Can you imagine having a baby once a year...for 21 years?
Doing an annual publication is a little like that. When you're up to the final deadline you just can't do anything else. If you are to eat, someone must provide. No cleaning can be done, no mundane things. You feel lucky to have time to go to the bathroom! Any moment you steal for yourself is a moment you might have caught a typo that will come back to haunt you all year.
This year, in the midst of all the furor, a tropical storm named Olaf dumped rain on us, and a full moon made everything just a little weirder. Oh, and did I mention we're buying a condo?
Like giving birth, nobody can do it for you. You have it all in your head and it would take longer to explain what needs to be done than to do it yourself. But I was so grateful to have my friend Jan proofread and find mistakes I made years ago and never noticed. And Mark is going to come tomorrow morning to help with the crucial Table of Contents (People have told me they wouldn't be in our book anymore because the TOC listed them on the wrong page.)
Anyway, tomorrow morning, we email the galleys for our 21st edition to the printer and I start to pray. This new printer, in Oregon, is somehow going to send us proofs so we can look it over one more time before it goes on the press. Our last job, at a press we had used for 16 years, was so bad it looked like it had been turned out by a crew of stoned highschool dropouts at midnight (which might actually have been the case since the press was closing down and the regular crew had already been laid off.)
Now after about six weeks of sitting at the computer all day (I know, there are a lot of people who do that their whole lives) I am going to allow myself a day of postpartum depression. Having published one thing or another since before I turned 30, it's an old familiar feeling. I will stay in bed, read, sleep, eat decadent treats I normally wouldn't allow myself, and answer calls from people who didn't get their copy in on time and will now tell me it's my fault. And people who just got around to looking at their proofs and want me to know it's all wrong. And others who would like to be in the book, is there still time? When each edition first comes into my hands, I'm usually reluctant to look at it for a day or so, just knowing the mistakes will jump out at me like tarantulas. Yuck! Then curiosity overcomes doubts and I look through it like a new mommy counting fingers and toes. I already know it won't be perfect, but after last year, anything will be an improvement.
So, folks, if you've harbored fantasies of being a publisher, this is what it's like. Bueno suerte! It's very much like giving birth, and soon you'll forget the painful part, at least until the next time.