From out of the darkness

I have returned. Sorry for my long absence, unless you enjoyed it, in which case...well, I don't blame you.

I've been dealing with some stress, and some vague melancholy and restlessness, and tinkering endlessly with the novel. I just haven't felt like blogging...haven't felt like I had much to say.

Bu I realized a few days ago that I must send this novel out soon. Query letter is ready, synopsis is ready, and I've almost finished going through my CPs comments and making any necessary changes. If I continue the tinkering, I'll be tinkering forever. At this point I'm rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (in the "doing something useless" fashion, not the "this ship is sinking" way).

What's odd is that I've never been like this with a novel. The last two, I went through two edits and a few CPs comments, then felt like there was nothing I could do. With this one...well, the perfectionist in me is really making her thoughts known. She's a loud one, the perfectionist. Strident, bossy, shrill.

But the other night I shut her up. "I'm going to do this, and this, and this--and then I'm sending it out. And you can just shut up about it." She had a lot to say about that, but I shut down her protestations. Changing the word order in this sentence and double-checking my comma placement aren't going to make a huge difference, and are really just more ways to procrastinate.

So! A week from this Monday, barring any other commitments (might need to be helping clean out my mom's house before the sale), the first batch of queries goes out.

There. I said it, and now I'm committed.

Of course, once I send those queries out, I'll probably be fit to be committed in another way. But we'll worry about that rubber room when we get to it.