Like an aging mirror

 

It’s been long enough that I can’t remember my childhood holiday breaks, to compare them to the ones flashing by now. Checking my calendar, I feel a little betrayed by the me of last month and my then work-focused mindset. The way the days land, this will be the first time ever either being in school or working in education that I won’t be off for two whole weeks. I don’t need a keen memory for that.

Despite the betrayal, the same me from last month also committed to working on book 8, and taking a big chunk out of the work needing doing. And despite the betrayal, I will be honoring that. Around that same ambitious time, I opened my amazon dashboard, the cover for book 7 hovering in a different window, ready to put out another book. When I tracked the breadcrumbs, I was surprised to find that I hadn’t even finished with book 6. The frustrating interface that has haunted me these past few years was staring me in the face, taunting me with how the image I had submitted was microns too wide and too short. And while things were coming back to me, I also remembered that before I could make the paperback in kdp, I had to use a different website to do the ebook formatting. I groaned.

I had a similar moment just the other day when, in honoring the commitments of that less tired, more ambitious self, I was working on edits. I opened the file from the previous day, found my place, and started reading (the metaphor I’ve come to like best is painting a surface: I don’t start from where I stopped, I go back before then and work on layering, diligently working on the effect being even and uniform; when I change a sentence, I try to be very sure that it fits in the paragraph, on the page). It wasn’t long before I was frowning, and then grimacing, and then inwardly screaming that the work I had done previously was not saved. It was a setback.

At some point, I had been wrestling with the paperback for book 6, and for one reason or another, I had just given up. I had given up for such a duration that I forgot to circle back around to it. And now here I was, confronted again by a version of me I did not recognize. However, I can happily report that I did, eventually, get back into it, reach out for help, get things going, and now book 6 is available in print.

The plan moving forward is that the ebook for book 7 will be available this break, and maybe if my timing is effective, the paperback will be right behind it. The plan also calls for doing a lot of work on the rewrites for book 8. I have a verbal commitment from the artist to come together for one more cover, and I even have a few ideas about how to make the best of the series. I guess I’m still pretty ambitious. I hope the me of weeks from now will look back on who I am in this moment fondly.

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