Ah, publishing

Some of you don't believe me. You get mad when I say I am *still* revising my novel. You don't understand why I get so intense about it, why I take whole weekends to plow into it.

Anything can go wrong until a novel comes out, and it's gotta be at its best when it does.

I am going to be in two anthologies that originally were going to be coming out this summer. One of them is a group of short stories by different female authors and will be published this August or September. It's not up on Amazon yet.

The other is this book of essays that was originally listed on Amazon as coming out this June. Then it was pushed to September. Now it says it's coming out in June of 2007.

In this case, it's only one of many projects I'm working on, so it's not a big bother. But this happens to people's first novels sometimes. Say you are waiting to finally make it as a writer, and your first novel gets pushed back an entire year (or worse, canceled or the publishing company collapses), do you know how much of a setback that is?

Until you hold your book in your hand, you can't bank on it. So I am always simultaneously in a rush to get my writing done, and at the same time, trying to hold myself back until it is perfect.