20100727 Giving Birth

Over the last week, I went through a marathon of activity, with one goal in mind – to get my book ready for proofing by Sunday, July 25, 2010.  And I made it.  There was a toll, by Sunday noon I had a migraine from eyestrain and lack of sleep.  I have a fulltime job to pay for my creative activities, so pulling double duty to fuel my dreams is a given. I am sure many of my acting and filmmaking friends can relate.

Birth involves pain and sacrifice.  I had to push myself out of the comfort zone of endlessly tweaking a little here and there in a futile effort to achieve perfection, and get down to brass tacks and push this baby out into the cold cruel world. It’s tough, because there are all sorts of bullies on the schoolyard ready to poke fun at the strange new guy.

You don’t think that’s a part of it? Trust me – if you are on an endless treadmill of adding this and making a slight change to that, ask yourself what you are afraid of. If these incremental changes are taking longer than it took to write the first draft, then you may be in the grips of the fear of letting the world see what you’ve been touting as your great masterpiece. 

In your mind’s eye, your work is a grand, fresh idea, and perfectly executed. When it hits paper or is in the editing bay, taking your ideal concept to physical form is a harsh reality. Alfred Hitchcock once said the film was never as good as the script, everything after that is a series of compromises. The same with other works of art.

Anyway, during the last week I taught myself enough about typesetting and the use of Adobe InDesign to produce a very nice manuscript of a quality worth printing.  It’s not perfect, but I am very proud of the accomplishment. The proof copy will arrive on Thursday (7/29/10), so I am excited. I will write more about how I got to this point in later posts.

Mark E. Poole