Damn, I'm Good

I've spent the last week reading over the galleys for my new mainstream novel, If These Walls Could Talk (coming to a retailer near you the end of May.)

Watching me read galleys is probably pretty comical, with all the changes in expression. I grimace when I see my name misspelled on the copyright page, twist my lower lip nervously when I see that I left out the name of some important folks on the Acknowledgments page, and roll my eyes and utter all kinds of annoyed expressions, from the mild ("Oh, for crying out loud!") to the profane (What the fuck . . . .?") when I see that changes I requested in the copyedit stage have not been made.

But through it all, I am struck by the words on the pages before me. They're good, damn it! And they all came from li'l ol' me. This is a good story I've managed to put together from a teensy spark of imagination. And I don't impress easily.

While I'm writing, I tend to agonize over the words I choose, the phrasing I use. Part of me is yelling to get on with it already, that nobody's going to notice how well that sentence is constructed. But when I read over the finished product, I'm suddenly glad that I rewrote that sentence five times because I didn't like it. I'm glad that I did that paragraph over and over, right up until it was time to submit, improving it each time. I'm glad went over that sentence in my head as I drifted off to sleep instead of counting sheep.

Will anyone notice? Probably not. But I know. And when it comes to a job well done, sometimes that's enough.

God, I love my work.