When you put your mind to it, you can freak out about anything.

--George McFly, between hyperventilating gasps

Sep 06, 2023

Life is made up of, to borrow a phrase from evolution, punctuated equilibrium. Squirrels will go 30,000 years with no changes, then change colors from brown to gray almost overnight. Wrens will stay the same size for eons, then plump up 50% larger.

Individual days of life are like that, too. Last Monday was lowkey and sedate. Then four things happened in a five-minute span. 1) I discovered laundry from the dryer needed to be put back in for another cycle. 2) I had to leave for a doctor’s appointment. 3) I got a phone call. That phone call was from 4) a delivery truck out front: the YOUR WORSHIPFULNESS books I had Kickstartered had arrived.

It only took a few minutes for the pallet to be unloaded from the truck. It was much smaller than I thought it’d be, not even fully two boxes. I had no time to unload the boxes, or even cut the shipping plastic off. So a 700-pound paperweight stayed on the sidewalk while I got the doctor visit out of the way.

I came back, cut the plastic off, and for a half hour trundled the boxes inside. I had overimagined how many boxed there’d be, so I didn’t need to make an igloo out of them in the basement. They’re all sequestered against a far wall almost unnoticeably.

Then, instead of opening the Princess Leia boxes, and finding out what the books inside look like, and what possible mistakes might jump out at me like a C-minus in Spanish, I felt an urgent need to go food shopping. We’d just come back from vacation, and in fairness we were out of all the staples. But there was also an avoidance issue.

So long as I don’t open the box, I get to live in Schrodinger land where things are both fine and awful. (It feels awful, but it’s fine.)

The great thing about grocery shopping is when it’s done, you then have to bring all the groceries inside. And then figure out what shelves they go on. And then it’s time to eat, and after that is dishes, and then dessert, and then some TV, and maybe some toothbrushing.

A whole fulfilling life can be lived without an unboxing!

Truth be told, the first time I saw the A MOUSE DIVIDED cover, I wasn’t in love with it. I assumed it’d be another Mickey Mouse silhouette, like so many other books about Disney. And there was a cover option the publisher made with that iconography.

But we went with a more creative and less beaten-like-a-dead-horse version, a close-up of Mickey’s belly, with the title being split like a faultline.

I’m fine with the Mickey cover now: I got excited a few months ago when I saw a water bottle with the same Mickey-belly iconography. Maybe I got spoiled: the Super Mario cover made cool-book-cover lists.

(And of course don’t judge a book by its cover, etc etc etc.)

I’d helped design the Leia cover, so I knew I wasn’t in for a surprise with the cover design. And I also knew that the text of the book might contain mistakes, both grammatical (“may teh forse be with you”) and factual (“Princess Leia, Captain of the Starship Enterprise…”). Every hardcover has some, even the well-edited ones. I did my best, like every writer should, and like every writer some will squirm by.

So if I wasn’t worried about these text mistakes, and I wasn’t worried about the cover, what else was there to be worried about? A book is pages and the cover, that’s it. Ah, but that’s the beauty of fear. What’s there to be worried about? Whattaya got?

I wasn’t sure what would stick in my craw, but I knew it would be something. This unboxing should be a very happy moment – George McFly’s “When you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything” moment. But my brain wasn’t letting it happen.

Conceivably, I could wimp out of the rest of the week – the week I was supposed to be stuffing envelopes with books and sending them out to backers – with ginned-up excuses. Hey, the minivan’s tire pressure seems low. And the lawn needs cutting. And there are relatives I should really visit, and maybe my phone needs to install a program, and I hear they say you should have a podiatrist visit every six months even if your feet aren’t troubling you, just in case. And I saw the Barbenheimer films this summer, but not back to back, as intended.

Enough.

I gathered the family, we went into the basement, and I opened a box.

The books were packed upside-down. I saw two copies of the back cover.

It’s glossier then I thought. I waited for the weight the crush, and it didn’t come. Okay, it seems I can live with a cover glossier than I imagined. Until I started this project I barely noticed matte vs gloss covers. A month from now I’ll forget which one is which again.

Next, I reached down into the box to scoop up a book. The cardboard gave around my hand. This is a familiar movement for me: I’ve unloaded a lot of boxes of books. What wasn’t familiar was reaching down what I considered a book’s worth of depth, but reaching too far.

YOUR WORSHIPFULNESS was 282 pages: officially the page count was 288, counting the material in the front and back. This wais a standard size for a book: I worked quite hard to sweat out words and phrases and stories so this wasn’t twice as long. (Pick a trade paperback off your shelf, and unless you’re a Brandon Sanderson fan, it’s about this page count in length and wordage.)

But most of the other ~300-page books I’ve read felt thicker than this did. My book had all the heft of a pamphlet! I flipped through: all the words were there. The paper wasn’t onion-skin or see-through. It’s the same height and width of other books.

I have since concluded that publishers often use “thin paper” for big books and “thick paper” for smaller books, so a 300 and a 500-page book will appear about the same size on the shelf. I used “thin paper” without writing a thick book, resulting in what appeared to me as a thin book.

This smallness is almost entirely in my head. I have bubble-wrapped envelopes for paperbacks, and a copy of YOUR WORSHIPFULESS doesn’t fit into the envelope. It’s too thick. I need the hardcover envelope size.

I’m trying to let it go. But now I suspect that’s why there weren’t more boxes: because my book is thinner than The Secret. Thinner than a castaway stuck on a desert island. Thinner than the plot of a concept album. Thin enough to floss with, an object out of Flatland.

I will get over this: there’s a pretty good chance I’m exaggerating. Anyone who bought a Leia book will find out soon, if they haven’t found out already!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go buy a red sports car, pierce my ear, and get hair plugs.

SUPER MARIO OF THE WEEK

(All from the games section of Target)