Waiting

An artist friend once showed me a piece he called, “Waiting.” It was a series of overlapping, elongated images that stretched from one end of the canvas to the other.

The painting fascinated me, and I couldn’t stop looking at it. “Oh, that’s just how it feels,” I had said.

With six kids, you’d think I’d be used to waiting. It takes nine months for a baby to be born, a couple years (give or take) to wean, potty train, etc. I’m still waiting for some of them to clean their rooms (I’m not naming names).

Publishing a book, if you’re going to do it right, is an awful lot of waiting.

Yes, I know some vanity presses guarantee a published book in eight weeks or less, but I think skipping a comprehensive editing cheapens any story. In Bryony’s case, significant molding and shaping of a six hundred page manuscript doesn’t happen overnight.

Each round of editing has taken approximately sixteen weeks: eight weeks on my editor’s end and eight weeks on mine. In between, we wait. We are busy with other projects, but nevertheless, we wait.

And wait.

And wait.

And wait.

One day the wait will end, and I’ll be holding the official, published book. Further changes will not be possible. Haste makes waste, they say. It also makes a ruined story.

So, Im okay with waiting. Sort of.