And Now, I Wait.

Yes, Learn To Love Me is off to the editor. Now I can sit back, relax, read a book, and begin thinking about the next book. Bah-ha-ha-ha! Yeah. Right.

Waiting for a manuscript that's in editorial hands is a lot like waiting in your room, as a child, while your parents open, read, and discuss that sealed note the teacher sent home with you. You've tried to be good. You've worked hard, and done your best to follow the rules. But somewhere, deep down in a secret corner of your soul, you know you've done some bad things. You've broken some of those rules, and now you're sitting in your room, trying to think of which one of those rebellious moments might get you grounded until University.

See, writers are creative people. We've chosen a profession that allows us to express ourselves, and our perceptions of the world, in poetic narrative, and passionate rhetoric. We rearrange words; we sometimes create words, and people, and worlds. We pour our very essence into our work, and we pray it's well accepted.

But there are Rules .  The torture chamber of the writer's soul is stocked with rules. Grammar, punctuation, tense, point of view, characters, descriptive, verb, adverb, noun ... and it goes on, and on.  We try to follow the them, really we do, but we're creatives; we can't help but bend, stretch, or break boundaries. It is part of our nature.

"After all", we console ourselves, "didn't some of the most famous and successful writers break a lot of rules?"  Well, William Faulkner did shatter several of the standards, and managed to earn a Nobel Prize. Faulkner said, "Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error." The Paris Review (1956) George Orwell, don't forget, gave us six rules of writing, the sixth of which was,"Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."  Wikipedia

With the words of such greats rattling around our heads, we sneak around a rule or two. Sometimes we feel guilty, and take it out when we edit. Sometimes it goes to our heads, and we start breaking as many  as we think we can get away with.

That is why we have editors. Their job is to read through our manuscript and point out the places where we ignored the laws of writing.  They are the people who tell us whether our story is strong enough that readers will welcome our miniscule rebellions as brilliance, or condemn them as horrible writing. They are the ones qualified to pat us on the back for bending the rules just enough; or slap us in the head, for letting creativity to flout the them like teenagers on an unchaperoned school trip.

Some writers strive to follow every tenet. I'm not one of them. Some say, "to hell with the rules". I'm not one of those, either. I'd like to think I'm more in the middle somewhere.  I write with the rules in mind, but I'll break them, without a bit of guilt, if I feel the story would be better for it. Well, without a bit of guilt until I turned the manuscript over to the editor. Then I drift into the position I'm in now.

I'm sitting in my house, listening to the echoes of hubby's snoring from the next room, and the hum of my son's humidifier, further down the hall. Like a kid waiting for her parents to read the teacher's letter, I wonder what I'm going to get into trouble for trying to get away with. No shifting tense.  No disembodied parts. Don't begin sentences with conjunctions. Don't use too many ellipses, em-dashes, italics, adverbs, or exclamation points. I've broken them all.

Here is where being an Indie author can be less painful than traditional publishing. I chose my editor. I'm lucky enough to have an editor who is diligent and creative; who can tell me when my rule-breaking works, and when it doesn't. So, when Simon,( FB Profile ), takes me to task for something I've done, (and he will), I will be prepared to take my punishment, ( insert blatant movie reference clip here ), and make the appropriate changes. If I were working with a traditional publisher, I'd be handing my word-baby to a complete stranger, who weilds the ability to have my contract rejected because I don't do as I'm told.

I know that when Simon (Google + contact) is finished pointing out plot holes, info dump, and misplaced descriptive, I will have a novel that I can be proud to put my name on, and present to the reader.

The expected launch date for "Learn To Love Me" is still August 10th, 2012. I hope to have further announcements concerning the launch for everyone soon. Until then, I wait.