Earlier this week, I sent the book files to the printer. It took me quite a bit longer than I wanted.
I knew running a Kickstarter at the front end of the school year would be a little dicey time-wise, but getting the files out was much more challenging than I imagined.
Even though I felt the book was in very good shape, it still needed one more solid editorial pass. It got two.
The first pass was from a good friend of our family, Sarah, who did a great job on the language and grammar. When we first moved into the house we live in now, she was the first to greet us with these homemade fried donuts and apple butter. We were like, “Is this heaven?”
The second pass came from my wife on both the text and images.
She was brutal.
Joanna is my queen editor person. She and I met in college in the art program, and she’s no slouch when it comes to visuals. She is also the most ruthless person when it comes to my work.
This isn’t to say she isn’t encouraging; she is, in fact, one of my biggest encouragers. But she is also straightforward in a way that most people don’t see. Very direct when it comes to my work. She’ll look at an illustration of a person I’m drawing and just be like, “That doesn’t look like him.” Boom, mic drop.
She looked at the book prototype once it came in and was very cheery about it. She was like, “This is awesome - so full of life and joy, and your best book!” I was on cloud nine.
But then, before I shipped it, she demanded she look again.
Here are some quotes from her close to 100 comments:
“Consider making ears more pink like in the elevator page. I can't tell if this is hair or ears. If it's hair, make it a different color then the hard hat.
What is this white disk under her chin?
Refine hands on these bottom two guys and Julia.
Tell me more about what he's doing with his hand here. Is he wiping his brow? Saluting? Is he bald?
This tangent is a problem for me. Consider showing blue guys left arm below.
There is no hand here and clean up bits throughout book.”
This lady's hands needs some work and the next guys raised left hand too.”
Dude. You’d think I couldn’t draw hands.
A few nights before deploying the files, I’m pushing through these corrections, desperate to get this book shipped to stay within a moderate range of our dates. I made 95% of the corrections, which, to be fair, are all valid. And yes, I was pretty lazy with some hands. There are like... hundreds of them in the book. This is not an exaggeration. Some of them became a… suggestion of a hand. It’s like I’m telling the reader “Hey listen you know what is at the end of an arm, why do I need to keep showing you?”
So it’s around midnight, and I’m sitting on the couch, and I’m whining like a bratty child.
(Say the following line in your mind, but act like you are tired and really winded… and about five years old.)
“I freaking hate this book. I’m so done with it. I can't do any more changes. I don’t want to look at it anymore… Joanna….”
Joanna is just giggling at me.
I think there is a point in the creative process where you are just done looking at something. It doesn’t mean the work isn't necessarily good; it just… needs to be done.
The book is in the best shape it’s ever been. I know it won’t be perfect. I’ve never made anything that is. But it’s off to the next stage, which has never felt better.
P.S. I just let Joanna read this blog post, which she laughed at hysterically and then said, “I need to look at this for grammatical errors.” Which she thought was even funnier.
I’m not making any more corrections. I refuse.
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