Oh My God Becky, Look at Her Book.

“So yes. I have temporarily lost my marbles. Diagnostically speaking.”

Oh my God Becky, look at her book. It's so... not done.

That is where I am with this manuscript. Not in a 'it's bad' way. In a 'I have been sitting in the ice bath so long my limbs stopped working' way.

The bones are good. I know they are. And as Josey used to say during my breast cancer surgeries — I kid you not — "when the bones are good, the BREAST don't matter." Sweet, unhinged child. She was not wrong.

But here's the thing about living inside your own work for this long: you start changing the changes. You bring in something to help you organize the edits, and it makes a suggestion, and you tweak the suggestion, and then you tweak the tweak, and you look up six rounds later and go — what happened here? A chapter that made me cry when I wrote it now reads like a botched plastic surgery. Same features. Just... off. And the only person responsible for that is me.

I caught myself actually mad during a readback this week. Genuinely annoyed. Not at the writing — at the version of me who kept touching it. The one that said "just one more pass" four times in a row. The chapter didn't need another pass. It needed me to close the laptop and walk away.

The problem isn't the book. It's the exhaustion.

Client work has tripled. Tripled. Which sounds like a flex and also is actively cooking me. Writing is the thing I want to be doing — but when you have been writing for money all day, sitting down to write for the love of it at 9pm is a different ask entirely. The legs are cooked. The creative tank is on fumes. And somehow I keep going back in and poking at chapters that do not need to be poked.

So yes. I have temporarily lost my marbles. Diagnostically speaking.

And also — the book is good. It was always good. Fifty thousand words of real, ugly, specific truth that I have been enriching and refining for months. The story is in there. It does not need to be restructured again. It needs me to stop.

I have a strep swab, a Dutch Bros run, a church drop-off, and twelve hours of volleyball standing between me and my next quiet moment with it. Probably for the best.

The bones are good, baby. The rest don't matter.

MANUSCRIPT STATS

 ✅ 19 chapters. Check.

✅ Part 1: Complete. Realized it needed help. Went back in. Still counts.

🔄 Part 2: Halfway done.

📚 Publishing direction: Traditional. Shelves, not hard drives.

👀 Agent search: Coming. Allegedly.