I’ve been a bit of a wreck for the last week or so.
In June I met an agent at the Santa Barbara Writers
Conference who, through the advance submission
process, read the first five
pages of my manuscript Rules
for Giving. There is a bit of a story behind this (click here),
but this past weekend I took him up on his advice and sent my manuscript and a
check for $1,500 off to a freelance editor for a review and assessment.
This was a hard concession for me. I’ve spoken to other writers who have paid good money to get their manuscript edited, and I think the qualifications of the editors were dubious at best.
When a literary agent reads a sample of your manuscript, however, indicates an interest, and urges you to get it professionally edited, you start looking at it differently.
So how did I choose an editor? The research process was not that hard. I asked around and found that this agent has worked with an editor in the past. I called her and hashed out the details. Her resume was impressive, and I double checked with the agent, who agreed with my choice. After going through my novel one last time and then scratching the $1,500 out of my budget (a few other expenses took precedence—summer vacation with the family, car repairs, etc.) I was ready to send the novel off to the editor.
I wasn’t prepared for the stress that came with this, however. For the last week I have been looking at my boxed manuscript and my check for $1,500 and obsessing. I was short-tempered, pre-occupied, and a general asshole to my wife.
I’ve had others read my novel—members of my critique group, friends, a few selected readers who I thought would give me honest feedback—but this is someone I do not know, they have a lot of experience at this, and I am paying to tell me what is wrong with this manuscript. I expect to get the manuscript back with substantial markups and pages of notes and observations (okay, I have a fantasy that she might send it back with a few typos corrected and little else but accolades for the brilliance of my prose, but that is fantasy).
The input from this editor matters—all the more because in my discussions with her as we arrived at an arrangement, she agreed that once the manuscript was where we wanted it, she would talk to the agent on my behalf.
This past weekend I went down to the UPS Service Center and shipped off the package. The editing process will take two or three weeks (which means four to five). From there I am expecting a few weeks to a few months of rewriting, and then with any luck it is off to the agent.
I’ll keep you informed.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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