Ever made a mistake? Just a simple miscalculation. You look at the calendar hanging on the wall, knowing you have six days, seven hours, and however many minutes until such-and-such happens. Then when that time is up you find out that your calculation was off by a day and you missed whatever it was you were looking forward to doing. It’s disappointing isn’t it? Or frustrating because that thing you were waiting for was something really important and now you’ve blown it because the numbers didn’t add up right.
That happened to me. Last night, in fact. A week ago I sat down and calculated how many days I had to get the file for my next book uploaded before the pre-order deadline. Then I had it all planned out to have the book finished, formatted, and ready to upload by noon on the day it was due. Which I did. My only problem…the deadline was 24 hours sooner than I thought. So now I have a cancelled pre-order, a book that’s been locked down on Amazon so I can’t update the content, and a file that’s finished and ready to upload.
Everything went exactly according to plan. Sure, I cut it close, but we had out of town guests, I had last minute changes I wanted to make, and we have a kid who’s dealing with some kind of issue we haven’t been able to diagnose yet. I knew it would be close, but I worked my butt off getting that thing done on schedule.
Except, my schedule was all wrong.
Yes, you can say frustrating and you can say it again for good measure. I cried. That’s not really very unusual because I can cry at the drop of a hat and I can make myself cry if I want to. But these were real tears I didn’t have to manufacture. Frustrated tears. How could I possibly mess this up, tears.
To the people who purchased the preorder, I’m sorry it was cancelled. I don’t know who you are, but if you’re reading this, I really am sorry. I messed up.
Hopefully, I’ll learn from this mistake. I won’t be able to set up another pre-order for a while, but when I can do that again, I doubt I’ll forget to keep a closer eye on the countdown timer.
I did learn that I can churn out a complete book, start to finish, in six weeks. That’s good to know, even if I don’t do it again anytime soon. I also learned I can stick to a schedule. Next time I’ll make sure it’s the right schedule, but at least I stuck to it and got everything done that needed to be done in the time that I gave myself. I’m taking that as a win. Even if it ended up being a loss because…well…wrong schedule.
Sigh.
That was all written over a week ago. Since then we’ve been through the wringer and pressed flat to dry. We took our son to the hospital in our town from where he was transferred via ambulance to the children’s hospital in Columbus, where we spent the next two and a half days. Long story short, he was in DKA when we took him to the hospital and was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. He’s five years old.
To say this has been a crazy couple of weeks is the understatement of the year. In just three days we saw a total of 24 drs, nurses, radiologists, nutritionists, diabetes educators, and various other hospital staff that were too numerous to count. And in the process of doing all of that, Yours, Mine, & Forever got pushed to the back of my mind, only making an appearance in my thoughts every once in a while. Just enough so I could keep a slow trickle of memes going on Instagram, but not so much that I even thought of the fact we didn’t have the paperback set up yet. Not really. If I thought about it at all, it was to tell myself we’d get around to that eventually. Buddy was more important and is still more important.
However, Josh took it upon himself to make sure the cover got finished and the file got uploaded. Now we simply wait until the book goes live and it will be ready to order. Some people might be waiting for that. Some probably don’t care. Right now I’m a little in the don’t care camp. There is just so much to do with Buddy, I don’t have the energy left to think about much of anything else.
But, thanks to Josh, the paperback is under review now and should be live soon. He may also have fixed a broken link here on my website, but I forgot to ask if he had time to get to it.
To save further delays, I’m hitting publish without running this blog post by my blog editor…so if you see any mistakes, that’s why. 😊