![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I like me! I really like me!
May. 1st, 2007 01:19 pmSo, my final layout proofs for Rhode Island Curiosities arrived the other day. I dutifully opened the package to begin reading, and a funny thing happened: I enjoyed it.
This surprised me, given how much I was slagging on the book while writing it, but perhaps that was just due to over-immersion in all the subject matter. I definitely remember not wanting to read any more about what I was writing, because it seemed dull. But maybe anything becomes dull once you've painstakingly gone over the same interview and research notes 50 times.
Regardless, the time away from the book seems to have dramatically increased my ability to enjoy it. Heck, even the profiles I remember as being the most boring still seemed fairly interesting. Maybe this points to my inability to accurately evaluate my writing soon after writing it. In the past two weeks, I've had three different people tell me that they'd read the first chapter of Shards online, and liked it enough to want to buy a copy. This was the book that, when I wrote it, I specifically exhorted all my friends not to buy it because I thought it was terrible. A year and a half later, when I go back to read it, I find a lot to enjoy.
Anyway, I guess the lesson is that accurately evaluating my own writing takes some temporal distance. So even though this post seems like the kind of pathetic self-congratulatory drivel I should keep to myself, maybe in a year I'll be glad I wrote it.
This surprised me, given how much I was slagging on the book while writing it, but perhaps that was just due to over-immersion in all the subject matter. I definitely remember not wanting to read any more about what I was writing, because it seemed dull. But maybe anything becomes dull once you've painstakingly gone over the same interview and research notes 50 times.
Regardless, the time away from the book seems to have dramatically increased my ability to enjoy it. Heck, even the profiles I remember as being the most boring still seemed fairly interesting. Maybe this points to my inability to accurately evaluate my writing soon after writing it. In the past two weeks, I've had three different people tell me that they'd read the first chapter of Shards online, and liked it enough to want to buy a copy. This was the book that, when I wrote it, I specifically exhorted all my friends not to buy it because I thought it was terrible. A year and a half later, when I go back to read it, I find a lot to enjoy.
Anyway, I guess the lesson is that accurately evaluating my own writing takes some temporal distance. So even though this post seems like the kind of pathetic self-congratulatory drivel I should keep to myself, maybe in a year I'll be glad I wrote it.
