In my quest to accomplish my goals for this month, I need to publish Gone Missing and Night of the Nothing Man on Amazon.
My biggest obstacle to this is formatting the stories to be published on Amazon.
It’s my least favorite chore when it comes to self-publishing. I can do it, but I don’t like to do it. The act of following the directions so I can properly format my manuscript awakens some sort of perfectionist Kraken in me that makes my life difficult. I’m not saying that I shouldn’t strive to do my best; but that bit of perfectionist in me denies that I’m capable of anything close to best. So when the Perfection-Kraken comes out, the task becomes about six times harder than it needs to be.
And then there’s that tendency I have from childhood that demands I get everything right the first time. I need to be able to know it and do it immediately. The fact that I’ve done this before (even if it was a few years ago) amps up that demand. I shouldn’t have any trouble with this because I’ve done it before and once was enough. For whatever reason, this line of thinking also leads me to believe that there are no do-overs. That it is essential that I get it right the first time because I won’t be allowed to fix anything, which isn’t true.
Finally, there’s my paranoia that if I do mess something up, I won’t be able to fix it and it will break the delicate balance of the Universe and the blood rain will be all my fault.
Okay, what I’m getting at is that just knowing that I have to format a manuscript for self-publishing sets my anxiety choo-choo in motion, pulling cars and cars full of procrastination.
It’s only until I make myself do it that the anxiety abates and by the time I’m finished, I’m kicking myself for not getting to work on it sooner.
It was worse this time around because all I had to do was some minor changes and do a little battle with Night of the Nothing Man‘s table of contents. All told it took me about an hour, maybe an hour and half to get both of them done and uploaded.
Yep. Two weeks of anxiety and procrastination for less than two hours work.
At least they’re done now.
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