First of all, let me make it clear it’s not over, even though it is SO over. I am waiting to get the copy edited ms. back with questions/suggestions/non-negotiable demands etc. But that said, I woke up this morning wondering what the hell I was going to do with myself. I had been working every day for at least 10 hours a day pretty much since July 15. I felt as if I were in some sort of surrealist prison camp. Each day I was led out to a giant field of granite boulders and I had to reduce them all to dust with my cracked and splintery sledge hammer, and not even a pair of work gloves. God forbid if I were to get too sick to swing the hammer and face-planted in the dust. The guards would just drag me off, leaving only a faint trail behind them.
When DavidandBarry told me in July that they needed the book by Nov. 1, I didn’t believe it was possible. And then a couple of weeks later, the deadline was amended to written and EDITED by Nov. 1, and at that point I KNEW it wasn’t possible. But I really wanted to do the book. So I thought, “Well, fine, I’ll just kill myself for three months, and then it will be over.”
But it’s one thing to anticipate killing yourself with work in the abstract, and it’s another thing to actually DO it. When I said this to my good friend the Vonster, he said that he once wrote a book in FIVE weeks, and not only did it literally nearly kill him, but ever since that effort, he’s been a little weaker and less creative than he had been before.
It remains to be seen if I will suffer that same fate. All I can say for now is taking time to eat lunch sitting down feels wrong, very very wrong.
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