Proof, Positive

So you work through your manuscript. One draft, two, three drafts. Perhaps more. Probably more, many more. Stephen King says that he never lets a novel leave his desk until he's written at least nine versions. You're not as good as King but you've still been working on it for months, maybe even a year or more. The basic plot or the design of some characters may have been floating around in your head for a decade, but finally it's down on paper (or at least on laptop screen) and it's the best that you can make it. You've pared, honed and polished it and agonised over every word until you've got to the point where you're just tinkering and thinking about putting things back in that you removed several iterations ago. That's when you know that you're not making any further progress; you're just procrastinating. It's time to let go. It's time to send your baby out into the world. It's time to publish your novel.

We'll skip over editing and proofreading (they're obviously unimportant these days given some recent novels that I've read) and move on to the next step. Somebody formats up your novel (or you do it yourself if circumstances dictate) and you wait. Just like I've been doing for the last week.

I knew what it was as soon as I heard the thud when it fell through the letterbox. I wandered over and there it was on my doormat, a small brown cardboard package containing my soul. Or as some would call it, my debut novel. To most people it wouldn't have looked like much but they didn't know the amount of work that had gone into it.

I gently tore the strip that held it secure and paused. I always say that the day before the football season kicks off is the best day of the sporting year because my team doesn't have any points, doesn't have any victories and doesn't have any goals but what it does have is hope. At that moment they could be the best team in the land, as could any other. They haven't had a chance to let me down yet. It was the same with my book. Right now, with it still enclosed in its cardboard package, it could be a future bestseller. It could be the best novel ever written. It could even sell enough copies to pay my gas bill. It carried hope. The minute I looked at it, just like the moment that Sheffield United kick-off every summer, there would be the probability that it wouldn't match up to my hopes and dreams. I'm sure that there's enough in those last few lines to keep a philosophy course going for a term or two but sadly I live in the real world. It was time to look at my work.

It was beautiful. It was exactly as I'd expected it to be. I was so pleased that I posted a selfie on Facebook with me holding the proof copy and grinning inanely to camera. It even has sixty-three 'likes' at the time of writing. Two hundred and fifty pages of perfection. Perfection, that is, apart from that missing full stop on page forty-eight. But I could live with that. And I could ignore the fact that the chapter headings weren't quite as large as I'd anticipated. Nobody else would care. They wouldn't be bothered with the fact that the margins weren't quite as wide as I'd hoped. The original size was only in my head. Just like the fifteen or so other things that were just a degree or two away from perfection or at least, the vision of perfection that had been playing in my brain for months.

So as far as most people would be concerned, there's nothing wrong with it, and there isn't really. There's nothing wrong at all. It's just that it could be more right in quite a few ways. How many minor niggles make up a major problem? How bad does it have to be before I reject it and make further changes? How many people, apart from me, will give a flying purple damn about that missing full stop?

And yet…

I've waited a long time for this. I can wait a couple of weeks longer.

© Shaun Finnie 2013