In case anyone’s interested, my academic alter-ego wrote a post for Cyborgology the other day that deals with my complicated and problematic relationship with print and ebooks in the context of seeing Line and Orbit through to publication.
When I write a manuscript, it should be real to me; I brought it into being, shaped and manipulated it until I was happy with it, put it into the words that I chose. And yet it’s not really real to me until someone has paid me money to publish it, and it’s still not as real as it could be until it’s in physical, tactile form. A lot of this, again, is about external validation, but most of it is how I personally navigate what I perceive as different orders of real. Not necessarily physical/digital and real/unreal, but rather a spectrum along which this thing that I made moves.
Woo navel-gazing. And navel-gazing in which I work in a plug for my book. Shameless.
A Trick of Light 
LOL – love the closing comments! 🙂 Yes, I agree with you that it’s all very strange – when I’m writing the story is REAL. Everything from typing “the end” to publication and beyond does not feel “real,” though – despite how much heart and soul (and blood and tears) goes into finding an agent/publisher, editing, cover art, etc. I thought each of those steps would make it “real” or that holding my finished book in my hand would make it “real” but none of those things have. Instead, I’m much more interested and intent on my current “real” thing – my WIP. So strange how the writerly mind words sometimes 🙂
That too! After I write something, very often my attention leaves it entirely, even if it’s going to be published, and focuses much more on whatever my WIP is. Strange indeed.