Steps to the leap

How do you know when a book is ready for publishing? It’s a difficult question and one that I am asking myself daily as I finish up the Slaying of the Bull (book 1 of the Tocharian Gospels Series). There are many steps in this process, and all of them have a hazy finish line. The first and probably the hardest is to finish the story. Sometimes this is easy, and sometimes it’s like pulling teeth. When you’re in the zone, and words pour from your pen (or keyboard), it’s absolute bliss and hours fly by and pages stack. But getting into that zone is not always smooth sailing, and it’s highly susceptible to distraction. Oh look, its a beautiful day out! What did Trump just say? Honey, can you do me a favor? You get the gist. Knowing how little or how much to tell is also tricky, and sometimes you’ll find that it’s too much. Killing babies time and yes, it’s as terrible as it sounds. Finishing the story often takes longer than you think, it never comes out as expected, and it won’t be as good as you thought. Until the polish!

This leads us to the second step. Once you get the story down, you have to go back through and polish. It takes a fearless, but cautious hand to polish well. You want to make it shine, but don’t want to polish it away to naught and lose your voice. The first read-through is one of my favorite steps. There is still writing involved, but it’s not as stressful and full of the unknown as the actual crafting of the story. You have the benefit of knowing the general path and the characters have become real people and the setting real places in your mind. The doubt hasn’t crept in yet, and the story is fresh. You’re also able to add all the spice and details that make things pop. The crap that is on the page starts to seem like a real book, and that’s exciting.

By the second or third read-through, all that magic is gone. The doubt begins to creep and you start to discover plot holes. You’ve read the book several times, and nothing is fresh. This step is probably the most critical part of the process, but it happens when you have the least stamina and attention span. Many put books away to sleep at this point so they can come back to them with a fresh mind. But this can also lead to promising potential works just sitting in the drawer for years (hence my own journey). Once and a while, you’ll find a plot hole, and some of the excitement returns as you add a chapter, but then it’s back to the doldrums. I usually do the last read-through out loud to make sure the pace is right. Finally, you begin to feel the story is complete, but the work is not over yet.

It’s time to switch from an artist to an editor, and it’s quite a shock to the system. You take off your writer’s lens, and you take out the editor’s microscope: commas, sentence structure, pace, vocabulary- the grammar works. I usually pass it through spell and grammar check first to do the major clean up, then a couple passes through Grammarly, and lastly, a final pass read through to make sure the AI didn’t miss anything or correct something wrongly.

After all this, you start to feel things are Kosher. You’re feeling pretty confident in your work, and you start to hesitantly let others read your baby. Boom, your world comes crashing down as you begin to get feedback. No one wants to hear their baby is ugly, but if you have good friends, the feedback will be cutting. So, its back to the drawing board and the process starts anew.

Lastly, you do the final read-through. This is where I am now with the Slaying of the Bull. The story is there, the editing is as good as it will get (you will always miss something), you’ve received feedback, swallowed your pride, and may have rewritten large portions, you’ve edited again, and you have a manuscript. It’s time for the mock-up and getting the raw manuscript to the final book form. This is much easier than it used to be, but it still takes time and may require another read-through to make sure things look good on the page, and the transfer didn’t cause any corruption. Finally, after months of writing, reading the book 6 or 7 times, and having a few breakdowns, you get to the moment of pressing publish and unleashing this beautiful beast on the world. Thus, begins a new journey, and that’s promotion (a topic for another post).

As you can see, writing is not just putting words on-page, and anyone that says that their published book is just a direct conduit from the brain to paper is a liar. It’s not glamorous, and there’s a lot of work involved. Hopefully, after reading this, you’ll have a newfound appreciation for the book in your hand. Remember the author and this struggle, before thrashing the book and if it was good, give credit where its due! Not all authors go through such a rigorous process, and the newer this is to some, the less they understand that it’s a requirement (but they’ll learn). For many of us, these steps are relatively consistent. The Slaying of the Bull will be my 7th time getting to the publishing moment and my second time doing it for an eBook. It’s been a blast, but I’m so looking forward to moving on to something new! Next stop on the Tocharian Gospels‘ journey, Vril.

Cheers!