When the Fun Begins

I sold a book yesterday. Well, not yesterday-yesterday. I’m writing this in August, trying to clear uncluttered space for the longer project I’m working on, so I sold the book in my yesterday, not yours.Not sold-sold, either. No contract. That will be months away. Certainly no advance. More months. But an e-mail to my agent saying the editor “LOVES” what we’ve sent.And that followed by the remark, “I do have a couple of editorial comments.”My heart quickened.Not because I have sold another book. Selling a book pleases me enormously, as it should. A sale doesn’t just mean future income. It means that someone values my work, the first someone living outside my skull to value this particular work. And this sale was an especially happy one because I knew exactly what this publisher was looking for, had tried twice before to produce just that and each time had missed the mark. So I was delighted to be on target this time.What made my heart quicken, though, wasn’t the sale. It was the promise of “editorial comments.”Sometimes small pieces such as this one—a baby board book—move from submission to contract to publication without a word being changed. In fact, the manuscript may leave my hands and not reappear again until it’s nearly a book. And that’s fine. I work my manuscripts closely before I show them. Sometimes nothing more is needed. But how pleased I am when an editor out there, someone I usually haven’t even met, LOVES this closely worked manuscript, enters into it, and discovers possibilities I hadn’t seen myself.That’s when the fun begins.I’ve said it here before. Revision can be the best part. When I’m writing anything for the first time I have nothing before me except a blank screen and nothing to write out of except the swirl of my own brain. I’ve never been of the writing-is-easy-all-I-have-to-do-is-sit-down-at-the-typewriter-and-open-a-vein school. I enjoy writing. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be doing it, certainly not at this time of life when my days are so precious by being more clearly limited.But the fun only grows—what does it grow . . . deeper, larger, funner?—when I get to climb back inside what I already love and play there again.I haven’t worked with this particular editor before, so I don’t know what our process will be like. But from the comments she made on the two pieces she turned down, I know she has a clear vision, and I’m confident my small manuscript will grow stronger in meeting it.Editors aren’t always right. We all know that. I have just been through an editing process with another picture book in which the editor, while being confident and competent and making many good calls, also asked that I pull back some language in a way that would have diminished the work. The solution? I agreed, agreed, agreed, following his lead to a stronger, cleaner manuscript, and stood my ground on the language I knew would enrich my readers. I don’t know that I convinced him, but he let me have my way.In forty years of working with editors, though, I have found that most of them are right most of the time. They not only approach my manuscript with insight learned from wide-ranging practice, but they approach it with something I can never have, no matter how hard I work . . . objectivity. They are like vocal coaches who have the clear advantage of standing apart from me to hear my song.And to have someone else there with me in the playground of my creation, someone who cares as much as I do about the choice of each word, the flow of the language, the intent of the piece . . . well, fun doesn’t get much better than that!I can hardly wait.