The HEA Cafe

You’ve finished the book.  You’ve stopped editing and mailed it off to your editor.  Now what?  Do you celebrate?  Immediately start another?  Collapse and begin obsessively checking your email/phone messages/mailbox for the editor’s verdict?

My post-book routine has evolved over the years, but this seems to be it:  First off, I celebrate — usually with a dinner out and a good bottle of wine.  After all, writing a book is a huge accomplishment, and I want to reward myself for all that hard work.  So I take an evening, maybe even a weekend, to splurge.

I try not to obsess for at least a couple of days (I have to give the manuscript time to arrive in New York before I start wondering if my editor or agent has read it yet).  I also try not to second-guess what I wrote, wondering if I should have changed this or that scene, etc., but I have to admit that I find this hard to do.  It seems to be my nature to obsess.  About the best I can do is relegate the doubts to the back of my mind and try to ignore them.

In the meantime, as I’m trying not to obsess, I clean my office.  When I am writing, I don’t do much housework.  In fact, the dust got so bad while I was writing my latest book that not only could I blow it across my desk, but every time I sat down to write, I got an allergy attack.  (Of course, I didn’t take time to clean.  I just took an allergy pill, got out another box of tissues, and kept on writing.)

So once the book is done, I get out the dust rag, vacuum behind the desk where the dust collects, and sort through the huge piles of papers I’ve been collecting.  Then I admire my temporarily clean and nicely organized office.  And yes… since I only finish a book a couple of times a year, I have a very dusty house.  Thank goodness for allergy pills!

And then it’s back to work.  I’m happiest when I’m working on a book, so the sooner I get back to writing, the better (and I have an excuse to ignore the dust).

So how about you?  Have you developed any end-of-the-book routines?