The creative process can at times be grueling. It keeps showing me more, revealing and revising itself more. Refine that, add this, draw another image, write more, define more, clear this up, cut this out, more white space, less fluff, create an appendix, should there be an index? And what about the cover? Is this the first impression we want to make? Seven years are at stake!
This whole process has given me a real merry-go-round tour of my own feelings. Hope for what it will be and do, desperation to get it right, and the agony of being so close and needing to pull back and look again, and then look again. And there’s been the feedback process from clients, students, friends, and the editors. There are times when I just can’t make the change. I won’t! I refuse! It’s the way it should be, just as it is, it has to be, I’m sure of it! And there have been times when I was suggested to do something that I initially met with the same angry resistance and then a week later–I see it and suddenly it’s become an essential change that makes an incredible improvement, humility. And in the background there are these fears. Fear of all this work bearing no fruit. Fear of failing and curiously, periodic but intensely adrenalized stings of a fear of succeeding.
Here’s the latest version of the cover. Stay tuned.
