Getting Real

This week’s heart-wrenching song: https://music.youtube.com/search?q=sex+and+candy

Now of course I know it’s been real ever since I announced my plans to publish in 2023, but it hits different when pieces start falling into place. Now it’s really getting real. Those of you on Patreon and the newsletter now have seen the book cover reveal for “I Accidentally Summoned A Demon” (if you’re not subscribed, why not? I barely bother you but I do give you some snippets of things, like last week my subscribers got an email with a book cover teaser. This week they got the book cover reveal before social media. Sign up here: https://www.jaideharley.com/email-newsletter-subscription/). Isn’t that cover stunning? The artist, Jacqueline Kropmanns, did an AMAZING job. Social media reveals are coming later in the week, but wow. I have a book cover. For the book I wrote and am publishing. Someone pinch me, it doesn’t feel real.

I’m on the final draft of editing (ha, I’d like to think so). Saturday, before I got a nasty bug I’m still recovering from, I had the surreal experience of printing my full manuscript for the red pen edits. Like, the whole thing. All of it. Two hundred and sixteen pages. Of course, I’m out a printer because mine decided it couldn’t stand to do what it was made for, so I had to take it to a nearby FedEx office where they let you print from a USB drive. It occurred to me as I watched the printer spit out the paper that I had no clue what a stack of two hundred and sixteen pages would look like. Holding that manuscript in my hands gave me a rush I can’t even begin to explain. It’s actually happening repeated in my head while I was lost in a daze, carrying those pages back to my car.

I blame the haze for the fact I didn’t bother to verify the whole thing printed. Then, as honey and I are sitting in drive thru to get smoothies, I decide to flip through it just for the fun of it, only to find the last page was not, in fact, the last page. The printer ran out of paper, but did not alert us of this fact. The last printed page was from chapter 40, the line reading “I just want to be with you and love you” was the last line on the page. For those of you who haven’t read it, or don’t remember, that line comes just before a sex scene. Literally, they’re sucking face in the next paragraph, at the top of the very next page. I tell honey, he races back to the store with the well-meaning but anxiety-inducing comment of “huh… I hope no one tried to print something after you, refilled the paper, and now they’re getting the last end of it.” The conversation went like so:
Me: Oh my God, what if they are?
Him: *shrugs* oh well, we’re not that far.
Me: It’s a sex scene
Him:…
Him: How detailed a sex scene?
Me: Pretty damn detailed
Him: *accelerates* it’s fine, who reads someone else’s stuff anyway? If anything, they’d skim it and quickly realize it wasn’t theirs. How soon on the page does it happen?
Me: The first sentence
Him: Oh boy. Well, maybe you’ll get another fan!
Me: Or some poor innocent child is printing a school project or a pastor is printing bulletins and this is the shit they get instead!
Him: *uncomfortable laugh* we are almost there

Spoiler alert, that didn’t happen, but it was still an all around uncomfortable experience. The only person working was a guy who was in the middle of refilling the paper in said printer. We explained what happened and he said “oh, then it definitely timed out. It’ll only wait so long before cancelling a project. Just bring it up to the front and I’ll print it for you myself.”

People, the embarrassment almost killed me. I had to hand over the flashdrive, direct him to the document, and it was at this very moment I realized…
I forgot to include page numbers 🤦‍♀️

In my defense, I don’t need page numbers on a word doc. Now, I definitely should’ve included them for a printed copy but thankfully this is just for me to cover in red ink with edits, so it’s fine I had to handwrite the numbers in case the papers ended up out of order. What wasn’t cool was not being able to tell him which page it was out of the two hundred and sixteen page document. It was then we did a word search, and I typed in the line I mentioned above. Honey chipped in and informed the guy it’s a manuscript for a romance and he was just kinda like yeah, cool. But the very fun (I cannot emphasize my sarcasm enough) moment, was when I found the last page that printed, then scrolled to the next and told him it’s from this page on. Guys… His face. His eyebrows shot up, he cleared his throat, and was like yeah okay, be right back.

I may have died and resurrected because obviously I’m still here but I will never recover from that incident. We get in the car now with all the missing pages and honey’s like, “so… We need to buy a printer”, to which I responded with “NO FUCKING KIDDING MAN”. I will not be repeating any part of that ever again, so it’s now a moral obligation for me to buy a printer. This may come as a surprise to you guys, but I’m next level shy. I’m relatively outgoing on the internet, and on paper, but if you met me in person? I blush when people say hi to me. I’m so painfully introverted that the entire scenario could’ve easily been a real nightmare I’d actually have. It sure as hell felt like one. The good news is, once I eventually recovered (mostly. I have already decided I will never return to that store ever again), I again got to be excited to hold my actual manuscript in my hands. If anyone’s curious what that stack looks like, it looks like this:

Having seen my stack, now you see I have plenty of work I better get back to. Not just in regards to that manuscript but also the endless to-do list of an indie publisher. Marketing, ISBNs, barcodes, marketing, formatting, typsetting, marketing, writing new content, printing suppliers, social media, marketing. Did I mention marketing? It’s not my forte 😅 I have much to learn, but that’s okay, I’ve always been greedy for knowledge 😉