Blog Post of the Week: Those pesky authors!

Those of you who know my list know that I have a lot of amazing authors. I also have a lot of authors who are–or who until recently have been–Very Late With Their Books.

Now, I am not endeavoring to cast any stones. Lord knows, I know how life–and novels!–can go screwy on you. And I, myself, am very much living in a glass house at this moment; my alter-ego is extremely late with her novel due to the recent(ish) appearance in my life of a small girl.

But still… With my editor hat on, it is the bane of my existence–especially when we repeatedly schedule books in a mad fit of optimism and joy, and later have to cancel them when the promised manuscript does not arrive…again.

Sometimes, you try to liven things up a bit. A while back, and very pregnant, I became involved in a three-way race to delivery between myself and two of my authors. One beat me by a month. As for the other…. Well, I’m still waiting, as is much of the universe. And in the meantime, I have a walking, talking two-year-old as phsyical evidence of just how badly that delivery estimate was off!

Not that You-Know-Who is the sole culprit. Oh, no. I will not point fingers, but there are more. Many more.

So when a fellow editor sent me the following post, I laughed so hard I thought I was going to choke! (Or maybe that’s the bronchitis I am recovering from.)

It is the Writer’s Prayer, the Penmonkey’s Paean–and every late writer needs to heed its advice.

To read the full post, click here. But here are a few excerpts for your reading pleasure:

“This book is not the boss of my shit.

“I recognize that writing a novel is hard. And I don’t give a lemur’s left foot. I don’t give a good goddamn. I don’t give two shits in a wicker basket. The best things in life are hard. Like hunting pterodactyls. Like getting married. Like climbing a mountain and building a ladder to the moon. Like raising children. Like raising robotic children. Like making a golem who will build a robot who will raise your robot children.”

It makes my feel better about my own excuse for being late–raising children IS hard, robotic or no–but now I, too, want to grab one of my severed arms in my teeth and soldier on! And I can only hope that some others will be inspired as well…