Perhaps you heard my “Ta-da!” as I clicked the Send
button. At last, the thing was out of
our hands. Mr. Joe has been a
six-year labor of love, but that Wednesday I was saturated with it, having
spent the previous ten days putting in revisions. As the message went to the
Out box, I could almost hear the clang of rolling steel, as though a safety door
had descended behind Mr. Joe and forced me to let go—not a bad thing.
Our publisher normally responds like lightning to e-mails,
so I was surprised when we heard nothing back from her. Joe, with his trusting nature, assumed that
all was well; but some of us harbor more anxiety. Some of us question
everything. All I could think was: Did
she get the manuscript? Did she read it? Did she love it or hate it?
The silence was agonizing.
When Friday came—the due date--I ventured a second
e-mail in case the manuscript had not reached its destination. That time the
reply was quick. Our publisher had been preparing for a huge book fair all
week. Mr. Joe, one of many projects,
was on her reading schedule for the following week.
“Are you ‘done’ with it?” she asked in her message. “Do
you believe it’s ready to go?”
If I thought the silence from Wednesday to Friday
was agonizing, this was worse. How could I say it? The day after I sent the
manuscript in, I found an error: two words left out of one of the later
chapters, no doubt the result of my cutting
and pasting. The spell check hadn’t caught it.
I’d also thought of a great line I could add to Chapter
44, regarding my mother’s statement that she did not want to live to be ninety
years old. I hadn’t immediately seen that her words would connect beautifully to
an earlier passage in the book.
Now my mind was racing. Should I tell the publisher
about these changes? That would mean sending a new file. The changes were tiny.
The missing words would be caught in Production. Should I read Mr. Joe yet again? Would I think of a dozen
other changes if I did? I decided to delay my response.
She wrote again: “I’ll read it Tuesday and Wednesday
if you feel it’s ready to go to typesetting.”
I couldn’t escape the readiness issue. It made my heart race. It
made my mind wild. It made me doubt myself—but let’s cut to the lesson. Joe has
had to remind me a few times during this project that everything isn’t about me.
I don’t recall that he said it this
time, but his words echoed in my mind like the clang of that virtual steel door.
Our publisher is beyond
excited about Mr. Joe. Being also a
busy publisher, she likes to avoid reading multiple versions of the same
manuscript. Her unsettling questions weren’t a finger-wagging directed at me. She
merely wanted to know if the Author Final
was indeed final. I told her the truth: I'm never done. Writers seldom are. We can always
find something to change.
As she began her reading two thousand miles and three
time zones away, Joe and I did the same in Cincinnati. I intended to make my
two little fixes and hope the 91,000 other words would still stand. Here’s the
thing: Every change in a manuscript starts a chain reaction. Maybe we should
call it a change reaction, because every
change can trigger a new story. Every change makes an author rethink what came
before and after it. I got lost in Mr.
Joe and felt like I was fighting my way out. Maybe you know the feeling.
Luckily, our inner survival mechanism eventually kicks
in. When mine finally did, I completed my edits easily and clicked on the Send button without a single stab
of conscience.
DONE!
Thanks to our publisher, Bettie Youngs of Bettie Youngs Books, for her steadfast support and encouragement during the development of Mr. Joe.
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