I have been really anxious in the last day or two. The numbers of people ordering my little ebook have increased daily. I keep taking out the paper copy, re-reading it, noticing the hundred places where an extra word would help. Or a sentence. Or even half a page. After all, the thing is short. It now stands at 19,500 words.
The oddest thing is people putting messages on facebook of `well done, congratulations,` that kind of thing. To be frank, I have never felt 100% comfortable congratulating someone for self-publishing something. Even though this is a completely unjustified position. Some of the self-published things I have read have been Genuinely Excellent.
On Friday I had another enjoyable Zoom lesson from my kind and tolerant teacher, John Wheatley. (Yes, your book The Last Princess has arrived, I meant to tell you. The paperback version. Look forward to reading and reviewing it.)
In the light of what I learned, I am reviewing my little `book` one more time before ordering the paperback copies. Added half a page in the last section. I think it makes the story clearer.
And I might add something in an earlier section, which will perhaps reflect the ridiculous contradiction of purpose that I sense in my very self-orientated self in this peculiar week. In an earlier chapter I describe the experience of a first year of training in Group Analysis. For a year I belonged to a group which was both training and therapy. If you are in a group – that kind of group – and people share their experiences, their feelings, and you listen raptly to their stories, you are seen as an ok member of it. But if you are able, and choose to reveal some of your own inner story, and if you cry, and let out your deeper feelings to the whole group…you are seen as something more. You have opened up, you have shared, you have contributed something.
