The Homestretch (?)

Big milestone in the development of the manuscript today. I switched out my black ink cartridge and hit print, marking the completion of the second revision of this version and the beginning of the third. This go-round will be quite a bit different, and I'm kind of nervous about it. While I've done all of my editing on the actual document so far, reading from a hard copy really makes me look at it differently. I have specific things I'm looking for that will have me rereading each chapter, one by one, seven or eight times with painstaking attention. I anticipate it taking a good amount of time to get through. Once I'm done, all that will be left will be finishing the query, and that job is no ride around the lake itself.

I'm also a little nervous about getting this close to what I've always told myself would be the end of the writing. The plan, back at the beginning of the school year, was to spend the fall prewriting, then drafting the manuscript for NaNoWriMo 2011, then knocking through a couple of revision passes, researching agents that might be good fits for the eventual pitch, putting together a force-of-nature query letter, and doing one last check of everything to make sure the manuscript stands as perfect as I can make it. There will be ups and downs in this last push; some days I'll feel buzzed about how much I like it and dejected about how much I don't. I've had several beta readers finish the book and get back to me with their opinions, and the responses have been overwhelmingly positive so far. In fact, if I can find an agent who likes it half as much as my most recent reader LOVED it, the whole thing will be a lock for me. And there's still a copy or two floating around out there, so maybe as more people read it along the way it will bolster me up.

But this last stage will be pretty lonely and full of self-doubt. It's a lot more fun to play with the optimism of trying to sell the book when you're still writing it and watching it become something. It's another thing altogether to reach the point where you feel like you're done and the goal is met, and then put your story out into the world and discover if your best is good enough or not.

I'm thinking back to a song I heard on the iPod this weekend while driving around, particularly one line from it: "No one gets to their heaven without a fight." I see this as a good metaphor for the effort that serves as background for that ridiculous platitude of how anyone can make their dreams come true if they just work hard enough. It might be a counterproductive thing for me to think as a teacher, but I've never believed that. Sometimes dreams don't come true, and they just never will, no matter what the dreamers do about it.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to roll over and give up, either. If it takes a fight to do this, I'm ready to bring one.