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Pain and grief manage to do a lot of things to a human being. They change them, hurt them, stretch them, and push them. But one of the biggest things I've noticed that pain and grief can do to a human is confuse them. How can they not? You drop a life-changing event into a person's life that hurts almost every step of the way, and that person will most certainly start asking questions in complete bewilderment, even if that question is just a small and helpless "why?".

It’s one of the best parts of the whole book writing process: the moment you put a period on a sentence and realize it’s the last one of your entire draft. You step back, and holy moly you’ve done it! You have a manuscript! This is the best feeling in the world! 

So what should you do next? Get beta readers? Start editing? Begin the publishing process? For me, I choose none of the above. What I actually do is stop everything relating to that book and take a long break. Full stop. The book goes into exile, but a friendly one! I promise! 

If I’m being honest, I wasn’t really sure how to write this post. Writing a book is such a unique experience for every writer and know to processes or books are going to be the same. That’s the whole point after all.

But in thinking about that, I recall how long I considered myself to be just a poser because I didn’t write books the same way I was always hearing or reading about. I’d read these articles and posts about authors complex outlining processes, storyboarding, and drafting and my heart would just sink.  I’d slip into a terrible habit of comparing myself to these authors and beat myself up for not doing things their way. I’d sit with tabs open to write my book and wonder what I was doing wrong. It was a vicious cycle.