I’m going to tell you about the worst nap I never took. Stick with me — this is about your manuscript, I promise.
A few years back Walt and I were on Denali, in Alaska, five days into the climb. Eighty-pound pack on my back. Dragging a sled behind me with another hundred pounds of group gear lashed to it. And I was wearing these big expedition boots — assault boots, built for sub-arctic misery — that had spent five days chewing my feet into hamburger. I could feel it. Raw meat where my feet used to be.
We’d hired a team for this. A guide, the whole operation, because they knew the mountain. They knew the logistics, they knew the safety gear, they knew where we were going when I sure as hell didn’t. That’s the deal you make. You bring your own grit; they bring the rope and the route.
So we drag ourselves into 11,000-foot camp, and a storm is rolling in. Everybody’s wrecked. We get the tents up — which is its own punishment, every single time, because you don’t just pitch a tent up there, you cut a whole boot box out of the snow first — and I finally, finally crawl into mine. And there is one thing I want on God’s green earth, just one: to get these goddamn boots off my feet and pass out. That’s the plan. Peel off the wet clothes, lie down, nap until somebody calls me for a meal.
And then, through the wind, a voice: “Hey — we’re cutting snow blocks to build walls so the tents don’t blow away.”
And I think, well, isn’t that nice of them to tell us. Keeping us posted. Maybe dinner’s running late. “Okay, thanks!”
“No. We need you out here.”
I want you to picture me jamming those boots back onto my screaming, hamburgered feet. I was so incensed I could have wept. Because there is no way anyone can expect me to go cut snow blocks right now.
Except. If we don’t cut the snow blocks, the tents blow off the mountain. And then we die.
So out I went.
Here’s the part I want you to sit with.
I thought I was done. Five days in. Feet destroyed. I’d earned that tent and that nap, and some part of me was keeping score, like the mountain owed me.
I was at 11,000 feet. Denali tops out at 20,310. I wasn’t even close to done. The mountain wasn’t remotely through with me — and worse, before I could so much as rest at the not-summit, it turned around and demanded the exact thing I’d just sworn I had nothing left to give.
That’s finishing your manuscript.
You type the last sentence. You feel the summit under your boots. You close the laptop and you come blinking up out of the cave into actual daylight — you remember your kids, your partner, the sun, exercise, food that isn’t eaten over a keyboard — and you think: done. I climbed the thing.
And you did. I’m not taking that from you. The draft is a real, hard, celebrate-it-with-champagne accomplishment.
It’s also 11,000-foot camp. It is not the top.
Above you: the edit — the one that comes back looking like a crime scene, red everywhere, like you’ve been executed and left to bleed out on the page. The proofs. The cover. The formatting. The launch. The part where you have to look people in the eye and ask them to buy the thing. And then the season after it’s out, which is its own climb. The work isn’t over when the manuscript’s done. It isn’t over when it’s on the shelf. It isn’t really ever all the way over.
Now — here’s what I don’t want you walking away with: that you signed up to suffer alone in the wind, forever, until you’re blown off the mountain. You didn’t. You hired a team for a reason. On Denali, I was not out there cutting blocks solo while the guides napped. They were out there too. They were out there first. That’s the entire point of the rope. We carry the group gear together. When the storm hits the production stage, you are not the one who has to know how to format a manuscript or design a cover or build a launch plan from scratch. That’s our hundred pounds of the sled. We’ve got it.
But — and this is the part nobody can do for you — you do have to come out of the tent. You can’t outsource the call on whether it’s hijacked or helpless—Good lord, the choices you have to weigh in on. Nobody else gets to decide which is your word. Nobody can put your boots back on your feet for you.
So put them back on.
The blocks get cut. The walls go up. The tents stay on the mountain. And the next morning you drink your coffee, look up, and yes — there’s still all that gorgeous, terrible mountain above you. But there’s also a team roped in right beside you, already moving.
Lace up.
