Why do we have such dysfunctional relationships with our creations?  I understand the first bump in the relationship road.  When you’ve just finished your piece and you are still on that emotional high from creating.  And then you let it sit a few days or few weeks and go back to edit, and realize it stinks.  It’s the worst thing you’ve ever written and there’s no hope for it at all.  There’s the first bump of many and one that makes sense to me.

As you edit you find tiny gems that make you breathe a little easier and think maybe the piece isn’t as bad as you thought.  Those gems are so important.   Without them we’d probably throw away work that should be kept.  And so it goes, through finishing editing and thinking it’s great again, to sending it out to a trusted first reader and retreating back to thinking it’s horrible again, until the reader comes back with honest, constructive comments and you feel hope again…every writer knows what I’m talking about.

I have made the decision, after a lot of thought and a lot of going back and forth, to e-publish a story.  I’ve debated all the pros and cons, and realized one of the biggest reasons I had to not e-publish was ego.  As in not feeling like a real writer until a big name publisher wants you.  But I don’t want to get sidetracked by that topic here.

This week I’ve been reviewing the cover art, which is a whole blog post on its own, working on the formatting, and all those chores.  I’ve been through loving this story, hating it, editing it many times, having it read by professionals as well as trusted friends, and spending way too much time studying each and every comma.  I also went through radiation treatments with this story and learned a lot about writing from that process.  Never, never try to edit or write when you are hunkered down in survival mode because you’ll just end up redoing everything.

What I have discovered today, is that I am way, way past the love/hate relationship with this story.  This story now feels like a young adult who has lived at home too long and needs to move out and live without the parent.  It’s time to let go, time for the story to move on without me.  Time for it to stand on its own and succeed or fail on its own merits.  I realize that if I don’t e-publish this story, it will live out the rest of its life in a file on the laptop.  And I don’t think that’s why it wanted to be told, why it haunted me for so long, begging to get written.  I think this story wants to be released, too.

Or maybe it’s just me looking for reasons to get rid of it once and for all.  Once it has moved out, I will love it again.

The Memory Keeper cover