Elizabeth Royte has a cute article in the New York Times today about the various stages an author goes through when writing a book. Royte is the author of "Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash" and "The Tapir’s Morning Bath: Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest and the Scientists Who Are Trying to Solve Them."
The phases:The Fog of Love; The Big Suck-Up; naked in Public; Euphoria; Obsession; Denial; Bitter Recrimination; Shame and Embarassment; What about Oprah?; Reality Beckons; The Last Hurrah; Withering.
My favorite description of Royte’s is for Shame and Embarassment: "Keenly experienced by author at a reading attended by only one person, or when author feels he’s being jerked around. "You ask yourself, ‘Why am I getting up at 4 a.m. to go to Fort Lee, New Jersey, to be on a business program that no one will see when I wrote a sensitive literary book about relationships on the Internet?’ " said John Seabrook, the author of "Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace" and "Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing – The Marketing of Culture."