When Is "Good" Good Enough?

"The perfect is the enemy of the good."  -- Voltaire

As you most likely saw in my last post, I finally have unleashed my Sadonian Chronicles on the world.  The decision to do it myself through CreateSpace -- and not trying to find a traditional publisher -- was a hard one, but one I ultimately came to for two big reasons:

• It dawned on me that I wasn't in it for the money and the wide-spread literary fame; I had a story I wanted to tell, and I wanted to share it with people.  
• With The Coming of the Heroes still in limbo -- finished but not public -- I felt like my writing was stagnant.  I had no real impetus to move forward on the rest of the Sadonian Chronicles series, nor any real drive to write other things and get them ready for publication.

It's not that I think The Coming of the Heroes isn't good enough for traditional publishers -- I happen to think it is (and I hope, should you buy a copy at the link at the left or from Amazon.com, that you'll agree).  Rather, I could spend time and energy trying to submit the book over and over, or I could get it out there by hook or by crook and focus on the more lucrative side of my publishing life, namely my composing.

The decision to actually go ahead and publish it over the weekend was another hard one.  Once you submit your files to the CreateSpace folks and they approve them, they send you a proof copy, which you look over and approve, or else make corrections and resubmit your files.  The copy I held in my hands this past Saturday was my second proof of this particular iteration of the novel, and something like draft 12 or 13 in the overall scheme of things.  (Unlike some authors, I don't number a new draft when I do something minor to it, only when I make major changes.)

By about 2:00 Saturday, I was feeling good; I was over half-way through the proof and all looked good.  And then I found them -- mistakes.  In the space of about two pages, I had used the word "trapdoor" three times and the words "trap door" twice.  Ouch ... but not the end of the world.

Then, the biggie: I'm a grammar nerd, so when one of my main characters, Eslin, says, "You wouldn't have keep something like that from me," I think I actually dropped my head and cried.  An entire three-hundred-page manuscript, and just those few errors.  What made them all worse was the fact that those errors have been in the book now for about four years.  So many people have read the book in that time -- personally, I'd read it no fewer than a dozen times in that span -- and no one had caught them!

That left me a conundrum.  I could make those changes and resubmit the files -- waiting another week before a new proof would show up for me to look at again -- or just publish the thing and have done with it.  I finally opted for the latter.  Why?

First, I thought of the Voltaire quote above, and something about it rang true.  We often try so hard to make things perfect that we never actually do anything with them ... because they never will be perfect.  It's just not possible.  I realized that, even if I made those changes, resubmitted the files, and got the new proof, odds were great I'd find something wrong with the new iteration.  How many times would I be content to play this game before I gave it all up as a bad idea and just threw in the towel?

I also thought of a quote I heard from George Lucas, which went something like, "Works of art are never finished; they're only abandoned."  I realized that at some point, I was going to have to let The Coming of the Heroes fly on its own, imperfections and all.  The story is sound, the characters interesting and believable, the writing is good -- there were just a couple of tiny mistakes.  I've read books published by big-name publishers with just as many errors, so it can't be that big a deal, right?

What finally made me let it go is the fact that, again, dozens of sets of eyes have looked over those pages and not found the errors, so they can't be that obvious.  I also figured that, what with Eslin being a young adult, his sense of grammar might not be the best anyway, and given the emotional distress he was under, saying something stupid like "wouldn't have keep" wasn't beyond belief anyway.

What are you working on in your creative life that you're loathe to be done with because it isn't "perfect"?  Are you denying yourself the pleasure and joy of seeing your work in the world because you're afraid someone will find fault with it and discount it?  Laugh at it?  Mock it?  If the work is sound, a small mistake or two doesn't change that fact -- remember, the Amish purposely design mistakes into every quilt they make, because only God is perfect.  Mistakes are part of the human condition, and they're what drive us all to keep moving, keep trying, and keep working ever closer to that elusive -- yet unattainable -- perfection.