4:45 am: I woke up after sleeping on the couch. Family is still in town for the holidays and so my wife and I have been bunking up with our kids. I usually opt for the couch so I can fall asleep listening to audiobooks. Last night it was Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.”
This morning I started off in the right groove. I got up. Said my prayers. Got my coffee. And got to work.
This morning that meant making a few small edits on the manuscript for Beatrice Clover, the novel I’ve spent the past four years writing, alternately as a novel, or as a television show (In 2019 pre-pandemic I developed Beatrice Clover with Academy Award winner, John Ridley, who wrote Twelve Years A Slave).
In the end, the story came into the world as a book.
Beatrice Clover was published on Thanksgiving Day this year.
One of the benefits of modern technology and of publishing on a platform like Amazon, (and one of the things I will be talking about on this blog), is the ability to update your manuscript to correct for any errors that still show up (despite professional edits and beta readers). So I spent the first hour of the day making those corrections. This inevitably leads to some small tweaks to the final two chapters; a word here, a word there. This is the downside to the technology and the digital platforms. There is always something to tinker with.
However, there needs to be a point where the book is done. It’s as good as you can make it. Now it’s time to publish and go write the next one.