is just the beginning.

 

Trust

If others are going to read your work there’s a small paranoia that takes hold and you start to question what you’ve written. Is it really good enough now for someone else to read? To be invited into your world? To judge you?

You set to work on edits and the first draft becomes a second draft and then a third and you learn to maybe start naming the files after the draft version instead of the date with no year attached because maybe the editing will take you more than a year and you might be left confused as to which is your most current draft.

Once you have a version that has been scrubbed so hard its skin is red, torn in places, no longer as shiny and smooth as it once was, you have to take the biggest step of all: you need to trust others to read it, to give you feedback, to help you make it even better.

And you have to give them time. They are your friends and family and they have lives too and they want to help you but it is a lot to ask someone to be this beta reader for you, and so you give them all the time they need, and some of them get back to you with incredibly helpful notes and others never get back to you, and that’s totally okay too, but at some point you need to call it and move to the next step on your own.

You now need to trust yourself that you are the absolute right person to bring this book out into the world.

 

The Spork In The Road

You are in this small circle now and you are loving that you can talk to other people and reference your characters by their first names and laugh about their foibles, dream about their futures. It’s a comfortable cul-de-sac and it can be easy to stay here for a while. You took a big brave step and landed in a safe space. But you cannot stay in this circle forever; you’ve always been aware of the small roads that branch off the end of your comfort zone, roads that lead into a dense forest, and you are not quite sure which one to take because you can’t see where they each lead.

This is when the idea hits you that you cannot be the only one facing these choices and that maybe, if you widened your circle just a bit, there might be others with flashlights, maps and breadcrumbs who can help you find your way through the forest.

You take to social media in search of these people, knowing that you can also help others, even if you are just a link in a chain, keeping your flashlight on the person ahead of you while others are doing the same to you from behind.

And you realize that to get to where you want to go, you need more than just a twitter account you randomly vent into, you need a home base, a place where you can rest, keep your things and where you can build a sense of community around you and your work, because you know you don’t want to do this alone anymore.

So you put together a blog and a website and you start to actually tell people that you are finally, at the age of 44, ready to take this lifelong dream of getting published seriously. You’ve had a career outside of writing that, unbeknownst to you, was secretly preparing you for this. You learned about business, about marketing, about leadership and how important it is to cultivate and nurture a sense of community, of family.

You traveled, saw parts of the world and had experiences that most people only dream about, and this has given you a rich life from which to draw experience and inspiration.

Everything you’ve done up until this point in your life has prepared you to finally leave that cul-de-sac for good and head out into the forest.

And you’re finally brave enough to let other people help you find the way.

 

You and I

And here we are.

Maybe you can relate to some of the journey I’ve shared above; hell, maybe you can relate to all of it. If so, did we just become best friends?

Life has given me an opportunity to try and make this dream of mine come true and I am not going to let it slip away from me, not again.

Welcome to my site and my blog. My home-base. My supply station that holds the creature comforts I’ll need when life in the forest gets tough, which I know it will.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope you’ll also feel at home here and if you are on the same road I am, please hit me up on twitter and consider joining the newsletter list as well so we can help each other figure out the way forward together.

One word at a time.