03/12/2020 - Pre Meeting Anxiety

I have a meeting with my mentor tomorrow about this book which I think is ready to go. Now, the one thing I always want out of meetings like this is for the person with The Knowledge to tell me that I’m a genius and they already have a contract for me and I’m never going to have to worry about anything ever again. That’s obviously not going to happen, but try telling my massive ego that.

What I suspect is going to happen is my mentor will tell me the book is terrible and only a complete re-write will maybe fix it, maybe. This hopefully won’t happen, because it’s been through multiple rounds of editing and had two professionals eyeballs over the thing, either one of which would have hopefully gone ‘Are you sure? Because this seems very bad’. So I’m discounting that possibility.

The most likely scenario is my mentor goes ‘Yes, it’s good, apart from this this and this.’ If I’m exceptionally lucky, she’ll say ‘Yes, it’s good. It has this, this and this flaw but they’re not enough of a problem to worry about.’ Which, thinking about it, is an incredibly unlikely scenario. Her whole function is to root out flaws and give me the best chance possible of getting an agent. No flaws must survive.

Hunting down flaws is, of course, fractal. No book is perfect. The trick is finding the line between ‘Excelent but with minor flaws’ and ‘good but with flaws big enough to make an agent nervous’.

I’m hoping whatever changes she asks for are fairly minor because, having done a bunch of structural work on the thing, I don’t want to have to re-write half of it. Again.