Nano, Writing, and I HAVE AN EDITOR!

Bleh!

The first two days of Nano went great. I pounded out 4k worth of words each. Day three not so much. Maybe 100 words.

I have a feeling I'm going to fail Nano this year, but for a very good reason!

I received an email from my editor. *Dances* I have an editor! *Dances some more*

I love hearing those words. I'd hug my laptop just for the sheer fact I have email from my editor.

This joy is followed with the utmost awe and a sense of surreal disbelief.

I. Have. An. Editor.

This is the person who will be ripping my work apart and sending it back to me in shreds in order for me to put it back together in order to improve my writing. This is the person who, through the authority of their job, will make me a better writer by the changing of a word here and there, the shifting of phrases, and doing it all with a deadline and a smile.

Okay, now I'm shaking with abject terror.

I have an editor...

I look over the manuscript I sent in. I already see glaring mistakes. I'm doing pre-edits to clean it up as they requested and I cringe every time I see a mistake. I wonder how in the world they saw this is as good enough to want. The internal editor, the insidious demon that lurks in the back of my brain, in the shadowy corner there, the creature I made a deal with when I was two chapters into writing this manuscript, is screaming at me and making up for lost time. (I made a deal with this thing to just let me write it and not make a fuss so I could get it out on "paper". The beast agreed.)

Now I want to reach back there and bitch slap the beast for listening to me!

Perfectly okay, it likes the abuse. After all, it resides in the mind of a writer!

As I furiously try to do pre-edits, I've given up on eating, seeing daylight, or remembering I have a child that needs to get to the bus stop by 8:15a, or a family who really would like some clothes to wear not stained and dirty, or food to eat. Wait? What was food again?

As I, like a mad-woman, try to complete said pre-edits, all I can think of is what I'd like to to say to my editor in way of greeting. When I told my husband of my being assigned an editor, his first words were, paraphrasing Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation..."May whatever Gods she believes in, have mercy on her soul."

(He knows me all too well. This month marks 13 years together.)

Because, dear editor, I have a feeling you're going to need it, and a lot of patience, working with me. Oh, not that I'm deliberately difficult. No, but I am a beginning writer, a newbie, a virgin to the publishing industry, ripe for the plucking, prepared for the table of the great beast, the publishing industry.

I will pick your brain with questions. And pick. And pick. And pick some more.

I want to learn. I want to better my writing.

=)