I received a copy of this through Goodreads Firstreads in exchange for an honest review. Anyone who has a book rumbling around in them would find this book informative and helpful. Even if all of the chapters don't apply to you, it is a great resource to have. ( )

I was disappointed in this book. I think I picked it up last summer, when I saw the author's workshop offered at Grub Street. I couldn't do the workshop, so I thought this would be a way of getting some of the same benefits, but as I skimmed through the middle sections of the book, I found myself wishing I hadn't even paid the $4 for the ebook.

It turns out I'm not much of a procrastinator or a perfectionist, by Rettig's definitions, and I've never really believed in writer's block. Her suggestions to delegate lower-value tasks to others, or hire people to do them, are pretty useless unless you have a few thousand dollars to throw around (and probably more useful to people without small children). I came away with no really useable ways to increase my work time or productivity, though I did highlight a few passages here and there, and will go back over those in case there's something important.

As someone who has self-published two ebooks, I felt like her $12,000 budget for self-publishing this book (detailed in one of the closing sections) was ridiculously high.

I think that this book is probably most useful to people in graduate school, and it made me so, so glad that I never went for a Ph. D. or an MFA., and may also be useful to some beginning fiction writers.

The upshot of the book is basically this: Cut yourself some slack. ( )