The Space In Between

I’m in this weird space in between things. Like this liminal space between urgency and nothingness, and it’s a daily struggle to not just let myself slip into the nothingness side. 

All it takes is one day to lose focus, and suddenly the urgency drifts away, and the things I want to do become distant dreams again. I trying really hard not to let that happen.

On the Inkitt front, there is a bit of a lull. I’m not actively posting any writing there, so I’m trying to catch up on stories in my Currently Reading and TBR lists, and stay engaged. I don’t want it to float away like a balloon I let slip from my hand.

It’s okay to be between stories, right? Now that I’m finished posting Sixty-Six, I don’t have to start immediately posting something else. I can just enjoy what others have written for a little while, until I'm ready to contribute something new.

On the self-publishing Maladaptive front, I’m busy. But also, it feels like I’m not busy. Like there are all these “hurry up and wait” things. Like there is this ever-growing list of tasks I need to complete, and every time I strike one off the list, I find out I did it wrong, and now I have to add it back to the bottom of the list while I finish all these other tasks first.

To put it mildly, I’m totally overwhelmed by this list of things that I need to do that will all eventually come together but at the moment, I can’t see how, and it feels so far away. It puts me into a state of thinking about doing these things, endlessly, while moving incrementally forward and feeling like I’m not accomplishing any of them.

This is all so very vague and cryptic, I’m aware. To put it in some kind of concrete terms, I thought that I was at the finalizing my book cover stage. I took the manuscript, and I plugged it into a book formatting service (Reedsy Studio) to get my page count for the spine width, and I gave that to the cover designer (Getcovers) along with the book size (5x8) and they made me a beautiful book cover that I love.

It took a couple of tries. The first version wasn’t quite right. Well, it didn’t look right to me, but for all I know, it was the more marketable version, and I turfed it to get them to do what I wanted. That might have been the wrong call from a marketability standpoint, but it just didn’t have the right vibe to me. But I gave them my feedback and they did what I asked, and I think it turned out gorgeous.

Now I find out that I may have underestimated the page count, because I had forgotten to add in things like the copyright page, and my author bio, and stuff like that. Maybe it won’t make a huge difference, but I wish I had realized I was missing those things before getting the cover designed and paying for it.

So now I’m in this phase where I’ve added in the front and back matter, and going through the manuscript, word by word, line by line, to fix any errors. I decided to do this using a screen-reader, because when I read with my eyes and mind, I insert missing words and correct mistakes. I basically don’t see them. The screen-reader is helping me catch a ton of errors I had no idea were in there, which is amazing, but also kind of scary.

And honestly I wasted like so much time trying to find a screen-reading app that sounded natural enough that I could actually listen to it. One that actually pronounced words properly instead of phonetically. It was one of the most infuriating side quests I have ever been on. Not kidding, I had a pocket of about 5 hours to spend on revising the manuscript on Saturday, and I spent 4 of those 5 hours on the edge of a meltdown because none of the apps I was using would do what I needed them to do in the way I needed them to do it.

Eventually I figured out how to add a more natural sounding screen-reading voice to Microsoft Word, and that is doing the trick. So I’m finally moving forward, but Maladaptive has 48 chapters plus the prologue. So it just takes the time that it takes, and I also have my day job, and what about exercise, and the aforementioned reading, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

And then there are all these other things. Setting up the KDP and D2D accounts. Filling out all these other fields, like genre tags and keywords, descriptions, etc. And… A+ Content? What the hell even is that? And do I want to try and get ARC readers/reviews? And how do I determine what my launch date is? And how do I time KPD and D2D so it launches at the same time? And what if I forget to order proof copies?

And what about all the other things I don’t even know about yet, that I seem to keep stumbling upon every day, adding to the list? And the fact that every time I try to do something, I end up hitting all of these roadblocks, and end up having to spend a bunch of time figuring out how to get around them, only to have more pop up in front of me like I live in a video game or something.

One thing at a time. Yeah right. That seems like the best way for me to miss something critical in the big picture.