The Weight of Waiting

If you can recall your anticipation as a child, waiting for Christmas morning to arrive, you can understand my title, The Weight of Waiting. Feeling the burden that you as a child carried as days seemed to drag when you could finally see what was wrapped and tucked beneath the Christmas tree. That is feeling that I am going through right now.

Over the last several days, I have read and reread the proof for my next book as I tried to eliminate any and all errors. The mistakes can be missed or misplaced punctuation, skipped words, or even improper spacing. I eliminated the ones that I found. Sometimes I change words to further clarify what I am trying to share with my readers. It isn’t an easy task to have you see what I actually see in my mind, then write it down to fully convey that vision to you. I spent most of the past two days adjusting the proof and rewriting it to get the bulk of the work done before submitting it again.

With design help for the cover, I changed the front cover presentation to have a black border and a black colored spine with white lettering. It isn’t exactly what I wanted, but neither was the cover for my last book, the Christmas series of Tommy Two Shoes Mysteries. My editor had the first two books done in subdued hues with the mismatched shoes as the identifying brand, the familiar recognizable trademark for the series. My editor decided to do the Christmas cover in bright colors. That in itself didn’t bother me, but she changed the mismatched brown shoes to a pair of brightly colored, mismatched bedroom slippers. She completely disappointed me, making the change without consulting me.

Because of that, I decided to try my hand at self publication. It means more work for me and possibly more mistakes in grammar etc. but the stories are still very entertaining and hopefully pleasurable for you to read. I’m also trying to keep costs down so my readers can afford it. That wasn’t happening with my other books. The price that I pay seemed to climb each time I ordered through her, that cut into the little profit that I made on each book.

So, this is my first attempt to publish on my own without the middle man, or should I say middle woman? I resubmitted my finished book to Create Space this morning. Now, I have to wait as they review it and let me know if it is fit for publication and when it will be ready for me to sell.