“The new phonebook’s here!”

Remember that line from the movie, The Jerk with Steve Martin?  He runs around doing the happy dance when the new phonebook is delivered.  That was me when my long-awaited first edits arrived yesterday for His Perfect Passion.  Except nowadays documents are delivered in an email and I don’t think I’m quite as ignorant as poor Navin Johnson was in that movie.  Well, I hope not anyway.

It was an exciting moment because it validated once again that my book really is being published.  I’ve learned there’s a lot of waiting around in the publishing business.  You have to use that waiting time to write your next book because you’ll have to wait some more for it too.

And the result wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d worried it might be.   The editor sent two documents.  One was a checklist with notations, suggestions and compliments, and the other was a word doc. of my whole book with all the corrections highlighted in different colors and balloon comments telling you what they want you to look at over on the right.  I like how my editor said, “please consider changing this to…for better clarity,” rather than saying, “that’s just stupid the way you wrote this, Raine!”  (Thanks, Caroline, for being so nice to me.) 

That kind of niceness is another thing I’ve experienced over and over since I’ve started down this writerly path.  The people in this business are just downright wonderful.  Whether they’re writers or publishers or bloggers or readers or Facebookers or whatever, they are kind and helpful, funny and interesting.  I’ve met so many lovely people and am having such a good time doing this, I wish I’d started writing years ago.

~Raine