It's less than a week until I release the e-version of my book, and I have reached a plateau of uniform chaos.

We're running way behind schedule. We've already postponed the release of the print version. Now my husband, who is my editor, formatter, and ebook expert, has suddenly become swamped in the last two weeks with articles and conference presentations, he's in negotiations with a major publisher and the inventors of a new technology, and he's also handling an unexpected sideline fracas. I've finished the self-editing and sent PDFs off to my mentors for blurbs, and now of course I keep finding the most insane typos in the PDF I sent. It's as though I didn't even read it. And this week two of my favorite clients just sent me new pieces of their ms's to work on, and because that's the work I love most I am shamelessly neglecting my book to work on them.

Plus, we have mice.

This is the pressure a traditional publisher can take off your shoulders: the pressure to make that book happen. Because, along with the freedom to do anything you want with your self-published book, comes the responsibility to do it. Nobody's going to schedule your editing calendar for you. Nobody's going to hire a cover designer or assign an in-house marketer or put your book into the distributor's pipeline to make sure it gets on the shelves on time. If your release date rolls around and past, and you have nothing to show for it. . .well, them's the breaks.

So I'm going to post an excerpt from my chapter on Despair here, to remind myself I already know about the special despair of being a writer, I know it's very real, and I know I will get through it it. I'm pretty sure. I hope.

Returning From the Dead

What happens if you survive the Self-Loathing Phase of Revision? Do you come back as a Writing Zombie? Actually, I’m tired of zombies. I wasn’t really into them in the first place, and for some reason they’ve just exploded into a kind of unbelievable dawning—of the. . .uh, dead. . .

So let’s call you a Writing Mummy instead. Staggering hither and thither in your unwinding windings, exhaling a little cloud of dust like Pigpen with each attempted breath, grasping blindly at everything you run into (because of course you can’t see through your bandages), leaving a little trail of bits of tooth and bone in your wake.

That’s pretty much how it feels, isn’t it?

You stumble into the kitchen in the morning, where some compassionate loved one has left the tea pot simmering, pour a cup, and dump it down your mouth opening into your stomach cavity, where it siphons onto the floor between your skeletal feet.

You turn and drag yourself up the stairs to your office. Your manuscript is waiting. You collapse into your chair, several limbs let go their grip on their neighboring bones, and they fall off. It’s morning, and you are now legless, one-armed, and drenched in libation. Not so different from a regular workday, after all.

That’s right. It’s still a workday.

I’m now going to give you some strict instructions, and woe unto you if you ignore them: DO NOT touch your manuscript.

As my son used to say in his piping, dictatorish, Mary Poppins voice when he was about two years old, “No, no!” Leave that poor sucker be.

I know everyone tells you to keep at it: “Write every day!” “Successes are people who never accept failure!” “Have faith in yourself!” Hogwash. Forget the faith in yourself. Don’t be a raving idiot. You found errors too big to be fixed, plot devices like snapped masts, lack of motivation to make Beckett weep. What do you want? A frontal lobotomy? (Yes.) Use a little common sense. That manuscript sucks.

Put it in the bottom of a drawer and close it. Stop tormenting yourself.

Instead, spend some real quality time using both hands to lift first one shin bone and then the other—yes, even if you have to lean over and fish them out from under your chair—up to rest your poor bulbous heel bones on a nice comfy stool. Prop the ends of the broken shin bones on the corresponding knee caps. It won’t hurt them. Adjust your pelvis carefully so you can lean back without dropping all your vertebrae in a shower of hollow clatter. That’s right. Prop your broken armbone up on your shoulder socket, and rest the elbow of the whole arm on the arm of your chair. Lay your finger bones out across your keyboard. See what a nice pattern they make? Like the spokes of pretty little bats’ wings.

'Let your jawbone hang down on your chest if it wants to. It’s not bothering anybody.

Now just sit. Be a skeleton. Feel your eye sockets. Big, aren’t they? Feel the roots of your teeth in your jaw. You’ve got a lot of them, don’t you? Breathe through your nose holes. Two’s a pretty good number, eh?

Your sternum rises and falls with each breath. Your collarbone tips gently forward and backward. Every now and then a vertebrae settles.

You keep thinking your whole spine’s going to come tumbling down all over your lap, spilling ribs you’ll never get back, but it doesn’t. Your broken bones stay balanced on the joints they’re propped up on, your feet might fall over, but they don’t fall off. Even your skull manages to stay upright on your wimpy, scrawny excuse of a neck.

You keep thinking the white electricity of humiliation is going to finish you off, but it doesn’t.

Another breath, another rise of the sternum, another tip of the long axoidal collarbone. And back down again. Over and over. You can forget about the story you’ve been so immersed in for so long, the characters you’ve come to love, the brilliant plot points, the gorgeous tone, the vast, complex, shifting, colorful world those characters inhabit. You can forget about wanting to throttle every single person who ever raised an eyebrow and said, “. . .a nice hobby—”

You can forget about waking in the middle of the night last night to weep helplessly over the agent queries you’ve spent so many heady hours crafting and polishing and sticking—all ready to go the instant your novel was ready—into their sweet, pristine little envelopes. You don’t have to look at them there in their place of honor on your desk. You don’t have eyeballs anymore.

You left your inner organs in jars somewhere in another room. You’re not going to need them.

Letting your sternum rise. Letting your collarbone tip. Letting your sternum fall back again. Letting the collarbone settle. You can spend the day this way. The light through your windows appears on the wall, moves slowly and with complete indifference across it, meets the floor, crosses that, slides up the other wall and eventually disappears, all without seeming to care whether it makes it all the way or not. Your eye sockets get bigger, get smaller, become rounder and less round. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference. You still have all those teeth. You still have two nose holes.

Your wrappings might get a little looser, and some of them might unwind a little. That’s all.

At the end of the day, when the light is gone and twilight is making it hard to see the bats’ wings on your keyboard (you didn’t need to move them—bones have no need to move), you finally do something. You sigh.

Then you grip the arms of your chair and heave yourself, clanking, to your feet. You don’t need to hold onto your desk to get back across the room, like you did to get across it this morning. You can get to the hall with just a hand out to steady yourself in the doorway. You go on downstairs, and it’s a lot easier when gravity helps. You hear the voices of your loved ones in the kitchen. The light’s on over the kitchen table. Someone’s at the stove, and it’s starting to smell good. You come around the corner, and they look up. They smile. They’ve missed you.

“Long day, honey?” Someone is handing you a glass of wine. I guess they don’t know mummies can’t drink.

“Long.” You put your hand on your child’s head, and the hair is soft and familiar and lovable. You sit down and cross your knees and take a sip. You know, it tastes pretty nice, considering you don’t have a tongue.

“I understand,” your child says kindly. “I had a long day, too.”

And you take your child onto your lap and hold them close, smelling their hair, feeling your heart beat against their lovable little back. The lamplight shines down on the little beautiful face under your chin, and their high voice goes on with whatever endless, convoluted story they were telling when you came into the room. Your loved one goes on cooking. The cats come in and sniff your feet.

None of them seems to notice your loose windings, at all.