The Waiting Game

I may have mentioned this once or twice, but I hate waiting.  Whether it’s waiting in a long line at the grocery store or waiting for my Amazon order to arrive in the mail, my reaction is the same.  I get impatient, and I’ll admit that it’s sometimes irrationally so.  That said I do my best to keep that reaction in check in public. You’re not going to see me cussing out the cashier or yelling at the clerks in the post office, but even those who don’t know me can probably tell at a glance that I’m not a fan of the waiting game. 

That same impatience extends to my writing. I’m so anxious to finish a novel that I’ve often spent several hours a night working on my latest creation. Once it’s finished, I’m no better. I dive right in to the editing process.  I always tell myself I’m going to give it a few days and take a breather, but I’m usually lying to myself.  This is something that can be both helpful and harmful to my writing. It helps in that it gives me drive and ambition. It hurts when that drive and ambition rushes me and makes the finished product sloppy.   I once had a fellow writer, a rather accomplished one at that, tell me that he really liked my work but he was disappointed with the ending. The way he put it, he could tell I just wanted to get the story over with.

Once again, I find myself playing the waiting game for my writing. This time, I’m waiting for my newly published e-book, Like You Mean It, to be available in e-book stores.  To be fair, it’s only been a week since it was published and accepted for premium catalog placement, and granted the publisher ships weekly to most major e-book retailers. Let’s not forget that if the retailer has a backlog of orders that will cause a delay.  I know all of this, yet I still find myself obsessively checking both my Apple iBooks store and my Nook to see if the book is available. And when I say obsessively, I mean multiple times a day as if it might be there at noon despite not being there at ten.

I like to think I’m not the only one who’s anxious for Like You Mean It to be available at major e-tailers. I imagine that my readers are ready for it to be there too; especially when I told them this would be the month they could have that long awaited book. While I’m sure that’s still the case, the book will still be available this month, I’d much rather that happen sooner than later. For those of you who know me, I’m sure you know the fact that I can’t do anything to speed up the availability offends the control freak in me!

So, like it or not, there’s nothing I can but continue to play the waiting game in the hopes that soon it will come to end. Oh, and I can continue a vigilant review of the bookstores in my e-reading devices.