Letting go…

I turned in Yes, I Know the Monkey Man yesterday. I won’t see it again until it’s typeset, which means…I’M DONE!!!! Except I don’t get real excited about being done. I want to keep tweaking. I could tweak forever. But then the book would never be published.

Years ago I did some miscellaneous work for a pretty established mystery author. He never had problems letting go…in fact, one of my “jobs” was to take the comments he got from his editor and fix the manuscript. I couldn’t believe he didn’t want to make the changes to his manuscript himself…and I was even more surprised he trusted ME to do it. He did look over what I did, but still…

I told one of my editors about that yesterday and not to be sexist or anything, she suggested men and women approach the revision process differently. In her experience, men are much more black and white in their approach to revision, whereas women “agonize and collaborate and negotiate and fight and even cry.” Sexist or not, I suspect she’s right…

So anyway…I took a long walk this morning (even though it was FREEZING COLD OUT!!!!), and I’ve been playing my mandolin and playing with my Zune. And tonight I’ll be working on my series proposal again…it’s very close to being done (I can let go of a proposal MUCH easier than I can let go of a manuscript). A group of us had a little write-in yesterday and I worked on my chapters again then…I was happy with the voice I had a week or so ago, whenever I last worked on it, so I thought I was maybe going to finish yesterday. But I found a new voice…and I’m even happier with this one than I was with the previous one. So I’m really, really glad I didn’t turn the proposal in before I started these final revisions of Yes, I Know the Monkey Man. Better to get it right than to simply turn it in.