The perils of writing

I find rhe writing part of writing exhilirating. I like to be creative. I gain pleasure from a finmished product, especially if I am fortunate enough to find a publisher, a feat that seems to become increasingly difficult.
It is the post-creative tasks that become odious--the endless editing and the marketing that are most daunting.

I looked forward to receiving the final page proofs for Shrink this past week.
I had edited the voume myself several times already and had paid a professional editor to critique what I had writtien. Her critique was most valuable in teaching me some things I was doing wrong but, alas, like me, she missed a fair number of typos and careless puntuation gaffs. The page proofs came as a seemingly finished book, bound with the cover design I had obsesse with the artist. Surely, I thought, there would be no or at best a minimum of errors to be found. Wrong!. I spent a day going line by line and found to my horror twenty mistakes I could not leave uncorrected. All but one were my fault, not the type setter. I checked. They were in the galleys I had approved a month ago. I just hadn't seen them. Psychologists are aware of the ability of the brain to overlook small omissions, to fill in the empty spaces, connect the dots so that we perceive form and meaning with minimal stimulus input. This fact does not absolve me of responsibility here and I will, no doubt, be asked to pay for the corrections in the finished product.

Another frustration arose from a sequel to Shrink that I wrote while waiting for editorial and production process for Shrink to grind out. I wrote a short piece of 14,000 words--the further adventures of my hero in Shrink. What to do with it? I learned it was too long for a short story--usually four to five thousand words, and too short for a novel, the skimpiest of which are about 60,000 words. "So it a novella," I told myself. Many brilliant authors wrote novellas--Hemmingway's Old man and the Sea, for one. Most of the Steinbeck masterpieces also are novellas. Not my newest production, which I call The Last Ride. Novellas are usually 20,000 to 40,000 words. "Add 6.000 words I was told by an editor who publishes anthologies for novellas. I don't want to. The story is tight and fast moving as it stands. I didn't set out to write a short piece. I told the story I wanted to tell and when it was finished I stopped. It had 14,000 words. Does that make me a bad person? "It's a novellete," I was informed. Who wants to publish novelletes? If you hear of someone, let me know.