A little more about that lunch

The night before I turned in the manuscript, I woke up at 2 a.m. and realized there was one crucial word I had to change, one word that would make all the difference. OK, 2 a.m. is a dramatic time of day. I did not spring from my warm bed to fire up the computer and make the edit; that would have disturbed Boscoe. Instead, I went back to sleep.

In the morning it took hours to remember what word, and which chapter it was in (the word was "peculiar," and it was in the introduction). I did indeed change it (to "problematic"), but I can't say that it made much difference.

The title that I put on the first page before handing it over was "News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist." Todd seemed to like it, but the decision is not so simply made: apparently, there's a committee for that.

I confessed to Todd my two fears: (a) that he was publishing the book just to be nice to me (at this he almost choked on his tofu mock duck), and (b) that even though he had been reading the manuscript, chapter by chapter, as I wrote them, he had been holding back his enormous criticisms in hopes of getting a completed draft out of me, and now that he had one, he was going to rip it to shreds.

Not so, he said. He said he thought it should be fairly smooth sailing, getting this done.

Often, he sends manuscripts out for review to readers--before I took the job I have now, I used to do this for him, reading two or three submissions a year and offering suggestions. He said he didn't think he'd do that with mine. He plans to read it again, straight through, and then send it to a committee of his colleagues.

The committee will meet in another month or two and dicuss the book. They'll talk about content and possible changes, but mostly they talk about how to market it. what should the title be? What should the cover look like? Where should they pitch it? Who should write the cover blurbs? What big names (if any) can they get? That sort of thing.

Then it goes to a copy editor.

Once it's copy-edited, it goes to me, to address any concerns.

Then it goes to a typesetter ...

A friend of mine suggested that I might feel blue now that the enormous project is pretty much over. Another friend, who has written many books, said she often feels something akin to panic immediately after feeling elation. Right now, I feel a little bit bereft and a little bit confused, like, wait, this was just supposed to be a draft, to see what you thought, and now it's being swept away from me ...

And I think, What if nobody reads it? What if those who read it hate it? Or, possibly worse, are bored by it?

But mostly I think: I'm glad I did it, I think I like it, and I'm glad it's done.