I finished a book. Hurrah! It’s done! Right? Er, no. There are proposals to write for the next book. There are revisions. There are copyedits. The final proof. The cover. The release and promotion. The book is dead for about five minutes before it comes back to life to reign again. And while all of that is cycling, there is writing the next book.
The creative life cycle is a funny thing. There’s no done. There’s only done for now. Sometimes I think the only sense of completion comes from doing the day’s work, whatever that might be, even if it’s just catching up on paperwork, filing, and email. Or hitting a milestone like the end of a chapter, the end of an act, or the completion of a proposal.
And yet, I can look at the bookcase that holds my author copies and see that I have been busily producing. I’ve finished a book, and another, and another, and another. I’m currently at work on my 5th book for St. Martin’s, while #4 is hitting the shelves. And backlist titles continue to be reborn and live on.
A book can live forever, or at least as long as the paper lasts. Thanks to electronic versions, even that is no longer a limiting factor. We have books that were written far back in history; The Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Hamurabi’s code of law. Barring an event like the burning of the great library of Alexandria, books can live on and on, long past the time the hand that wrote them returns to dust.
The book has a life of its own, and past the time it moves out of my life, when it is out on the shelves and there is nothing more to be done except jump for joy if a foreign rights or other subsidiary rights sale happens, it remains a living thing. The words written can speak to readers I never meet or know of.
I’m going to finish another book soon, and when I do, the book will be dead. For about five minutes. Long live the book!
No related posts.
Books do live forever.
It’ll drive you a little crazy
if you think about it too much.
Buddies of mine never finish writing
books for that exact reason.
If the book is to live forever,
they want it to be perfect.
Oh, I can live with that. Sounds easy compared to being a mom.
Kimber Chin, no writer is perfect so no book will ever be, either. But you can strive for good and memorable. Perfectionism will kill creativity stone dead if it gets the upper hand.
Kimber An, I swear nothing in writing or publishing is ever as hard as parenting.
[...] I’m at RTB today talking about how a book never really ends. [...]
So true, Charlene.
Just when I thought I could plow headlong into my current manuscript, I got the ARCs for my December release, which I’d ‘put to bed’. Now I have to read it for the dreaded ‘last chance to catch errors’ pass.
Terry, it’s never over.
Well, once it hits print, the chance to tinker with it is over…
Of course, then you have (ought) to do promo and all of that marketing stuff…
Gail, exactly! Bookmarks, signing, and so on.
What? What? You can’t go into bookstores and write in corrections?
Oh man, the worst part about finishing a manuscript (for me) is realizing that now I have to write a synopsis.
I just think: Geez, I already wrote the damn thing, why do I have to write it again, even if it is condensed?
I hates synopses, precious, I hates them.
Terry, it’s amazing, but they frown on that.
Magdalune, I always write the synopsis first. It’s the whole “eat a live toad in the morning and nothing worse can happen the rest of the day” philosophy. Get it over with and then you get to have fun.
Charlene, I would totally do that… but the way I write, I have no clue about whole sections of the short story or novel, so writing a synopsis is impossible until the manuscript is complete.