Go ahead, pat me on the back— I’ve reached a new milestone. After almost six months of editing, and with the help of an awesome team of beta-readers, I’ve declared my manuscript finished. I’m using the above minion as my own merit badge. Yay, go me!
The truth is, I had to give myself a deadline. I’m a control freak, which means I’m a perfectionist, and the editing process thrills me. I love taking what I wrote before and making it better. I love turning sentences over in my mind, and finding new words to say the same thing. You can see how this editing business could go on for a lot longer than 6 months—is this paragraph the way I want it? How can I make this sentence better? Have I used all five senses in this page? It’s addicting, and a very good way to turn my novel into “The Never Ending Story”, believe me.
Of course, not all parts of editing and revising are fun—I had to cut out a lot of parts that didn’t work, and that hurts sometimes, even when I knew the end result would be for the better. There were some cute scenes between Josh and Sofia that I wanted to keep but chop,chop they went.
Then there’s the part where I had to use the ‘find’ function to locate repeated words. For instance, the word ‘that’. Seems innocuous enough, doesn’t it? In a manuscript with the total word count of about 89,000 words, almost 900 of those were the word ‘that’. Imagine that. After spending close to 3 days, and tediously going line by line to assess the relevance of each ‘that’, I was able to cut a little over 300 of them. Redundant much? Yeah, just a little bit. By the end of it, I was so tired of this part of the revision process that I was unable to go through any other frequent words and do the same. “That” was enough for me.
I mentioned before how I pitched to the managing editor of an LDS publisher in May, at the LDS Storymakers conference. This means I had a 10 minute meeting with this very nice lady and told her the gist of my story. She liked it and asked me to submit my manuscript to them. In the submissions guidelines page of this publisher’s website, in addition to the manuscript, they also asked to complete an author questionnaire, and write a one-page plot summary. I had the questionnaire done back in June but had no idea how to do a one-page plot summary. After asking around in some writing groups, I got some tips and was able to finish it—my whole novel reduced to 351 words typed in one page in 12-point font. Let’s just say, I hope they don’t judge me too harshly on that, I really write better, I promise.
So here I was, with the manuscript finished, the plot summary and the questionnaire done, all attached to a cover letter written in an email and addressed to the editor. And I sat in front of my computer screen and stared at that email and its attachments—and had no courage to push the ‘send’ button. I stared so much and for so long that my 14 year-old daughter, sitting close by, said to me: “Stop staring at it, and just send it!”.
What was my hold up, you ask? Fear. That basic human emotion. In my case, the fear of rejection and the fear of acceptance. Side by side like that.
I think the first one is easy to understand—what if I go through this submission process, and after all the wait, they come back to say they don’t want my novel? What will this rejection do to my writer ego? Will this mean that my story is not attractive, that my writing is not good? Will I lose my confidence in my own abilities?
And what if they accept it? What kind of changes will I have to make to my manuscript? How long will it take before it’s published?
The good news is I don’t have to make a decision right now. Furthermore, I know that my value as a writer and the merit of my story don’t depend on whether this publisher accepts it or not. If they reject it, it only means it’s not a good fit for them in particular and at this time. There are still lots of other possible outcomes, including publishing my book independently. And for someone who likes to be in charge, going indie has a lot of appeal.
After checking, double-checking, and triple checking the email and all its attachments, I sent it. I received confirmation this morning that they received it and everything looks good. It will be read by a couple of editors at that publishing house, and, if they like it, it will then be sent to outside professional evaluators. There are a few other steps in the process which may take 4-6 months. When I have an update, I will post it here.
In the meantime, I will be catching up with the writing of my second novel, and I’m very excited about that.
