The Tenth Month of Publishing Pregnancy

This is simultaneously an exciting time and a trying time for me. I seem to be moving constantly to the goal line of my book, "The Six P's of Change," but only half the distance at a time. Writing the book was tough enough -- a year of turning my vacation time into three-day weekends devoted to pounding out tens of thousands of words over time. But once written, bringing it to fruition has been both an education and a frustration. First, there was relinquishing my baby for editing. Now my dear editor, Karen, was never the problem in this. I first planned that I would get it to her by mid-January. But the holidays held that up more than I would have guessed. So the time it took Karen to give my manuscript a thorough edit began later than we both thought.
After HER initial edit, there was MY final review. Boy, it's amazing to see things that looked perfectly sensible the first time around. With fresh eyes, I often heard myself saying:
"What the hell was I thinking when I wrote THAT!"
So, I sent it back to Karen for one more once over, the final one. Then she could see all my little misplaced commas, inconsistencies in headings, key repeating phrases and themes, and more. So that added more time. Finally I sent it off to my designers, and the layout when swimmingly (thanks largely, of course, to Karen's attention to detail, as well as their own professionalism.) Now, it was time to review the layouts.
Hm, how did I manage to misspell the word "measurable" so often? It wasn't spelled "measureable" in any of my dictionaries!
So now THAT had to be fixed. And when I got the proof back from the printer, I saw a misrepresentation of a Jonathan Swift quotation. What should have read “Vision is the art of seeing things invisible,” I had transcribed as:

“Vision is the art of seeing the art of things invisible.”

So now, we have to change that! Luckily, the printer advised me that since the cover was approved and all other copy was approved, we would go right into the printing phase.

My new website is trumpeting the book, announcing that it's for sale at a special prepublication price, as it is now complete and ready to be shipped. But the printer is in Utah, and I am in Philadelphia, requiring five business days to deliver the books to me! That means instead of arriving late this week, they will arrive early next week. My "prepublication" period is beginning to look like The Hundred Years War. I just tell myself that the book will be here soon, and I will forget all of this agita. But as more people ask me when the book will be here, I begin to realize:

"THIS is what a long pregnancy feels like!"