Cat Waxing
I have written a lot of blog posts this week. About halfway through, I realized what I was doing. The time honored tradition of cat-waxing.
There was writing that needed to get done, but instead I was working hard on the one thing that hasn’t gotten much response: my blog. That’s because I was avoiding the more difficult editing, re-writing, and fixing of my novel’s manuscript. Much more fun to talk about my typewriters.
Well, cat-waxing or no, I got my manuscript a bit more polished, and shoved it into the intertubes for Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award. How many times have I re-read my <300 word pitch? About a billion. And re-written it? About a million. Is it any better than the first version I wrote? At this point, I have no clue. Sometimes, it seems passable for prose written in the English language. Other times, I think it was written by a toddler in excrement on the bathroom wall.
But it’s done! I’m in. They still allow me to fiddle with it until they reach the cut-off point of 10,000 submissions or January 27th. Though there are probably untold things that could be improved, my sanity would be better served by leaving it alone. Then it’s just a month’s wait until February 13 and I discover whether my pitch was written in English or crap.
I have had a couple of encouraging pieces of writing news in the last week. One of them I can’t really share yet. The other was feedback from an editor on a story that I’d submitted many months ago. I’d queried to see what the status was, and she responded that she’d “loved” it. But it still has another layer of approval before it could be published. Nevertheless, a good ego-boo.
Now, I can get back to my typewriters. And this time maybe it will be for its own sake rather than as an avoidance technique.