I spent the last couple weeks not doing one of the most important things on my to-do list... fixing my book covers.
Not because I didn't know they needed fixing. It wasn't because I didn't have the skills. But because every time I opened that folder, my brain turned this molehill of a task into a mountain. If Mount Everest had a bigger, meaner brother… it would have been that mountain.
A frustration-riddled, maybe all-week project that I couldn't afford to start because what if I couldn't finish it, and what if it ended up wrong again, and what if the whole thing was beyond what I could handle. Because at this point—one year, eight rounds of proofs, six-plus months of editing (followed by even more editing)—I was beginning to wonder if I should just call it.
It took me five hours.
Five hours, one hyperfocus day, to fix three file variations, upload them, order proofs, and catch a pricing error in the distribution system that I didn't even know existed.
That thing I'd been avoiding for weeks? Turned out to solve even more than I anticipated.
On the outside, it looks like I was just avoiding the work (I wasn't. Okay, well, I was, but not really). I was avoiding what the work was asking of me.
