I am in the home stretch with the (current) round of revisions for The Silver Girl. I don’t know if everyone knows how this works, so I will give you a little overview of the process.
Once a publisher agrees to publish the manuscript, the editor sends the writer an editorial letter, which is basically a few pages of critique. The writer gets a few months to address the issues. I always make a good faith effort to take the editor’s instructions. However, if there is something that I just really disagree with, I leave it be. Sometimes fixing other issues with the novel, will make it where things that used to be issues aren’t issues anymore.
I do try and address every point she brings up, even the ones that seem crazy on their face. You have to trust your editor enough to believe that she knows how to make the book better. As I tell my students all the time– take every suggestion. If you don’t like it, just change it back to the original.
This morning, I rewrote the ending. Tomorrow, I will do one more read through, but then I’ll be ready to submit. It’s a really big deal. I half want to celebrate and the other half of me would like to get in the bed. I am exhausted.
Over the next couple of weeks, my editor write me another editorial letter. This is when we will really tangle over the little stuff. I will turn it in one more time and we will basically be done.
Maybe then I will be rested up enough to party.

It’s time to introduce a new term– Workcrastinaton. If you’re like me, you think that procrastination involves Law & Order marathons and twitter, and these are insidious forms of procrastination, for sure. But there is another, more sneaky, incarnation– Workscrastination.
This is when you blow off your novel for important stuff that needs doing, not fun stuff, but neccesary stuff. For example, right now. I know I need to be working on my novel, but I am doing things like grading student papers. (It must be done! It’s my job!), paying bills (It’s the first of the month!), etc. Other instruments of Workcrastination include updating this website. (I spent half the morning updating my “appearances” page. Check it out. I added a lot of new stuff.)
But really. This has got to stop. I am about ten pages from the end. Why am I acting like this??? I am going to have to get a zero-tolerance policy with myself– If it ain’t the book, it’s procrastination. If the house is burning down, grabbing a hose = procrastination.
Time to get to work.