It has always surprised me how different an experience seems once you've done it. Beforehand there may be trepidation or eager anticipation, all sorts of expectations and projections that probably have nothing to do with the 'event' itself.
Possibly, the only experiences I've gone into calmly - and positively - are speaking events. On those occasions I either have notes with enough space for me to get 'out of the way' when inspiration strikes, or else I am confident in my subject matter and trusting of my audience to the point where I don’t use notes.
I recently completed a crime mystery, the third in a series. Buoyed up by that final rush to the creative finishing line I thought I'd cross another leviathan off my list - a short story collection.
To share a masterclass in procrastination, I won the cover design for a planned anthology back in 2014, from https://www.goonwrite.com.
There were three reasons for putting off the endeavour:
1. I didn't think I had enough stories.
2. I wasn't convinced that those I had were good enough.
3. I thought it would be a lot of work.
When I went back through my folders and my trusty spreadsheet I found plenty of stories. Many of them had been published elsewhere in other anthologies and on websites. Reading those stories again, I recognised that the quality was patchy is some of them but each story was a memory in ink and an attempt to bring an idea to life. Sometimes I had written to order for a competition. Other stories fell from the sky on to the page, like a gift from the Gods. Some were, frankly, hard work. One or two did not make the final list.
It was a lot of work. It took ages to edit and proofread each story (with some very minor rewrites). Choosing an order was an exquisite torture as well, trying to balance story length, genres, titles even, over the whole book. And now it's done, I have what I believe is the best version of each of them (at time of writing!). They exist as a collection now, so there is no reason to rework them. I’ve set them free and that has set me free to work on something else.
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0FTT8X2B4
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FTT8X2B4
