Pages of Heartbreak

They don’t tell you this when you begin… that writing a book will break your heart.

Not just once. It happens repeatedly. Brutally.

The act itself is a sheer, slow violence of extracting something real and alive from inside you and turning it into a product.

Writing is romantic until it isn’t. It starts with a spark, a sense of purpose. 

You tell yourself, this matters. Heck, someone else might even tell you it matters. Encourage you. Hold your hand through it.

You start gathering fragments of thoughts, truths too painful to say aloud, dreams too fragile to name. You build a world. Characters arrive. A voice emerges. You start to believe.

But the deeper you go, the more it demands.

It drags up everything you’ve buried. Every shame, every memory, every longing, every doubt. You unearth hidden traumas your therapist could never uncover. You start cutting pieces of yourself out and offering them to the page. Some days the words come like blood. Other days, like pulling teeth with no anasthesia.

And just when you think the hardest part is over, when you’ve sculpted sentences that almost say what you mean, when you’ve made peace with what you’ve exposed, you realize: now you have to format the damn thing.

I paid someone else to do it. It wasn’t how I envisioned it, and now I’m staying up all night to meet the deadline I promised the Library of Congress. 

Let me say this clearly— formatting a book is another level hell.

Typesetting software is a sadist that invite you into a welcoming parlour only for it to turn into a torture chamber with cushioned handcuffs.

You whip the margins, line heights, drop caps, headers into shape, but each lash comes with a new opportunity for something to misalign or disappear.

You obsess over em dashes and orphan lines like they’re sacred.

You discover that what looked beautiful in Word now looks like garbage in EPUB.

You stare at widows like they’ve insulted your ancestors.

You print a copy only to find a random italic “the” in Chapter 7 that nobody caught in 26 rounds of edits.

Every export is a tiny betrayal. Every font choice suddenly feels like a referendum on your soul.

At some point, it hits you… this isn’t just publishing. It’s mourning.

You’re saying goodbye to the pure, private version of your story. The one only you knew. The one that held everything you couldn’t say out loud.

Now it has page numbers. Now it has a cover. Now it’s out there. Fixed. Final. No longer yours alone.

People ask, “How does it feel to be done?”

You smile. You say thank you. You say you're proud to finally fulfil a life goal.

But inside, there’s a hollow ache. It’s not regret. Not exactly. Just… grief. Because you loved the book in a way no one else ever will. And finishing it means letting it go.

So here’s the truth.

Writing a book broke me.
Formatting it nearly ended me.
But I did it.

And if you’re in the thick of it, if your soul is splintering across an InDesign file or you're crying over a paragraph you can't quell into submission while arguing with the characters in your head— you’re not alone. You're not crazy. Maybe you’re actually doing it right.

Art hurts. That’s how you know it’s real.

Love, Vx

PS: I recommend Vellum.