It’s baaack!

The title and cover image have been finalized. The book tour is shaping up. A photographer has been hired to make me look … creative? mysterious? authorial?

But the galleys are back with me, which means the book itself isn’t quite finished and I get to make changes to the manuscript of DAY AFTER NIGHT. I’m looking for typos, of course. I have found a few, which means there have to be more that I’m not seeing. But the truth is, it’s hard for me to see the book at all.

“Manuscript dysmorphia” is the clinical term for my condition. The diagnosis was coined and delivered by one of my writing clinicians, Stephen McCauley. This is a condition not unlike body dysmorphia, in which the patient has an extremely distorted view of him/herself, or in this case, her book.

I’m working steadily, 20-30 pages a day to meet my deadline. That’s all I can sit still for. I’m changing a word here, a phrase there, checking for internal consistency. Thanks to the “word search” function, I can hack away at my worst excesses of repetitive language syndrome. (“Of course” is a problem for me.)

But please, don’t ask me how I feel about it. Is it brilliant? Does it suck? Manuscript dysmorphia strikes again!