Support4Change Blog

October 20, 2007

Category: Perfectionism

By Arlene Harder, MA, MFT

If you read last week’s blog on Nineteen-Year-Old Headlines, you know that I carve out “nothing” days to keep me from keeping my nose to the grindstone. Well, tomorrow is a nothing day and I must finish this very quickly because I’m about to watch “Arsenic and Old Lace” and then go to bed. If I make a mistake on this, even if it’s blatant, it will just have to do until I get back to the office on Monday. So here is what I have to write today.

As many of you know, I have written a book, Ask Yourself Questions and Change Your Life: Stop Wishing Your Life Were Different and Make it Happen. It will be available in paperback next spring. That’s the cover to the right, designed by the talented Christopher Tobias of Tobias Design, who creates wonderful “outerwear for books.”

I’ve also recorded a CD of Words of Encouragement Everyone Needs: Experience the Stages of Childhood With a Guided Imagery Exercise. It was my intention to have an online version of the book, as well as the CD, available for you on Nov. 15.

That date was to coincide with a flash presentation I’ve been producing for more than a year called Getting Through the Gate to Change. The idea was that it would draw visitors to Support4Change, where they would then want to buy my products. I hope I might earn enough from them (plus other books planned for next year) to underwrite Support4Change.com and ChildhoodAffirmations.com, as well as this blog, because I’ve been paying for them out of my own pocket (okay, my husband’s pocket as well) for several years.

Although I wrote the script for the flash more than a year ago when I presented the idea to an animation company, it has taken longer to complete than we all had hoped. Now I discover it won’t be ready until December. But that’s when I’ll be in Egypt, Kenya, and Tanzania for a month. So the date for the rollout is being pushed back until January 15. Since I want the animation, book and CD to be launched on the same day, I won’t have the online version of the book available until then, although I’ll have the first chapter next week, which I’ll tell you about in a moment.

As disappointed as I am, this delay is turning out to be not such a terrible thing after all, considering the way I tend to squeeze too many activities into my days. I’ll have more time to proof-read the book, which brings me to the reason I’m calling this blog entry “Thank Goodness I’m a Recovering Perfectionist.”

Let me explain about the arrangement I have with my publisher. Personhood Press is a small publishing house that produces books that allow the author to earn more than they can through a regular publisher. But it is not a vanity press. They have to like your book well enough to promote it in bookstores and, in fact, through their efforts my manuscript is being considered for translation by several foreign publishers.

Anyway, with this arrangement I have greater latitude in both writing and laying out the book than I would have if I were to go with a standard publishing house. So the last couple days I’ve been reviewing the chapters I laid out for the galley copy, which has been quickly printed, but not yet proofread. In going through that book, today I saw some glaring mistakes on a few pages. I’d repeated paragraphs, which would make puzzling reading to someone from whom you hoped to get a good review.

So now I have to tell my publisher about them, which is not something to which I look forward. But as I said, I’m glad I’m a recovering perfectionist, because I know that being human means you make mistakes, even when it’s a bit of a bigger mistake than you’d like others to know about. I’ll let you know how we go about correcting this.

In the meantime, at the beginning of next week I plan to have the first chapter available as a PDF file at no charge, in the hope you would like it enough to want to buy the online version when it finally comes out on Jan. 15.

At the end of the chapter, called “What Do I Know About the Process of Change?,” you will have the opportunity to give me some feedback. I hope to learn what readers most like about the chapter and assuming I get any positive comments, I will be able to use them in publicity.

NOTE: If you want to comment on any blog entry, please go to the contact page on Support4Change and you can reach me there. If you want me to include your comments online, please indict that.