Yesterday, I got the phone call I was dreading – a call from my EDITOR. I spent half an hour on the phone yesterday with the person in charge of editing my next children’s book, and I have to admit, I had been dreading her call for a while.
I got an email from her when the book was first accepted by the publisher (yay – details to come, I promise!) saying, basically, “We love your book, but naturally, we’re going to have to make some changes to the text.” Which is their prerogative, right? I can’t force them to publish my book as-is, no matter how much I love the text, so my best bet if I want to be published is to roll with things.
So. I was prepared to roll with things. But that doesn’t mean I was looking forward to her call, in which we would “discuss the changes.”
Ugh. Did she not realize how much I’d sweated over every single word of that story? Written, revised, erased, gotten it to the point where it was just about perfect?
Let me tell you – I didn’t feel particularly grateful about the spectre of her call.
When you read a commercially-published book, you’ll often see a bit at the beginning or the end where the author thanks her family, her agent, and then her editor (or editors). I always took that part for granted until I started working as a novice journalist and working with editors who actually hacked and slashed and carved up my writing to find the most important points within it and bring those to the fore.
And at first, dealing with those editors, what I felt was mostly ingratitude. How dare they tell me how to write? Isn’t writing supposed to be an art form? And if so, would they swipe their red pens across a Degas or Van Gogh if they didn’t like what they saw on the canvas?
I was being – feel free to slap me now – frankly ridiculous.
Oh, I was gracious enough. I wanted to keep making money and getting published, so I rolled with it, like I said, and even said “thank you.” But I wasn’t feeling it. Oh, boy, was I not.
But gradually,
