It’s not real until you hold it in your hands….

I got the test book for The Ancient Egyptian Daybook in mid-December. That was when the project started to feel like a real thing, beyond the ebook that had already been released to the Kickstarter and Egyptiandaybook.com backers. I even took a photo of it, to remember that moment, when the project went from my head to tangible reality outside of my own brain.

Today the book took another leap into reality, as 25 boxes (of a total of 32) were finally delivered after being delayed in Portland’s freak snowstorm week. Here’s a quick view of all three forms of the backer project: coilbound, paperback, and hardcover, respectively.

There’s always something bittersweet about the day your books arrive from the printer. It’s exciting to unwrap them for the first time and realize you’re surrounded by boxes of little piles of reality representing the inner work you’ve been doing for months or years (and in this particular project’s case, decades). A bit later, you’ve already started the dissociation process, finding mistakes that you didn’t find in the many editing passes you made, sorting all of the things you must do now like marketing and shipping and cleaning up from the project that’s now over. The adrenaline of “when will it get here?” wears off, and you’re left staring at yourself and your work and wondering what’s next already. Writing never stops. It just gets printed now and then, and then you find a new project to do. Those people who compare the writing and publishing process to giving birth to children must be thinking about the days when women pretty much got pregnant over and over until they died.

There I go, taking the romance out of the metaphor….

Really though, Warren Ellis sums up the finishing a book process better than anyone has.

I have plenty to keep me occupied, with a dissertation proposal defense and quals work in this first half of 2017, and writing projects that were set aside for the Daybook now returning to my mental horizon. I’m also working on another Kickstarter for the accompanying perpetual calendar that goes with the Daybook, the one that’s already in process and should be released in the next couple of weeks. Definitely not sitting still or mourning the loss of the project that I once thought that once I finished it, I’d never have anything else left to say.

At the same time, it’s always a little emotional to watch another baby walk out the door. Be kind to this one, if you will. It was with me a very long time.