I’ve completed my final creative draft and accept all of the literary errors and shortcomings of my work. Every time I read through the draft, I make about 60 changes and I still feel that I have some copyediting to do. I’m confident in the overall structure of the novel although I don’t believe most readers will understand the choices I made to the structure later in the book.

Still, I think the experience is complete. I’m navigating the world of self-publishing and am horrified to find that the industry of unique book identification is a monopoly. I’m somewhat mortified to learn that if I want to self-publish without random and odd restrictions, it’ll cost me a couple hundred dollars for a 13-digit identifier number and for one company to store just a little metadata in their database for books.

They weren’t kidding when they said that freedom isn’t free. The good news is that Amazon and Ingram will give you a free ISBN that you can only use with them, so there’s that. I’m looking forward to having a reader find something worthwhile in my story. This is a work that has been two years in the making so I’ll try not to delay any further.