Finished the first pass draft of the cancer log, finally. Woot!
It took me much longer to do this than I expected. Edits were only about 15-20 hours of actual work, but I think I needed to be in a pretty emotionally stable place to work on this book, and it’s been a long pandemic, people.
I feel like I’ve just started to get back some of my base emotional fortitude. It was so depleted for so long during the pandemic. I’m still having some trouble making myself deal with basic things sometimes — like yesterday, I just couldn’t face dealing with e-mail or Slack; I knew I should, and I just…couldn’t. Sigh.
Instead, I cleaned house for most of the day, including the writing shed, which had gotten pretty cobwebby, yuck. Nice working in there today; hoping to get back in the habit of mornings in the shed every day…
Still needing a lot of recharge time, but there’s a month of summer left, so I’m hoping I can do 3-4 hours / writing each day, and spend the rest of the time in more low-key recharge activities. Cleaning the house, yes, but also puttering in the garden, crafting, swimming, hanging out with friends, playing board games with the kids and Kevin, etc.
I’ve gone through the whole cancer log manuscript and made minor clean-up edits; I also added a brief prefatory note and some final thoughts. There are three more steps I’d like to do before handing it off to my editor:
– go through the log entries and figure out which ones have pictures that are particularly helpful / illustrative; I think we can include at least a few of them
– go through the comments on the entries, and see if any are particularly helpful; if so, I’ll ask for permission to include them as annotations
– decide on a title. I’m currently leaning towards just calling it “Cancer Log,” which is maybe not the most inspired of titles, but it’s accurate — that’s what it is, a pretty bare-bones documentary of what the process was like for me. I could add a subtitle, I suppose. Thoughts welcome.
Progress. I’d love to finish this book and hand it off to Lori Perkins at Riverdale Avenue Books by the end of the week. We’ll see…
