I typed the title for this post and my brain served up a memory of Billy doing a godawful Jim Morrison impression. “Way-TING.. WAY-HAY-TING…” (As if the actual Jim Morrison weren’t bad enough. Not a Doors fan. Sorry. I was, but then I turned thirteen and discovered The Smiths.)

Oy. If anyone out there is truly capable of reading minds that must be a terrible curse. In the time it took me to type this paragraph my brain went from my book to Billy to the Doors to Morrissey to a poster in my teenage bedroom to hummus to eyeshadow to parabens.

I came here to tell you something and I’ve gotten terribly off track. It’s been that kind of a night. I came here to tell you that I finished revising The Revolution of Every Day per the editorial notes from the very wise and generous editor I’ve had the good luck to be working with. Today I compiled it from Scrivener into Word. And then formatted it for two hours. I love writing in Scrivener. It’s worth all that formatting work, the few times a year I find myself compiling a manuscript…but, damn. Two hours of my precious childfree time today spent deleting double tabs and correcting chapter numbers because it insists on marking my title page as Chapter One no matter what I do. Even though I use a template that INCLUDES a title page. Yes, I compile to RTF first. Yes, it’s supposed to be much easier than that to compile a manuscript. I have no idea.

The double tab problem I’ve figured out. It happens wherever I’ve copied and pasted text from a Word doc into Scrivener. In later drafts I often find myself moving chunks of text around, using a marked-up Word file of an earlier draft. I guess I need to stop going back and forth between Scrivener and Word, because the double tabs are a serious pain. I have to arrow down through the entire manuscript line by line.

And now I’m off track again.

I just wanted to say that I finished the revisions and turned them back in and now I’ve got to wait as patiently as possible to hear back. Best possible scenario, I get the book deal. Totally okay scenario, they ask for more revisions before an offer. Also entirely possible: they say no. I’m feeling more than a little anxious about it.

After I hit SEND on the revisions, I took my anxiety out to Powell’s and bought it a nice new book I’d been wanting. Bonus karmic points for supporting a fellow Portland author, yes? Yes. Certainly.

I’m going to try to make it through this wait as gracefully as possible. Wish me luck.

(And to the person who found my blog by searching for “little carrots that are easy to draw,” I hope you found what you were looking for.)