Margins and Motivation

Yesterday I stopped by the pharmacy to pick up some prescriptions, and while I was there, I grabbed some scotch tape, blank Christmas cards, and a spare pair of scissors. (Where do all of those scissors end up, anyway? Probably with the spare socks and my chapsticks.) As she was checking me out, the cashier said, “Oh, I see you’ve made it to Phase 2 of Christmas shopping!”

I’ve never felt so seen. Because it’s true isn’t it? Christmas shopping isn’t just that is it? It’s the selecting, the shopping, the wrapping, and finally the giving. And while I really do take true joy from each of those parts, if I forget about them, they tend to eat up time that I usually had planned to spend somewhere else.

The end stages of publishing a book are a lot like that. You think, whew, it’s all finalized and edited and proofed…and then you have to dive into the world of fonts and margins and page number placement. If I’m being honest with you all, I really don’t care about page number placement. I’m sure some of you do and I admire that attention to detail. All I care about is that they exist and are in the right order.

But all this self-publishing business means that I have to. So I force myself to for as many hours a day as I can and then I escape. Back into the world of plotting and writing, poring over maps from a hundred years ago and figuring out whether the word “spook” is historically accurate term for an undercover agent in the early 1900s. (It’s not, in case you were wondering - the first recorded use I can find is from 1942.) And while that might not seem so fun to most of you, please remember that some people like thinking about book margins for fun, so I guess it takes all kinds.

I’ve spent the better part of a year trying to spend as much of my time doing the work I like and as little as possible doing the work I hate. Which might sound childish or even lazy. Of course you don’t want to do work you don’t like! Who does?

But I’m using the word “like” here very specifically. I don’t mean work that is easy, comfortable or simple. I mean work that is meaningful, consequential, and productive. Kneeling in the rain planting bluebells is work I like. Trying a dozen different words to find the right one is work I like. Cutting out a hundred paper snowflakes to help decorate my daughter’s classroom is work I like.

So when I spend all of this extra time I didn’t expect working on margins and fonts, I have to remind myself that it is meaningful. This is the culmination of a year of work. It is consequential. Believe me, if the margins are off, it will annoy you and maybe you won’t know why, but it will. And, if I give the task the necessary time and focus, it might just be productive.

I probably still won’t like it, though. Oh well. It’ll be worth it.