You have to surrender to a book. If you do, when something in it seems to be going askew, you are wounded. The more you have surrendered to a book, the more jarring its errors appear.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I'm done with a book, I always give it to someone with expertise in the topic and tell them to flag all of my stupid mistakes.
When a book goes well, it abandons me. I am the most abandoned writer in the world.
Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.
Then you start another book and suddenly the galley proofs of the last one come in and you have to wrench your attention away from what you're writing and try to remember what you were thinking when you wrote the previous one.
I confess that I am a messy, disorganized and impatient reader: if the book doesn't grab me in the first 40 pages, I abandon it. I have piles of half-read books waiting for me to get acute hepatitis or some other serious condition that would force me to rest so that I could read more.
I try to picture my books being acted out.
Often something comes in from which you can see that the person is good, the book may not be perfect as it is, and the person doesn't want to do a re-write. That's something we do almost nothing of.
An author writes a book, and that's the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.
You work hard on a book and throw it out there and then it's beyond your control.
Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.