I had a dream about Rachel Singer Gordon the other night…
I told her I was done with my book and she shook her head and told me to keep editing.
In spite of this dream and the nagging feeling that I missed 1,000 little things while editing the book, I printed it out and will be mailing it to her on Monday.
Here’s the Damage:
- Approximately 100,000 words
- 1 Printer which now sounds like a cat being tortured and won’t actually print anything
- My poor wrist tendons
For past few weeks I literally did nothing but work on the book. It was book, sleep, book, sleep. I had a sudden burst of insane energy due to the fact that I really just wanted to be done. I’ve never felt so motivated. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy writing the book — I did. It’s just that I’ve been breathing, sleeping (and dreaming about) this book for the past 8 months. I haven’t had a life. There have been many weekends where I literally did not leave the house. There were some days where I barely moved away from my computer at all. So towards the end, I started to imagine the idea of not having to write a book anymore. And the idea was very appealing. To be able to sit down and read a non-library-related book? To go away for the weekend without bringing my computer or chapters to edit? Even the idea of cleaning the house seemed appealing to me (in theory Adam, in theory!). Of course I still have a chapter to write for another book (on technology education in LIS schools) that’s due soon, but after writing 100,000 words, this shouldn’t be too difficult. Besides, it’s a topic I have definite opinions on.
I’ve learned a lot in this process, though I don’t know how much useful advice I have to offer. Here’s what I was able to come up with:
1. Don’t spend more time thinking about how it will get done than doing it. When I first started the project, I got a little too giddy about creating an organizational system. I love buying office supplies (new pens… mmmmmm…) and I love creating organizational schemes for things. But it’s very easy to start overthinking this stuff. If you’re spending more than a couple of days figuring out how you’re going to organize your research and your writing (or on how you’re going to decorate your binder), you seriously need someone to slap you back to your senses. I totally identified with Merlin Mann’s “Perfect Apostrophe” podcast (which is hilarious and something any procrastinator will identify with).
2. When you plan out how you’re going to get this book done, remember who is writing it. I am not a procrastinator. In fact, I am the sort of person who always assumes that I am going to get a terrible illness halfway through a project or that my house will burn down along with my computer and all of the backups of my book (even if one of the backups is in another state). So I always pad my schedule for getting things done with a lot of extra “disaster time” at the end. Which is probably why I’m done with my book weeks before it’s actually due (yes, I know, I’m paranoid and crazy, but it works for me). I know myself, and I know that I will be less stressed if I build a lot of time into the schedule for disasters. I created a really demanding writing schedule for myself with a ridiculous amount of time leftover for editing. There were times when I got behind and I would pull a few days out of the editing timeline because I knew I could. I didn’t beat myself up when I just got sick of writing for a while. I didn’t beat myeslf up when I didn’t work on the book for two weeks. I know my strategy was weird, but it worked! I never felt too stressed by this huge task. That’s why you need to create a schedule based on your personality. Do you work best on weekends? At night? Do you get motivated under pressure or do you crack under pressure? Do you need someone to put a gun to your head to get anything done? Think about how you work on projects and build your schedule based on that. If you know you won’t stick to it, then don’t bother creating it. By now you know how you work and it’s not going to suddenly change once you get a book deal. So be realistic. Maybe some people can even write the book without checklists and planning, but I wonder if those people actually get their books in on time (and I’ve heard some horror stories about people who didn’t — yikes!).
3. Take advantage of high-energy times. You will be at your most enthusiastic when you first embark on the project. Yes, you may have 8 months or a year to write the book, but the best thing you can do is jump in and get as much done while you still have that enthusiasm. There were moments in March and April where I really had to force myself to write while I was flying through the book in November and December. Capitalize on that initial enthusiasm, because many months later, you may want to think about anything but your topic.
4. Read your publisher’s submission guidelines. And read them again. Seriously. Make sure you know how they want things done in terms of fonts, margins, file naming conventions, screenshot guidelines, citations, captions, etc. It’s a real pain in the behind to make changes once you’ve written hundreds of pages. Curly quotes were my undoing, though there were plenty of other more minor things I didn’t pay attention to until I had written most of the book. If things like this are not spelled out anywhere, ask these questions early on.
5. Get a straight answer about permissioning. When I was talking about the book deal before the contract had been written up, I asked if I needed to get permission from people/companies for the use of screenshots. Basically the answer I got was “maybe” and “some people do, some people don’t.” Ok, but what should I do? And really, I haven’t ever been able to get a straight answer. As you can guess, I’m a little neurotic and I don’t do well with uncertainty, so I ended up writing to a whole mess of folks from MySpace to Slashdot to Aaron Schmidt to get permission for screenshots (only one company said no and they had a good reason). I heard from just about everyone now and the few I haven’t heard from I have diligently tried to contact via various means, so I feel I did the best I could to get permission. But let me tell you, it was a lot of work and I still have no idea whether it was necessary or not. So find out if this is something you have to do. And see if you can negotiate into your contract for someone at your publishing company to do it, because it’s a big pain in the behind and is a lot to keep track of when you’re already keeping track of a lot.
