I’ll tell you straight up–I’m terrified.
I can’t put my finger on exactly what, but I’m glad I gave myself a goal and am just chugging towards it, because otherwise I think I might just sit here and talk myself out of things.
K., as I knew she would, just fucking got into it with the manuscript, finding typos and bad word-choice and places where the subject and verb don’t agree and so on and so on. And it’s a lot, but it’s not too much, you know.
But I do feel like I’m going to throw up. I’ve been trying to put a name to it. Do I think it sucks? No. I like it. Am I worried other people will think it sucks? Yeah, but I also am not sure “I didn’t like it” is the end of a statement on a book. I mean, I really didn’t like Adam Ross’s Mr. Peanut and I am still thinking about it and still ranting angrily about it to friends and still think it’s exquisitely written. I think that book is a smashing success that really pisses me off. I have half a mind to email him and demand answers.
I read it a year ago!
Good lord, what’s “I didn’t like it” in the face of “I wrote something that’s going to make you angry for a year?”
You know what I’m getting at?
And here’s the thing–I have this terror, this driving fear saying “Oh, go ahead and turn on the TV instead” and when I try to figure out what’s behind that terror, I can’t really put my finger on it.
Just that, once I’m done with this, the next step is to hope people I don’t know think it would work as a salable book.
And that scares me.