This week, I turned the whole manuscript of my book “This Is Not a Writing Manual” (TINAWM) to my editor.
Image courtesy of billaday (flickr.com)
Hurray, right?
Not so much.
Suddenly, it felt like I’d never even read the thing over myself–even though I’d read, and re-read, and written, and re-written and re-written and RE-WRITTEN the damn thing so many times I couldn’t even see it clearly anymore.
You know when you’ve read something so many times, it’s like your eyes just start to fall into the grooves made by the letters and spaces, and it’s like they are doing some sort of mind-numbing ocular exercise rather than actually reading and sending information to your brain? That was what re-reading my manuscript was like on Monday morning. It was time to send it in, and take a break from it while the editor did her thing.
So why the completely untrue, but still very intense, wave of paranoia that I hadn’t done enough? I even had a cliche dream a few nights before, where I was supposed to give a speech at the wedding of a friend I hadn’t seen in years, and–surprise, surprise!–I wasn’t ready. In fact, my bridesmaid dress didn’t even fit. Had I not woken up, it might have morphed into an even more embarrassing and cliche naked dream.
If a friend of mine was telling me all this, I’d take her out for a pumpkin latte and say “Of course.” Of course you feel that way, when so much is at stake. It’s perfectly normal.
So I did make myself a pumpkin latte this morning, and I’m writing this blog and telling myself it’s perfectly normal and just calm down, but still–I feel jittery.
I suspect I will for a while. And I’ll need something a lot stronger than a pumpkin latte when I have to fork over the manuscript for good in just a few short months, after the edits and copyedits are done, knowing I won’t be able to get my hands on it again. Ever.
I’m sharing all this fear and anxiety with you, believe it or not, to inspire you to SUBMIT TO YARN! And to tell your friends to SUBMIT! You have to let it off your hard-drive some day. And when you can’t even see it anymore–that’s usually the right time to fork it over to an editor who cares. Who knows what you’re going through.
We really want to know: What’s your YARN?