This week has been tough.

Last weekend, I finished editing DON’T SAVE ME. Hooray, right? Not so much. When I exported the final draft as a PDF and an EPUB out of Scrivener, I discovered all of the text formatting had disappeared. Okay, not completely. Some of it did, some of it didn’t; and there was no pattern, no rhyme or reason.

All the text formatting was haphazardly applied. Every bold, every italics, every heading, every block quote. It was chaos. Sometimes, it was there, but often it wasn’t.

It took about an hour of Googling and scrolling the Scrivener help forums to discover that it is a known bug and that the software’s compile function is rather lackluster. Which is to say, you’re better off exporting your draft clean and applying any text formatting in another piece of software like MS Work or Google Docs.

So that’s what I did. I removed it all and compiled a clean manuscript in Word. Once the document was ready, I began the excruciating process of applying all of my lost text formatting to the new 124,000+ word document.

On Wednesday, I hit a wall. It turns out you can only read your book – with your characters and plots and syntax – so many times in a short period before you begin to feel embittered toward it. In my case, that number of times is three. This formatting pass marked the fourth time inside six weeks. I was reading DON’T SAVE ME, and I hated it.

Hated it. It made me nauseous and angry; not the work, but the words. Suddenly, everything I was so proud of looked horrible. I wanted to kill it, cancel the release, delete all copies of the manuscript, exit all social media, and forget my dream of being a published author forever.

Dramatic, I know.

But something miraculous happened when I switched back to DON’T LOSE ME, the unfinished follow up to DON’T SAVE ME, and started reading the first draft from the beginning. As I read and watched my characters grow and find love with each other, I discovered that I’m not bad at this. Not great – not yet – but not bad.

Maybe it’s because I have an easier time empathizing with Matthew and Taylor than I did with Donna and Kellan. Maybe it’s because I’ve actually been to New Orleans, where the book is set, where I’ve never been to where DSM largely takes place: Ibiza. Or maybe writing DSM taught me some stuff, and I was just a better author when I started fleshing out DLM’s outline into an actual book.

Maybe all of the above.

Anyway, I am now 38 days from DON’T SAVE ME’s release. And it’s time to get back on the horse, so to speak. Maybe someday I’ll return to Kellan and Donna’s love story and do it justice, if I haven’t already. I don’t have a full “author support network” set up yet – my acknowledgment section is rather short – but I’m not doing this for riches or fame. It takes time.

And if you’re reading this – or take a chance on my debut novel – thanks. It means a lot to me.