Frankly, I miss school. Most adults, I think, are happy to be free of it … but I felt very much at home there. I could easily have become one of those “professional students” who find clever ways to get Pell Grants for the rest of their lives.
Strangely, I also miss tests. Remember tests? The teacher announces the test date. The teacher covers the material. Friends gather to study. You invest whatever time is needed to master the material. The moment arrives. Next class session, the test returns, bearing a mark of approval.
Few things in life are so simple and so satisfying.
Deadlines come close, though. This week, I faced the scheduled deadline for my fourth book — the second book I’ve written this year. Unlike a lot of authors, I have a pretty good feel for the number of words I can crank out in a day, and I’m also very much aware of how many of those words will be left after revisions.
On the day the book was due to be mailed, I printed out a pristine copy of the book — thousands of words, a stack of paper as tall as a cola can — and packed it into a manuscript mailer while the pages were still warm.
I made a table of all the tables and illustrations in the book. I copied the Microsoft Word and text-only files to floppy disks (yes, floppy disks — the publisher doesn’t want CDs), then packed the disks into a bubble mailer.
In the end, all these elements came together, forming a neat, tight little package that went to the publisher by Priority Mail, right on time.
Simple. Clean. Satisfying.
Nothing more I can do now until you people grade me — by buying the book … or not!
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