The deadline to submit was noon today, and I was still tweaking and making slight changes at ten 'till. I've changed everything identified in my editing group (with one exception that I disagreed with), and some other things not noted by the group: phrases I decided to change in the interest of accuracy, word choice changes, grammatical restructuring.
My biggest concern is that there is something completely glaring that we all missed - me, my advisor, my thesis instructor, my classmates - that I won't see until it's printed. We'll have proofs that we'll check for spelling mistakes, etc., but that isn't a stage at which to make major edits. So I have to be happy with what I submitted via email a few hours ago.
It's funny ... when you start out writing, you write a first draft and you think, This is perfection. Then you have the story workshopped, or you take it to your writing group, and it's completely torn apart. So you go home and rend your garments in similar fashion, because your writing sucks and you decide never to write again, or at least not return to the decimated story that got you into this mess. But after the would heal, something pulls you back to this story, and when you can look at the critiques objectively, you realize that this story can be saved. So you do a first revision, which comes out pretty good but still needs more work, so you pass it on to a trusted reader. With the trusted reader's feedback, you do a second revision, a third, ad nauseum. Eventually you reach a point where all you're doing is sentence-level revision - which is a pretty good place to be - but when does the tweaking, the micro-revisions, ever stop? I could have kept going, were it not for my deadline.
So, the punchline is this: initially, you want nothing to do with revision, but the revision process gets addicting.
(Friends, please watch me carefully over the next few months. If I start to exhibit any of these 7 Signs of Addiction, please stage in intervention and take away my laptops, my netbook and my flash drive.)
I also had to include a bio with my submission, and the bio I submitted was totally lame because I have no publishing credits or interesting teaching/volunteer work to mention. I also didn't mention my husband or my cats because I like to keep my private life private. Are you excited yet? Without further ado ...
E. S. Cameron is a higher education administration professional. She lives and works in Washington, D.C.
I know ... super lame, right? I seriously need to publish something to beef up my bio.
