It's Book, the Last Day of Writing It

By Cal Orey

First Edition

It's book. Yes, The Healing Powers of Olive Oil, Revised and Updated is inside a FedEx package and come Monday morning it will be out of the house and on its way to my publisher. I devoted my body, brain, and spirit to this demanding baby...

Body: My frequent swims and hot tub mornings got put to the side somewhere in between tourists and working on The Book. Oh, how I crave swimming laps and feeling hot bubbly water on my aching back. And there's more...
Pounds? I'm small, size 4 (I still can fit into my jeans) but I feel fat! I've tested recipe after recipe and well, some stuff that made it to the freezer didn't end up there for long. That means the dish worked but now I have a muffin top. Note to self: Come this week, it's back on schedule with swimming, gardening (thanks to global warming and the Lake Tahoe winter drought), making fires (it's still in the 20s early mornings), and the treadmill...I vow to remember my dogs' names. They missed me.

Brain: Fellow authors know that when you write a book you enter the zone. In my case, this time around I went to Olive Oil Land (again). As time passes, and you near the end like an amusement park ride or vacation (of sorts), you do and don't want to leave. At night before, during, and when you awake in the morning, often thoughts of reworking parts of the book haunt you. 
The book invades your brain. It's all about the book. You eat, breathe, sleep the topic...it consumes your mind like worms. It's kind of like monsters set up camp in your brain and won't leave until you let the book go home to its publisher.

Spirit: Family and friends begin to worry about you. Comments like, "Are you okay?" and "You need to have fun!" permeate the air whenever you come up for air. But since you're in another place, like Olive Oil Land, you prefer to go back because it feels more normal than the real world.
Then, you begin to think, "Do I have OCD?" as you begin to edit, proof, edit and rewrite a passage here and there it's like leaving the house and imagining you left the key in the front door. 
Worse, you start to wonder, "Should I add that?" and "I forgot to insert this!" And so it goes until you wish, you hope, you pray that the FedEx guy comes early or worked on Sunday. But I put the book--the big book--in the FedEx envelope. Yet, I want to go back to it. I hear it calling my name, "Cal!" And I begin to bargain, "Just a quick reread" and "One more section to tweak" and so it goes.

So countdown time is 24 hours...And then, IT will be en route to New York. I will have my life back until the first day of the editor's edits return. Tomorrow I can exhale and do all the things I haven't done for months! Goodbye, Olive Oil Land. It's been fun. I don't know how to tell you this...Today is the last day and then it's over.  It was fun. We had some laughs and good times. But I'm done!