That’s about it. I’m about to e-ship the manuscript off to the publisher. This is how it works.

You submit your original manuscript, not exactly thrilled, since it’s not perfect, but you are sick of it and ready to give up, and open to suggestions and editing. Sure! You’re open-minded and collaborative.

Just in case, you keep all of the sources you used in a stack in the corner for use at a later date.

The later date arrives. Used to be this was in the form of an actual paper manuscript, but no more. It’s through the email, and your previously pristine manuscript is now color-coded with at least two different editor’s changes, plus yellow streaks of comments.

This can’t be too bad, you think. I can probably do it this afternoon!

Sure.

Four days later, you emerge, mad at your own carelessness, wondering why you ever thought “Oh, I’ll just pick up that point in copyediting,” but just as angry and frustrated with having to constantly argue the obvious, you think. Your self-loathing is broken only by listening to that NPR game show you hate because it’s so damn smug, but you happen to catch the host and his guest both complaining about being copyedited, and having to answer, for example, queries like “Why is this funny?”

And in the midst of it, your carefully-maintained stack has somehow sprung legs and walked away, at least in parts. So that the well-worn, familiar Early Christian Fathers that you’ve had and trusted since college is now gone and you really need it. The next day it turns up, spine backwards on the wrong shelf (the Catholic fiction shelf) next to J.F. Powers, for some strange reason.

But you have your satisfactions, too. The moments you can correct the editor (hah!) and the moment in which, just a second before you were going to have to lose a Chesterton quote that he was “supposed to have said” but no source online or anywhere else can definitively trace to anything, and you know, your publisher’s kind of strict on that, when your eyes glance up to a bookshelf, to a book you rescued from the trash of a Catholic school library fifteen years ago, and you think, “Well…maybe it’s in there…” And it is!

But by this time, largely left to his own devices all morning, Joseph has stripped off his clothes and is running wildly around the house buck naked, so that particular satisfaction is short-lived.