Is Patience Really a Virtue?

I’ve been awaiting the arrival of edits on Wolf.  It’s funny that I’m nervous about this. I already got the contract. But I am. When I wrote Serviced I had self-revised until there wasn’t a single punctuation mark I wasn’t satisfied with, but that wasn’t even thirty pages long. I attempted to do the same with Wolf, which is why I’ve been holding on to it nearly three years after finishing it but at upwards of 240 pages that was proving, well, let’s just say difficult, and leave it at that. This time I know I’m going to have to make edits and based on someone else’s input. And that has me a little queasy.

I was the kid in school that had her hand waving frantically in the air, going “Ew, ew, ew, pick me, pick me.” Because I knew the answer. I always knew the answer. Kids hated me. Unless they didn’t do their homework or forgot to study, then for twenty minutes on Friday morning they LOVED me. My 7^th grade homeroom teacher had this revolutionary idea to try to make smart-sheik and invented a contest she called “Geek of the Week.” She would honor one student per week as said Geek. The winner would get their picture posted on a bulletin board in her classroom and a little bag of prizes. Then whoever had won the most often over the course of the entire year got the dubious title of, you guessed it, Geek of the Year. I’ll give you two guesses who was crowned Geek of the Year in June 1989, but you’re only going to need one. And I reveled in my nerd-om. My epithet would’ve read VALIDATE ME! Till I got boobs, but believe me that is a whole `nother story.

This waiting to get something back that isn’t perfectly right is a little like having my Geek crown stripped.

I don’t necessarily think my manuscript will be covered in red ink [Do they use red ink? I may hyperventilate if they use actual red ink.]. Who am I kidding?  I keep picturing my manuscript dripping with the blood of a drained red Bic while a vampiric copyeditor laughs menacingly in a dark distant corner a ’la Vincent Price. [I may have had a teensy bit too much caffeine today.] If perchance the copyeditor working on Wolf happens to surf my blog and reads this post, no offense meant. I’m a little hyper, a little emotional…wait. You work with writers all the time, right? LOL you’re used to it.

Okay this took about five minutes. Sigh. Waiting sucks.