Forgive my week-long absence. If you read my last post, you can probably figure out what I was doing.

That's right, I was watching the Olympics.

But when I wasn't watching Hedrick vs. Davis, Cohen vs. Slutskaya, or Bode vs. 16-oz schooners, I was working my way through final galleys on WAKING LAZARUS--an exhilirating and exhausting experience at the same time. It's exhilirating for the simple fact that it's your own book you're looking at: the typography, the cool chapter headings, the presence of your name on the header of every even-numbered page...well, that's something you dream about seeing for a long time.

It was exhausting because, as much as you want to have the book published, you also want to have more time with it. If you only had more time, you could add another 10K words to the thing, fill in a few areas. (Of course, maybe you'd slow down the pace by adding 10K, but given a bit more time after that, you could find ways to pick up the pace.) This, also, is where grim reality starts to set in: it's your last chance to check your makeup and apply some fresh lipstick before the prom, and you secretly fear you've missed that big hunk of spinach between your front teeth. For that matter, you wonder if that last-second bit of lipstick is going to draw attention away from your crossed eyes, buck teeth and recessed chin. (And with all that, how in the heck did you ever get asked to prom in the first place?)

Now, I'm not saying these feelings overpower the sense of exhiliration--not by any stretch--but they're certainly there. And so, when it came time to seal the UPS envelope and send the whole package back to my editor, I had to pause. Was the book ready. Was it really, really ready?

Yeah, I told myself, the book was as ready as it could be. But I don't think I was.