My novel was accepted by the publisher almost two years ago. I read the contract very carefully, looking for tricks and traps, but it was straightforward and very generous. The cover looks great, and they were very responsive to my concerns about fonts. Because the title is a Navajo word, they were able to accommodate the unique accenting of the language. The layouts went well. Everyone has been extraordinarily professional. But that’s not why this is taking so long.

I received the first edits fifteen months ago, and they were really bad. When I realized the editor had caused a lot of problems, I asked Production to fix it. They rejected all the changes and brought in a new team. They were just as bad. So was the third edit. The fourth edit was a vast improvement, though it wasn’t until a later round that they stopped changing “Oxen’s Razor,” which was the term used by a teenager trying to sound smart, to “Occam’s Razor,” not getting the joke.

I’ve been going back and forth with them for fifteen months, during which I’ve reread my novel nine times. I’m getting kind of sick of it.

(To be clear, I’m really proud of this book, and I think it’s some of my best writing.)

Now that they’re only sending me the final proofs, I have to edit my own book. Because of my attention span, I can’t catch all of the errors on a pass, so I have to go through it again and again, stripping out the errors. On the ninth pass, I saw that I had misspelled Jennifer once, and I didn’t notice the other eight times I read it. Also, I’m catching some continuity mistakes, like who gave the main character his pickup. These things should have been spotted by an editor.

To be clear, I’ve liked working with them so far. I just can’t figure out how this one department can be so unskilled and unprofessional. And I can’t figure out why the publisher isn’t taking this more seriously. When I self-published three years ago, my novels went up covered in typos. I reread them at least three times, and I still missed a lot. And that’s embarrassing. How am I able to hold up a book proudly and brag about it if it looks self-published? This looks bad for the publisher too. So I just returned the latest round of proofs. I will spend another fifteen months doing this if it’s what it takes to make this perfect. I painted this picture of Aaron and Jen, the main characters of the novel, Hanììbààz Rising because it was on my mind again.