The Importance of Self-Fanfic

So to go into a little more detail than I have in the past, I got a bite rather than a nibble from one publisher.  I got a very nice e-mail where one of their editors told me all of the things she liked about and that she had some "general edits" that she wanted me to address before she recommended it for publication.  This is the most serious interest that I've had in my writing EVER, which is why when I saw an e-mail entitled "Re: Wingspan Submission," I literally blacked out for an unknown period of time.  Then I read the letter and it wasn't a rejection and was better than I expected.

So, with these "general edits," I've had to go back and tweak a few minor things and one or two major things.  On the day that I got the e-mail, Kate let me pick her brain for an hour.  The following Sunday, I spent a little more time than that talking about the philosophies behind what I had to change.  Tonight, I spent time consulting a paralegal and a nursing student in order to be accurate with certain aspects of the plot.  Last weekend, I cane up with a much more intricateversion of the curse and because it expressed some very personal philosophies of mine, I ran it by my ultra-feminist conservative Mormon friend, my lesbian activist friend and several people across the spectrum in between.  When all of them surprisingly found good things to say about what I came up with, I called it a win and decided that I could integrate that idea into the book series as large.

Most of the time, the edits have not been sweeping story arcs and changes of characterization.  It's been adapting small things that will have eventual significance.  One minor subplot caused Kate to have a crossover idea between this book and The Deserter, which amused and delighted me.

As difficult as this is, I think it would be a lot harder if I hadn't been keeping an active part of my brain involved in this universe.  For a writing challenge a few months ago, I wrote a missing moment from the next book.  I recently cheered Kate up by writing her the prologue of the next book.  While the manuscript was done a while back, I haven't put it on a back burner.  I've been acting like a fangirl with my novel and that has been of great help.

On the other hand, I'm trying to work with a self-imposed deadline for these edits to be done.  40 days seemed reasonable on March 10.  On March 21, when I was starting to make progress, I developed bronchitis and didn't stay conscious for much of the next week and a half.  Now I've got 14 days before I'd like to be done with this and, while I have over 8,000 words added to the manuscript and have the rest of the procedure mapped out, I'm trying not to panic about how much time has passed already.