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was worth it. I was about to join the ranks of the elite - a PUBLISHED author. Maybe I really AM good!

That's when my novel moved into the editing stage of the publishing process. The publisher I was working with, which shall remain nameless at this point, still worked with hand editing - in other words, I received my manuscript back through a courier service with red and green pen marks hand edited, with comments in the margins and scribbles all over the document.

There were more red and green pen marks on my manuscript than there were typed words. I flipped through the pages and promptly sat in my desk chair and cried. I'm serious, I literally cried. They had torn my novel apart. They had torn my characters apart. They wanted me to make changes to 'my baby' that when finished, the novel would barely resemble the original story. Maybe I wasn't so good after all.

Ego Versus Desire

I suppose I could have argued the changes the editor wanted to make to my manuscript, but I also wanted desperately to be published, so I sucked it up, and I went through my manuscript, page by page, line by line, word by word, and made the changes they suggested.

When the manuscript was rewritten and edited per their specifications, I held a new manuscript in my hands, one that resembled what I had written, but somehow, even though I had done the work on the edits myself, I did not feel as though *I* had written the novel!

Patience is a Virtue

While your editor or publisher or agent will tell you, "I need this revision on my desk no later than Monday!" and expect you to jump for them, they do not jump for you. You may stay up for three days straight working on your masterpiece, turn it over to them, and not hear a word for days, weeks, even months.

The industry doesn't move fast. It took me a year to write my first novel, another six months to properly edit the manuscript, and six more months of queries, submissions, rejections and the like until I finally landed that contract - and that is FAST in the literary industry.

Once the manuscript was accepted, it took three more months just to receive my contracts, two more months before I was even assigned an editor, and eight more months before they finally sent me the edits.

After this, the publication date was set for my manuscript - 18 months from the day I returned the revisions to the publisher-18 months!

All Work and No Pay

While I was offered an advance on my first book, it was not a large one. Additionally, the advance would not be sent

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