Beware the moment your writing sucks

 

You finish your first draft. And it  is pleasing to your sight. 

Then you look at your draft during editing, and instead of being pleasing to your sight, it reminds you of the time the cat horked up a hairball on your chest. It’s terrible. It’s terrible and there is no fixing it! Maybe you should go off and do something else. Start another rough draft because clearly, this idea was just… bad.

I bet there are many, many authors like that. They have hard drives full of first drafts and half-edited second drafts; they have minds full of ideas and wondrous worlds…

But they don’t have any books on the market. 

We say that “you cannot self-edit your book,” but there’s another part there. The only way to find out if your book is good… is ultimately to shove it out the door. The part of you saying: "I’ll just start something else because this isn’t any good," is the part of you that wants to ensure you will never, ever, put a book on the market.

Because if you never put a book on the market, you can never fail. 

Don’t be that person. Do what you need to do, but push through that horrible second editing ass. And then send it out—because you may find that the people who haven’t read your book 50 times are likely to be far kinder than you are to your pride and joy that you've been living with for weeks, months, or years..