It Never Gets Any Better

Right now, all those pubbed authors who told me that it would never get any better, that I would always feel that panic rising about submissions, that nothing would ever get "old-hat" (unless you're La Nora, but there's only one La Nora, right?) ... well, all of those guys would be sagely nodding their heads at me right about now.

Because ...

Well, it never gets any better.

I sent off my MS of UP FROM ROCK BOTTOM last Wednesday by Global Express. Usually it takes eight days for mail to wind its way from middle Georgia to Macon, Ga. to Miami and then to Toronto. It has to go through Customs and everything.

So that was eight days I could relax, right? I requested e-mail updates from USPS about my tracking, and I ordered myself to get busy planning my next book and getting my webhosting and domain names straightened out.

Imagine my surprise when I got an e-mail from my own lovely editor, telling me that the MS was on her desk. Gasp! Chortle! I was seized by the inexplicable urge to catch the next flight to Toronto and rip it from her hands and shriek, "It's not done yet! NO PEEKING! I'm not ready for you to look at it!"

But of course, at this point, I am done with it. I've done all that I can until I get an expert's opinion about what to do next -- and she's the best expert I know. She's a jam-up editor!

Compare that plethora of panic to my phobias a year ago. Back then, I worried and fretted about whether it had got there. Did the absence of the returned self-addressed postcard mean that the mechanical wizardry that runs our mail service had chewed up my MS and spit it out?

I wasn't worried about what an editor would think of it -- at least not immediately. I took weird insulating comfort in the certain knowledge that, when it got there, my work was safely in the confines of a towering slush pile.

Not on my editor's desk. Not like now.

Guess it just goes to show.

We writers worry about everything.

It never gets any better.