The Publishing Journey, Sticky Notes and All

A graphic I made that turned out to be an honest self portrait of getting Blackwater Parish to print

I made a graphic a while back that was supposed to be a lighthearted joke about publishing. An author at her desk, surrounded by sticky notes, equal parts excited and terrified. The longer I look at it, the more I realize it is not really a joke. It is an honest self portrait of what the final stretch of Blackwater Parish actually looked like.

The Steps That Are Painfully Real

The graphic walks through the stages of the journey, and every one of them is true. Step one, write the book. Step two, assume publishing will be easy. Step three, realize you know nothing about publishing. Step four, learn all the things, cover design and formatting and keywords and categories and roughly four hundred other things nobody mentioned.

Step five is upload to Amazon and pray. I put that on a sticky note because that is genuinely how it feels the first time you hit publish. You do the work, you check it three times, and then you let go and hope.

The Oops Moment

My favorite sticky note, because it still makes me wince, is the oops moment. I uploaded the fixed layout version of a file instead of the reflowable one. In plain terms, my book briefly read like a PDF on an e-reader, with text that would not resize the way it should. Who knew there was a difference? Now I do, painfully and permanently.

Every indie author collects a moment like this. The specific mistake changes. The lesson, learned the hard way, is universal.

Writer Fuel, Do Not Disturb

There is a coffee mug in the graphic that says Writer Fuel, Do Not Disturb, and that mug is basically a documentary prop. There are sticky notes for self-doubt and how to ignore it, for Google as my best friend, for trial and error and revise and repeat, and for patience, which I labeled a work in progress.

That last one is the truest of all. Patience with the process, and patience with myself, was the hardest and most necessary part of getting this book out.

The Final Stretch of Blackwater Parish

What makes this graphic personal is that it maps the actual final stages of Blackwater Parish almost exactly. The caffeine. The determination. The little bit of luck. And a tremendous amount of Googling. Getting a southern gothic thriller from a finished manuscript to a real, purchasable book was a gauntlet of small technical battles I never saw coming when I was busy writing the story itself.

The writing was the heart. The getting it to print was the marathon nobody photographs.

The Peach Milkshake

There is one sticky note that is pure celebration. Step seven, celebrate, with a Chick-fil-A peach milkshake. That detail is not decoration. When Blackwater Parish actually published, I genuinely treated myself to a peach milkshake. It felt like the right size of reward for a very long journey, small and sweet and specific.

I put it on the graphic because I want other authors to celebrate their wins too, even the quiet ones. Especially the quiet ones.

The Part That Is Not a Joke

Here is the thing about turning your hardest season into a cartoon. It only becomes funny once you have survived it. In the middle of it, the oops moments and the self-doubt did not feel like sticky notes. They felt like evidence that I had taken on something too big. The humor came later, on the other side, once the book was actually out in the world.

That gap matters. If you are in the thick of it now and nothing feels funny yet, that does not mean you are failing. It means you are still inside the part that becomes the story later. The laughter is waiting for you at the finish line, not before it.

Why I Shared It

I made this through Horseman Creative Studio partly to laugh at myself and partly out of solidarity. If you are somewhere in the middle of this journey right now, drowning in formatting and second guessing every choice, I wanted you to see that the panic and the sticky notes are normal. My years in nursing taught me that naming a hard thing out loud, and knowing you are not alone in it, takes a surprising amount of its power away.

So here is the truth behind the funny picture. It is hard, it is messy, and you can absolutely get through it. There may even be a milkshake waiting on the other side.