What’s Next?

(Probably more meaningful to West Wing fans…)

So I spent some time yesterday talking to my editor at Bantam Dell about revisions for Rites of Spring (Break). The reason I was up at 8 a.m. this morning was not out of some desire for early-morning tai-chi (though I will admit to a love for early morning chai tea) but rather, because I want to get all the silly stuff out of the way so that I can be ready to leap into the revisions ere they come from the nice Fed Ex man.

I read with much amusement the recent blog posts of Maureen Johnson and Meg Cabot talking about the challenge of editor letters.

Maureen Johnson says:

There’s an adage that “writing is revision,” and I think it’s true. It marks the difference between merely writing something down and really writing something. I can’t take two very quick steps and say I was running. I have to make lots of quick steps in order to call it “running” and not just “quickly changing position.”

It’s sort of the same with writing. Books aren’t written once—they’re written five, a dozen, twenty, fifty times. … There is always a way to change things around. Herein lies the problem if you do this for a living.

It is a problem. Though I have it on good authority that Maureen has turned in her revisions, so I guess she found a place to stop… for now, at least.

Meg Cabot says:

But wait! Why is my old book being handed back to me? I thought I was done! I have already started a new book (some writers find this odd but do you know what I find odd? Not starting a new book as soon as you are done with an old book)! After my editor has read the manuscript, she usually has some suggestions. I hate revising more than anything in the universe. More than cleaning up cat puke. I am done with this book and do NOT want to work on it anymore.

But once I see my editor’s suggestions, I see that this book is terrible and needs tons of work. So I shut myself up and work on it, resenting that I can’t be working on the beautiful first draft of the new book I’ve started. STUPID OLD BOOK. I HATE YOU!!!!!!

This is, to be frank, precisely what I’m afraid of. Because I’ve been working on the unicorn book and it’s all bright and shiny (at least in my head) and now I have to go back to the other book. And it’s not that the other book sucks, it’s that the only parts you are focusing on are the parts that need work. So it creates this false sense that the book sucks so much more than you remember, and that of course it sucks more than the new book you’re writing all on your own with parts that are great.

Ah, the mind games art plays with us!

Ooh, Fed Ex is here. Back in a jif.

Okay, here I am. In passing, why do those debris-filled Fed Ex envelopes always explode on me? Things currently covered in tiny bits of gray recycled fluff: me, the manuscript, Pantalaimon the laptop, my teapot, my tea, and an ostensibly innocent blueberry muffin.

Grrrr….

I’m very lucky my editor is such a genius. She has really great ideas. A few have already made me giggle out loud. Also, the way she puts things is so droll. What, in particular? I can’t tell you. Spoilers, you know. But it involves the word “love machine.”

And now I’m going to have “stay on the scene, like a sex machine” in my head for the rest of the day. Thanks, Kerri.

Here goes… wonder if Sailor Boy wants to get me a new blueberry muffin?