The Frustrations

There is nothing worse than getting a stack of edits back, well after you've submitted the manuscript, and finding errors in the first story. Your heart sinks, and  you fear, Oh God, I'm going to get rejected. But it's still an awful waiting game. Then there's always that hope, What if what I wrote is still good enough....?

Everyone knows that when submitting something, revise, revise, revise. I do. The manuscript in question is the short story chapbook I submitted to Burnside Review. Each story had been written on their own over the last year or two, and were clumped together into what is/was known as Kitchen Floor Confessions. I had been editing the stories pretty much any time I got  bored--throwing something new into the mix, finding spelling or tense errors. Then for a month straight they were hit hard, by me and everyone else I sent them to, and then by me a few more times.

As far as the manuscript as a whole is concerned, Laura and Alyssa were the only ones to send back ANY edits. Peter never went through. Nor did Mike. Tammy and Elizabeth are excused as I gave them to them WAYYYY late. Just today, I got Sandy's back. Laura and Alyssa didn't get through all the stories, and by the end I had re-ordered many of them (so the last story originally is now the first). The first story, did not get re-edited by them, only by me...the person who wrote it and was so used to reading it that everything came out the way it was supposed to...or so I thought.

I'm not going to lie, the processes is exhausting. I think that's why we (as writers) need distance from our work. So we can go back to a story once we've forgotten what it was about, and re-edit, and make it polished and pretty and ready to submit again.

Game On (Game On).