Watch Out, He’s Got a Binder!

I’m kicking it old school* these days.  After months of fits and starts trying to work through the final edit of my MS on my laptop, I decided to print it out and tackle it the old fashioned way. I’ve got my red pen and my rainbow of highlighters, and I’ve been tearing through paragraphs like a machete-wielding psychopath at an abandoned summer camp.

This is the final stretch for me: I’ve decided to self-publish, and I’ve targeted early 2012 for release. Is my book good enough? I don’t know, but it’s been complete for nearly two years now. Since then I’ve cut out nearly a quarter of the text, changed names, races, concepts, eliminated characters, and pretty done everything I can to squeeze as much life out of every paragraph and every sentence as possible.

Now it’s ready for the world, no matter how much I might want to lock it in an airtight case and bury it under seven miles of concrete. It’s a book; it needs to be read.

Is it good? Again, I don’t know. I like it, but I’m biased. It’s hard impossible to read it at this point with anything close to objectivity, and despite what people say, it’s pretty damn hard to find objective readers, too. It’s not so much that putting out a bad book worries me, it’s that I haven’t done everything I can tell the story of Thea, Talus and everyone else in the most effective way possible.

So that’s why I dusted of the old binder** as well as any marketing ability I might have tucked away in the dark recesses of my brain. I’m going to publish. On my own, no less. Very soon, I’ll even have a date set. No going back.

My book might suck, or it might be good but completely ignored. But If I don’t risk those things, it’ll sit in a file collecting virtual dust until it disappears, never having seen the world. I don’t want that to happen.

It kind of feels like jumping out of a plane. I know because I’ve done that, too.

I think this is scarier.

*kids still say that, don’t they?

**three rings to rule them all.