Hopefully Resuming Normal Psychological Programming

It's gone. It's really gone. Carson's Learning is in the mail, and I can't change another thing on it for this submission.

Praise all that is good and holy in this world.

I have swung through so many emotions with CL. I've been deliriously, nothing-can-stop-me, look-out-world happy about the story and it's prospects. I've also been so thoroughly disgusted with it that I actually tried to rip a printed copy in half. (I was marginally successful and felt really stupid as I taped the torn sections back together so I could use the copy to revise). I've analyzed and angsted over a teeny tiny plot niggle that I've changed one paragraph of text over and over and over. I didn't go through all this with Human Dignity, mainly because of one big factor.

No one has seen this but Mark and me.

Andi's beta-read fell through, and I didn't have the time or the courage to ask anyone else for the favor. I'm not even going to get into my frame of mind while writing the original draft and making the subsequent revisions, suffice to say that sending this out with only my husband's feedback is not helping my already see-sawing confidence about this piece. Nothing wrong with Mark's critiques, except for the fact that he's about as close as to CL as I am and can't see the big picture anymore just like I can't.

The last week and a half have seen me alternating between thinking CL is so wonderful that big name editors will want me to write a proposal for a three-book deal and thinking it's so bad that the anthology staff will take the time to write a scathing rejection letter. All statistical improbabilities to both extremes aside, this translates to the fact that I no longer have any perspective or objectivity on this story.

I wish I could blame someone or a string of events for how seriously out-of-whack I've gotten over this, but I can't. I'm not so far gone as to puff up my chest and declare myself a true artist because I've sufficiently suffered for this novelette. I'm also not so deluded to pretend that my attitude right now is anyone's fault but my own.

Hopefully within a couple of days, I'll have the distance from this story to smile at my dreams of getting a book deal out of it and to roll my eyes at the silly notion that a busy anthology staff would take the time to lambaste me. And while I wait for their response, I'm going to keep working on other projects as if I didn't have a submission out. That's really all I can do.

I do have one concrete piece of good news about Carson's Learning, though. Final word count: 14,875, down from 18,606. Go me and my mad revisioning skillz.