Am I sanguine?

I have just sub­mit­ted a new man­u­script to my edi­tor. If all goes well it will be my sev­en­ty-sev­enth pub­lished work. Those of you struggling—and it is a struggle—to pub­lish your first book, that num­ber may seem out­landish, and you must think my mood san­guine. The num­ber may be absurd, but my mood is any­thing but san­guine, san­guine mean­ing : “Of per­sons and expec­ta­tions, etc.: Hope­ful or con­fi­dent with ref­er­ence to some par­tic­u­lar issue.” In fact, I am anx­ious, which, to stick to the dic­tio­nary, means, “Trou­bled or uneasy in mind about some uncer­tain event; being in painful or dis­turb­ing sus­pense; con­cerned, solic­i­tous. unsure of the outcome.”

The truth is my deep involve­ment with writ­ing a book can, and usu­al­ly, does, cre­ate a kind of selec­tive blind­ness to what I have cre­at­ed over these past months. Thus, after read­ing the MS to my wife, she might say (and has), “Wait a minute! How does X know that Y …?” Or, “What­ev­er hap­pened when Z …? Or even, “There is no log­ic that A does B, when C …” Most dread­ed (yet wel­come) of all, “That Chap­ter 2 real­ly is dull. Can’t you cut it …?”

It is my expe­ri­ence that when I share my work with someone—a reader—I imme­di­ate­ly see my work in a dif­fer­ent way. Call it defen­sive. Call it self-crit­i­cism. Any­way, I sud­den­ly am aware of the short­com­ings of the work.

I sus­pect that this shift from a self­ie approach to cre­ation as con­trast­ed to exter­nal objec­tiv­i­ty is oblig­a­tory in the cre­ative process. I am will­ing to trust myself only up to a cer­tain point. And that point is when some­one else reads my work. Such as—my editor.