6. If you’re writing a book on technology for people who may not already know about the technologies you’re discussing, you may want to get someone to proofread your book who also doesn’t know much about technology. I never felt more confident in my chapters on blogs as when my mother said that she understood and liked them (thanks mom!). Sometimes you take certain things for granted or you assume that concepts are easy to grasp that may not be. Showing what you wrote to someone who knows nothing about it is a great test to see if your explanations are understandable. RSS was definitely the biggest challenge for me and it’s the chapter I am the least pleased with.
7. Social bookmarking software is a gift to writers. I don’t know how I would have kept up with all of the research I was doing without good old Blinklist. To be able to take all the articles I want to read for chapter 5 and tag them as “ch5” made my life so much easier (and yes, I know I ruined the folksonomy for other people). Another tool I really liked was stikipad. It’s a wiki-like application that allows you to easily create wiki pages and to-do lists. So I used it to keep track of what I still needed to edit, which interviews I’d gotten back, which screenshots Adam or I had done, and the permissioning process. It’s not exactly a revolutionary tool, but it worked really well for my purposes (and would probably be great for people writing books together). I love all these cool wiki hybrid productivity tools that have been coming out!
8. If you don’t have a super duper crazy mega laser printer, don’t print out more than 400 pages in the matter of an hour or so. It may say that it can do 20 pages a minute, but that doesn’t mean that it can do 400 pages in 20 minutes (as my husband insisted). Ours actually did do 400 pages in under an hour, but after that it started sounding like a cat being tortured and completely stopped working. We ended up having to buy a new printer because I think I must have melted something in there. D’oh!
9. It’s worth investing some money in things that will protect your wrists. I’ve learned that I’m a really prolific writer. I have much more of a problem writing 700 words than I do writing 5,000. I love to write. The only parts of me that protested writing as much as I did were my wrists. My left wrist has been hurting on and off for the past six months with all the writing I’ve been doing. If you’re planning on doing some major writing, make sure you take good care of your wrists, because they may not be as enthusiastic about the project as you are.
10. If you can’t multitask well, then avoid doing it. I was totally right in my last post on the book about only focusing on the writing while I was in that phase of the project. I had no idea how much effort it would take to edit, deal with getting permissions, deal with screenshots, citations and other stuff. If I’d been working on that while I was writing, there was no way I could have focused on the writing. But that’s me. I guess I need to focus on one mentally taxing thing at a time. I’m sure other people can mentally multitask better. But if you can’t, take my word for it, don’t distract yourself with other parts of the project while you’re writing.
I’m still a little bit in shock that I wrote all this. I was looking at the giant pile of papers on the dining room table that was my manuscript thinking how did this happen? It still hasn’t quite hit me that I’m done with it and I’ve got a lot of anxiety about giving it up, even to a brilliant editor like Rachel. I just can’t believe I’m done. But when I’m hanging out at the Farmer’s Market in Montpelier tomorrow morning, enjoying the Vermont summer sunshine and eating yummy organic treats, I will definitely feel a difference. 🙂
I’ll add to this list if I think of any more useful advice. For now, I think I should give my poor wrists a rest. They deserve better.
YAY! Congratulations on crafting a veritable mountain of text. I can’t wait to get my hands on the book.
As a longtime RSI sufferer (now mostly under control, thank goodness), I will recommend some action and (hey, I’m a librarian) a book.
Action: Sit at your computer, hands on keyboard. Check that your head is not leaning forward. If it is, change your workspace until it’s not. Check that your shoulders aren’t slumped forward. If they are, change your workspace until they’re not.
Check that you are not holding your hands at an angle to your wrists (either to the side or up and down). If you are bending your hands up or down, that means your keyboard is the wrong height; fix it.
If you are bending your hands to the side (usually outward), this is very common and very dangerous. Try a Microsoft Natural Pro keyboard; if it doesn’t help, talk to me and we’ll get you looking at a Kinesis.
The book — okay, two books. First book is Damany and Bellis, It’s Not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome! (Because it’s not.) Second book is Davies, The Trigger-Point Therapy Workbook.
Take that nice book advance to a good massage therapist. It’ll help. Therapist should focus on your shoulders, upper arm, and the area just under your elbow, believe it or not.
Congratulations on finishing! And as a lifelong procrastinator (and a sometimes writer of prose), I’ll take any advice I can get. Thanks!
Having written a book for ALA Editions myself, I can totally relate to this post!! A hearty congratulations!
