031: Eleventh-Hour Creative Gremlins

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Hello. Hello my friends. I am coming to you today just moments before crossing the manuscript marathon finish line. And in honor of one of my values for this show, truth while it's fresh, I have to report to you the 11th hour gremlins that have come in and thankfully since flown out. While working on these final, final, final edits, you hear a lot of writers and creatives and teachers talk about how intimidating the blank page can be, the blinking cursor. But what about the very end? What about just before marking something final, especially something as permanent as a book? There is no going back and editing 10,000 printed copies. I've spent about 25 combined hours reviewing the final typeset manusc in Acrobat Reader, which is apparently what everyone's using these days. So you no longer mark it up by hand. You use Adobe and they have commenting and editing features. So I've spent 25 hours in the last seven days and that's doing a super duper close read of every word, punctuation mark, hyphenated word. It's so intense. And I had waited to do this close edit. I actually thought I didn't need it. Ha ha ha. What a joke. Of course I needed it. So I ended up finding 628 things that needed to be changed at this 11th hour. While I was doing this close read over the weekend, I left a Marco Polo to one of my favorite people. We've been in a little accountability duo all year right since the pandemic started and this is what I said.

Oh my goodness. This is my emoji for the full on crisis that I just had mid reread of my I am on page 69 and there are 182 comments. I have found so many mistakes.

And I'm like disgusted rereading my book. I had a total and utter breakdown to Michael. I was like I don't, I don't want to be doing this. I don't want to be rereading this. They're all going to hate me. I'm not supposed to change anything at this point, but then again, I better change what I need to Change.

I'm bleary eyed. I thought I was further along.

And to add insult to all the injury, it's that thing of taste and skill. It's like, I have a certain taste. And then rereading my book in the close read, it's just that feeling of being, like, disgusted.

And knowing how much I can't change. And it's like I'm just probably too close to it.

I can't believe it. I can't believe it. And I just didn't sit my ass down and do a close read until right now as it's about to be final. And I don't even know what I'm gonna do. I don't know how many. I'm gonna have to call Jessica. I. I can't believe it. I just can't believe it. I just can't believe it. And I'm like, I am fixing errors, definitely. I found New York Post wasn't italicized. The name of a TV series had quotes. And instead of italics, there's many words that have dashes where Merriam Webster and Chicago Style has eliminated dashes from a lot of words. Like reorganize, reorg, reconsider, reimagine.

And mine are still in.

I had two different styles for AM and pm. I had lowercase and I had small caps. I'm just sharing these with you as.

Things to look out for.

And beyond that, there's word choices that.

Like, I just need to fix to make the text clear.

And I. I don't know, I feel like I'm leaving you a confession right now of my total and utter breakdown. And also, like, a confessional of I'm sorry to all the book gods that I've made so many edits at a stage where I shouldn't, but I have to. The worst part is that once Jessica implements, I'll have to check it again because, you know, with at least gonna be 300 comments, if not more, it means that there's very likely to be a mistake in implementing it. It just feels so never ending. Omg. Omg. Omg. It's so much easier to just ship it and not do this close read. But I just can't. I just, like, can't live with myself if I do that. So, anyway. Oh.

I told this to Michael and I even said it on podcast that sometimes when you're done with something, you feel disgust because you're so close.

You know how much more work it.

Needs, but you're too tired. You need to release it.

Nothing can be perfect I wouldn't create anything at all if I was waiting.

For it to be perfect. But nonetheless, it feels like the stages.

Of grief, all those stages of the creative process.

Gosh, thanks for listening to my Polos. Talk to you soon.

