Pressing Send -

(or bicycling to the Post Office)

Happy Sunday!

I know that all writers must share this feeling: you press SEND - or the little arrow shaped like the paper airplanes we used to buzz across the classrooms at school - and your manuscript flies away, out of your control forever (unless you want to indulge in the expensive process of re-writing in proof, which editors hate.) Your stomach seems to sink. It’s gone. There’s lightness, a sense of release. And there’s dread - now I can’t fiddle, cut, prune, add, change it anymore. It could have been better…maybe.

In my case, yesterday, I not only sent the digital version to my editor, but did the old-fashioned thing of getting 200+ pages printed up, put in a box and labelled with a physical address, and went to the Post Office on my trike to hand it over the counter. It’s decades since I did this, since we all went digital, but my publisher requested it and I respect her wishes. It seems more real, somehow. It was real paper, in a real parcel, and it went by real post to a real woman. (I’m a 20th century sort of person at heart.)

I remember the Gillian Anderson film about a young writer living in the bush in Australia - was it called My Beautiful Life? The young woman sends off a brown-paper parcel containing her first book and eventually gets a rapturous response from a publisher in London to say that she will be published. So it goes in all the movies about writers. One minute, scratching away in a garret or in the outback, the next a much-feted celebrity. Otherwise there wouldn’t be movies about writers, as they would simply be doing all the scratching away and then we would see them in tears or alcoholic on account of all the rejections, and that would be that. But the sending away of hefty parcels of manuscript always figures, it’s part of the plot, and we see the writer simultaneously relieved and anxious, handing over the goods.

So, I was glad to be turning my manuscript into a bulky package again - it seemed to give it some heft. Literally. What’s in a digital file? And I triked home again, relieved and yes, lighter.

I don’t have to go through the anguish of waiting, this time, though. The novel has already been accepted and will come out in May, 2027. But there’s the worry still - did I cut enough, prune enough, add enough, make it as good as it could be? The answer is always no. But nothing is perfect. Perfectionism, as Julia Cameron warned us constantly in “The Artist’s Way” - is the enemy of creativity. And who was it who said that “A novel is a long piece of prose with something wrong with it”? I guess that’s about the best we can hope for.

Thanks for reading.