Not only did my advance cheque arrive this morning (YAY! — insert cartwheeling and planning of many cheques to be written and bills to be paid here), but my editor just e-mailed me to say that Pagan Pregnancy got a short write-up in the latest Publisher’s Weekly as a forthcoming title. Nothing huge, just a mention and a synopsis, but it’s there and that is a very good thing.

First day of official at-my-desk work this week. It really feels like a Monday around here.

I just got the copyedited manuscript for the pagan pregnancy book. They asked me to look the edits and comments over and tell them if January 30 was an acceptable deadline for sending back the rewrites.

Pretty much every author I know hates doing rewrites and copyedits. They drag up all sorts of self-confidence and self-esteem issues, making us bang our heads on our desks a lot, declare the work to be broken and unsalvageable, and ask ourselves why we have deluded ourselves into thinking that we can write. I am no different.

I’ve been dreading this moment. I’m in the middle (okay, first third) of another completely different book that requires a very different headspace. I haven’t looked at this manuscript for fourteen months. So I steeled myself, heroically opened up the file, and started scanning through it.

…

That sound you hear (or don’t, in this case) is me being speechless.

There are two — yes, TWO — major things to look at. And they are minor major things, if you know what I mean, As in, maybe we should cut these paragraph. (Answer: Yes, now that I see it again after fourteen months; they don’t fit very well.) Or, I think this chapter should be moved earlier; what do you think? (Answer: Probably… but everything before it is kind of theoretical and backgroundy, and as this chapter address practical and active stuff I couldn’t think of anywhere earlier to put it at the time.) And, Don’t you think it’s kind of asking the reader to do a major gear-shift, going from a chapter about loss and miscarriage to a chapter on birth? (Maybe… but that’s the order a reader would encounter the issues, and I can’t think of where else to put that chapter… certainly not at the end of the book!) Okay, that’s three examples, but you get the idea.

There are some minor things, like figuring out what to do about the quotations (things I get mad at not seeing in other books, but here they’re asking me to take them out and use my own words, and asking why I need quotes to support things that stand on their own… blame my academic background), asking for an identification/clarification (Q: Are readers going to know who Starhawk is? A: Bwah-hah-hah-hah) and italicizing the titles in my bibliography (which I usually do and can’t figure out why I didn’t this time… or maybe I did and the formatting was stripped at some stage).

In two weeks’ time? Heck, you can have it back next week. This will take me a day to do. It’s just a question of scheduling that day into everything else I’m working on.

I should have known something terrific was going to happen when I woke up to Nixie nibbling my fingers lovingly. Woke up the second time, that is; I first woke up at quarter to five (not as cheerfully), got up and wrote a couple of pages in the hearthcraft book as well as handling some e-mail, then curled up in bed again with HRH and the boy after the boy got up at six-something. Then they left to get dressed and have breakfast, and I pulled the quilt over my head… and woke up an hour later with Nixie purring at me and giving my fingers sweet little love nibbles. Hey, I’ll take any extra sleep I can get. Especially when I don’t fall asleep till midnight, no matter what I do.

I’m glad this happened. The only other post I could think of doing was one that talked about how hard this damn fatigue/pain thing has been on my mental and emotional state lately, and frankly, I didn’t want to write it or post it. I didn’t want to do something negative like that today, even though I can sense that soon I’ll need to vent about the frustration and the fear. The other awesome thing that can happen any time now is the hearthcraft advance cheque landing in my mailbox, okay, universe? That would make me very cheery indeed.