Yep, that's what I sound like when I'm totally having a breakdown at the 11th hour. I think part of it is just total exhaustion from giving this project everything I've got. I talk in the book about the difference between hard work, capital H, capital W, and hard work, work that is rewarding and in a way I call it easeful work that it doesn't mean you're not giving it everything you've got. But there's something that's in flow about it. The whole book centers around this diagnostic. Are you in friction or are you in flow? So as much as I love this project and I am so committed, I am also obsessed with every last detail. This is just something about my personality. I like big picture visioning, but I also get absolutely obsessed and committed to making sure that every detail is buttoned up. Just this morning, after I did, after I finished that review that you heard me talk about in the Polo, I found just an egregious mistake. I called standard operating procedures SOPs, which is the most common term in the genre that I'm writing about, business systems and operations. Well, in the book I called it Standard Operating Principles. It's just incorrect. And this is a basic term. I would have immediately lost so much credibility with readers to get something so straightforward for this genre. Incorrect. And nobody caught it. It's not a typo that you would see, especially a copy editor, if you've had multiple copy editors at every step along the way. But you kind of have to know the nuances of the material. And I only caught it this morning. I'm recording this episode on a Wednesday. I finished the final review on a Tuesday.

And then I was.

My brow was sweating. I was like, I was like, oh my God, I can't believe I caught that today at this. This is beyond the 11th hour. This is the 11th and a half hour. And just mortified at what else could I possibly be missing that I am going to cringe over? Or I think about the one sentence that those one star reviewers are going to pull out to skewer me with. In 2008, I read a delightful book by Rick Carson called Taming youg Gremlin. The original was written in 1983, the year I was born, but I somehow stumbled upon it, maybe through cti, through coach training, and just love this book. The illustrations are so creative. CTI Coaches Training Institute talks a lot about gremlins and inner critics, and while I don't like to set up that we are at war with a part of ourselves or myself, I think of it as domesticating dragons. Like let's be friendly with all the parts of ourselves. I'll read you this one passage from Taming your Gremlin because I actually think that the 11th hour gremlins that sort of rushed into my psyche while he was finishing the final edits. They're not necessarily a part of myself anymore. I've done so much personal development work to get through that. But they certainly can come in at big projects and especially at the end when the work that I'm doing, there's no hope of changing it anymore. So here's here's what Rick Carson has to say. Your gremlin wants you to feel bad, and he carries out this loathsome pursuit via some sophisticated maneuvers. By reliving the past, worrying about the future, and analyzing the relationships between all sorts of people and things, he convinces you to waste your time. Your gremlin wants you to believe that he has your best interest at heart and that his primary purpose is to serve and protect you. His motive is actually much less honorable. He is intent on making you miserable. Your gremlin's caution about life and living is inordinate and his methods of control are overzealous. He is not merely your inner critic or simply a part of your psychological makeup. Your gremlin is not your negative thoughts. He is the source of them. He's not your less than positive past experiences. He uses them. He's not your fears. He taunts you with them by creating the horror movie about your future that you sometimes watch. That just about sums up these 11th hour gremlins.

We'll be right back just after this.

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You heard me say in the audio clip the difference between taste and talent. And oh, my goodness, it's so confronting. Reading the final, final draft. That concept comes from a quote from Ira Glass. So he did a series on storytelling, and this is part three of four. I'm going to read you. It's kind of a long excerpt, but I don't know if I have the rights to include the actual audio because there's also a really cool vimeo for this called the Gap by Ira Glass. He says nobody tells people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there's a gap. For the first couple years, you're making stuff. What you're making isn't so good. It's not that great. It's really not that great. It's trying to be good. It has ambition to be good, but it's not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. You know what I mean? A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing that I would like to say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making was not as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it felt short. It didn't have the special thing that we wanted it to have. And yet the one thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you're going to go through it right now, if you're just getting out of that phase, you got to know it's totally normal. The most important possible thing you can do is a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work, put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month, you know you're going to finish one story. Because it's only by actually going through a volume of work that you are going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while. It's going to Take you a while. It's normal to take a while, and you just have to fight your way through that. Okay. Thank you, Ira Glass, for these amazing words.

Thank you.

