I’m at a coffee shop this morning with my husband’s cousin (he works from home, so we coffee shop it up sometimes) and he was all, “How’s it going?”
And I was all, well…um….
Because I sent the first ten thousand words of my YA over to Daniel, my alpha reader, to read last night, who had salient points on it that I read first thing this morning and was grumpy about.
It isn’t that he’s not right — he totally is — it’s just that before I move forward I have to do a little mental shuffling first.
DABDA’s the acronym for the five stages of grief according to Kubler-Ross — Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance — and in addition to being totally applicable to losing someone from your life, it’s a really good…metaphor? Metric?…for how it feels to find out that something’s not as right as you thought it was.
Luckily, since it’s just book edits and since I know that Daniel’s right, I cycled pretty fast…but it’s funny how easy it is to get hung up in the “no way, my book is perfect!” or “if only so and so read my book they’d like it” or “everyone hates my book” stages on the way to acceptance of the need to edit further, heh.
Anyhow. In case it’s helpful for anyone else to realize where they are today on the path ;).