Greetings Backers,

TL;DR: No action items for you. The Minnesota Retreat was wonderful. Blank journals are in hand. I'm excited to get back to organizing the warehouse and putting finishing touches on this book. You get Chapter 16 to read. Your next update will be the week of July 14-18. 

Being in person with other writers is always a joy. I'm very pleased that my role as safety officer was not used or needed very much. No one got sick in a way that needed more than mild management, and the support people needed emotionally was not burdensome. Being a featured instructor was a new experience. I've taught at retreats before, but usually as a small bonus class. This time I got to teach the first and last classes. Making sure I was fully prepared to teach and critique occupied a large portion of my time. I was still able to turn my focus to SLSC at various points during the retreat. In fact I referenced SLSC frequently while preparing my classes.

I had an enlightening moment during the final Q&A of the retreat. DongWon Song (who is a literary agent) was answering a question about the timeline for a book and mentioned that books spend 8 months in editorial. I realized that it has been about 8 months that I've been working on edits. This made me feel much better about my progress. Perhaps it is not that I'm slow, but that I was expecting too much?  I've been trying to push faster than was reasonable, in part because I want to get the project to all of you, but also because I need to see what financial support this book can give to my family once it is done. I'm letting financial anxiety affect my project timelines and that isn't ideal.

Related to that thought, I was listening to Mary Robinette Kowal talk about the novel she was working to edit, and I had another realization. When Mary Robinette finishes her edit, she will hand it off to someone else who will do another pass on it. During that time the project continues to move forward, but her brain is free to refresh and explore other projects. When I finish an edit pass, I hand off the project to ... me.  This means I don't get breathers between edits. Not only that, but I keep starting the next pass before I've fully finished the previous one. At the time it seemed like a way to make things go faster, but I think it just fragmented my focus and made things feel messy.

In order to clean up the mess, I need to bring everything into alignment on the same edit pass. I'll be creating a few pre-press copies that I hope to have at Gen Con, and I'll be hiring out the copy-edit pass on final text. (Yes I attempted to do a copy edit earlier, but my latest edit had some significant revision, so the copy edit needs to be done again.) During that copy edit pass I'll be able to take a breather and then come back with fresh eyes for the final layout.

I have definitely learned a lot about how to build good processes for this sort of nonfiction book. I will be applying my learnings to future projects in a way that hopefully helps me do better at not breaking my brain.

I have most of July before I leave for Gen Con. I plan to get a lot done. I'll give you all an update the week of July 14-18.

Thank you for following along with this project. Below are some photos from my retreat in Minnesota and another chapter for you to read.