Seeing that the Work is Good
It was a busy day in the middle of a busy week, but I had a quiet moment to sit on the couch and think of nothing in particular. My eyes wandered over the stacks of things in my front room. It has once again gathered the detritus of projects in process and projects not-quite-cleaned-up. One of the stacks was right next to me on the couch. It was half a dozen copies of Massively Parallel all waiting to be transported to the warehouse. I absently ran my hand over the cover of the book and let my thumb rifle the edges of the pages. Bright colors flipped past as I saw familiar characters having adventures. This is really pretty. The thought floated through my mind in response to the colors. I helped make this. It wouldn’t exist without me, but here it is. It is real. And beautiful. And funny.
As creators we always hope for the moments of triumph. So often we feel despair or lost in futility. But every once in a while we can see what we’ve created and know that it is good. I see it when friends open their boxes of Advance Reader Copies. I see it when they finish their drafts or go on their book tours. Those are the moments we expect to be attached to triumph, they are the punctuation points in what mostly feels like a really long, run on sentence. Yet every once in a while a moment of creator joy comes unexpected, when I’m sitting on the couch thinking of nothing in particular.