So many of you know, I'm a total bookworm. I have thousands of books in my house piling all the way up to the ceiling. I read voraciously. I haven't been able to read too much this year while working on free time. I know what a good book is. And when I was reading my final manuscript, I just had this moment of panic, like, this isn't up to the standard of every other book I've ever read in my library. There were five types of gremlins that rushed in over the weekend. One, Jessica, the typesetter and the team are gonna hate me. They're gonna be so mad at me. They're gonna think I'm being difficult, that my edits are never ending. I really. I have this thing as an author. This is my third book, and I worked with traditional publishers for the first two, and now I'm working with Idea Press, an amazing independent publisher, and I just want to be liked. This is a personality flaw, to be honest. I want to be liked. I want to meet my deadlines. I want to be a good partner to work with. And I worry that when I had all these extra changes, everyone was going to be mad at me, and yet they kind of needed to be made. It's not worth printing all these books knowing that there are things that we can do to make it better. So by the end of the process of doing the close reread, I actually felt happy that I made the book better in 628 little ways, even if it's removing an obnoxious comma, changing an exclamation mark to a period, noticing typos, noticing things that weren't that were hyphenated when they shouldn't be. I mean, all kinds of stuff that I was finding. The second gremlin was, I should have done this two weeks ago, but in fact, I was too tired from moving out of the Airbnb back to where we live in New York City. I just didn't have it in me. I had life stuff going on. So I started beating myself up. I should have known better. I should have done this weeks ago. I can't believe I saved the close read till this late in the process. What's wrong with me? The third kind of gremlin was that I was trusting other people to do this close read, when, in fact, at the end of the day, Any creative project you undertake is yours. And as incredible and as talented as everyone is who is a part of it, no one will care more than you. And nobody will see the things that you see with your vision and and your attention to detail. On the other hand, authors sometimes miss a lot. We are like going delirious. I used when I sent my friend that polo, I used the spiral eye emoji of like this is how I'm feeling. And so we can miss a lot too when you're too close to the work. The fourth gremlin was that gap between taste and talent as we talked about. And the fifth is that I'm worried the book is not good enough to merit the outsized risks that I've been taking on writing and printing and launching and going the independent route. And I've put everything on hold as I shared in the episode on long term singular focus. I've put so much on hold to give this everything I have. And is that the right move? I don't know. I don't know. So just this rush of doubt, am I doing the right thing? Am I taking on too much risk? I don't know. So all I could do, true to the Anne Lamont book, Bird by Bird, all I could do was just sit there in my misery honestly try to remember to enjoy the process and keep going page by page, word by word. No matter when the gremlins rushed in, the one star reviewers, or me feeling like I had too many changes, I had to just keep going. The only way out was through of finishing this manuscript review. Some of you might know that when you record your voice, some people don't like listening back or hearing the sound of their voice. So some people don't even like taking selfies or seeing photos of themselves. They get kind of self critical. So reading a manuscript is the same thing. It's like, oh yes, I'm so proud of it. And also yes, it's so painful. Don't make me read it again. It's been so many read throughs. Imagine picking a book off your shelf and reading it 15, 20, 25 times. At some point you're ready to put it down. But alas, the team was really understanding. Jessica, the typesetter is incredible. Jane who helped with some last minute copy edits. Incredible. My dad has done around. I mean it really does take a village. And the only way out is through. I'm throwing you all the cliches right now and also I just want to leave you with that Ira Glass message that for all of us. Sometimes our taste is still greater than our talent. And that's for me, what gives me the courage and the impulse to create is that I am inspired by so many books and authors that have come before me and that have been such a salve in my own life. I'm recording this on the other side of those 11th hour gremlins. I have no doubt a whole series of launch Gremlins will come in, will come in when that time comes. But for now, I hope that sharing this with you gives you a little encouragement to keep going and make it through the dark night of the soul you might experience or encounter. Or the dip, as Seth Godin calls it, for any of your own big projects. And if you have a friend that is just crawling across the finish line of a big creative effort, send them this episode. Let me know how you handle your 11th hour gremlins. And thank you so much for being here listening as always. Have a beautiful rest of your day, everybody. Happy Gremlin Taming.

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Thank you.

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