Hooray! Congratulations. There’s nothing better than being able to see a finished product after so much work. 🙂
Congratulations! It must feel great to be done. When we see the result in print?
Let me add my congratulations along with everyone else 🙂 I look forward to seeing it in print!
And in addition to Dorothea’s good suggestions for wrist protection, I can recommend the “keyboarders” at mousemitt.com. I couldn’t have typed my last book without them, my wrists were hurting so badly. I own two pairs, one for work (I bring them to the ref desk and put up with the strange looks) and one for home.
Good advice, Meredith et al. A couple more points in re RSI: if you are short, find a box to put your feet on or some other means to ensure your feet are flat on the ground and that you are not balancing on the edge of your spine. Take five-minute breaks every hour, even if you don’t want to; you can still work–just not at the keyboard. I went through a bad RSI problem just over two years ago, and let me tell you: it arrives in a sudden and goes away slowly. It gets awfully hard to write when your hands don’t function correctly.
On the very-long-manuscript-print-problem, boy do I hear you… I’m thinking I’ll print the final draft and then the final-schminal copy of my thesis at Kinko’s. They have hefty big ol’ printers that are spozed to do this work. Even printing out my first draft of my thesis in small chunks took forever.
Some people write best in coffee shops. Me, I don’t get that, but I’m surprised by how many people tell me they need to go to Starbucks to write. I like that very early chunk in the day, before the emails start flying.
I agree on not getting stuck in the pencil-sharpening stage. On the other hand, some of that procrastination is my “steeping” phase. As one of my teachers said this spring, if you need to clean your house to get started on writing, then by all means clean your house. Just don’t be cleaning your house a week later. 😉
CONGRATULATIONS!!!
Ok, and in case that last post made it sound like I type with my feet (I wish!)… if your feet aren’t flat on the floor, and you’re balancing on your bottom, you compensate by leaning on your wrists (unless you’re on an airplane, in which case you just squirm in pain for many hours).
Congratulations Meredith, and I’m REALLY looking forward to the book! 🙂 It was good to see tip 3 in particular – an important lesson for me (a chronic procrastinator) to learn…
That’s one impressive stack o’ paper. Congrats!!
Congratulations here too.
I believe I managed to stave off impending RSI by switching to MS Natural keyboards a few years ago; I know that my wrists used to burn after 90 minutes at the keyboard, and I never have problems anymore. (Warning: Some people take to the Natural, some people can’t use it at all–and most people who aren’t touch typists find the Natural wholly confounding. Microsoft has a $20 “curve” keyboard that may offer some of the benefits of the Natural–but even a hotshot wireless Natural keyboard/mouse combo, like the one I’m using at home now, isn’t that expensive.)
I’m a little surprised that you needed to print out the final ms. as opposed to just emailing the chapters. I guess every publisher works differently. And there certainly is a sense of satisfaction in having that pile of paper.
Congratulations!!! I can only imagine the sense of relief you must feel in looking at your big stack of paper that will soon be a book. I am looking forward to reading it…
Thanks y’all! I never had a problem with my wrists until I worked in circulation at a public library while getting my degree. I would spend a few hours each day just opening video boxes, sensitizing or desensitizing them and possibly rewinding them, and then closing them again. It put a lot of strain on my wrists and I actually left the job because it was interfering with my ability to perform in my classes (I did my MLIS online, so it was ALL typing). Ever since then, when I write a lot, I end up with sore wrists. My set up at work is fine; I have a foot rest thingy under my desk (great for shorties like me!) and a gel wrist rest (for keyboard and mouse) that keeps them in a good position. My problem is that I write best laying down, so I lay in bed with the computer on my lap or stomach when I was writing the book. Not exactly the best set-up, but I just have a difficult time being creative at a desk. I have my own method of typing (never learned the right way, but I’m still fast), so I’ve found those natural keyboard very difficult to use. I definitely agree though that it’s not carpal tunnel and that I should try changing my writing habits for the sake of my wrists. Thanks for the mousemitt suggestion, Sarah! They look cool!
Rick, I’m not 100% sure when the book is coming out though I’ve heard talk of very early 2007. I guess it depends on how quickly the editorial folks and all can get things going and how much editing my book needs. Walt, yeah, they asked for an electronic copy and a hard copy (of everything, even the screenshots). It wasn’t that big a deal (other than my poor printer, which seems to be recovering. It prints now but is louder than it used to be). Karen, definitely take your MFA stuff to Kinkos or something! It’s not worth risking your printer over.
Yay, Meredith! Although, if people are going to dream about me, I’d like to be a little less severe… :).
Meredith, many congrats. I know you are happy to have this done and we will be happy to have you back at full force. We missed you. (well, I did anyway!)
Meredith, you’re an inspiration. Congratulations.