I had originally planned to write some more complaints-thinly-veiled-as-observations about the editing process for this post. 🙂 After all, I did finish up a third round of edits on my WIP (that’s Work In Progress to the uninitiated!) last week, which satisfied a goal of mine and, more importantly, allowed me to send off that manuscript for a mentorship program that I am very excited about. But all of that news has been overshadowed.

Yesterday, I got an email entitled “Anthology Edits.”

(To be honest I’m not even sure if that’s the real subject line; as soon as I saw the words “anthology” and “edit,” my heart rate tripled!)

See, one longstanding piece of advice for aspiring authors is to have short stories published, even if what they really want to write is a novel. That way when they’re querying agents, they can point to a list of publication credits rather than having to admit something along the lines of, “though I’ve always loved writing, I haven’t yet traditionally published any of my work . . .”

And, having heard that advice often, I’ve been sending out short stories by the bucketful. Contests, writing prompts, literary journals, genre magazines, anthologies, you name it. Some of them never respond; some respond months later just to say no. But yesterday, finally, I got a different response.

A short, standalone mystery I wrote has been accepted (with edits) to an anthology!

“With edits” suddenly became the first ray of sun peaking out from clouds of uncertainty and doubt. There’s nothing wrong with edits (even if they do make my head hurt). If it means my story gets out there, and never again do I have to write a bio saying “haven’t yet,” and some day I’ll have a real printed book in my hands that contains words I wrote, I’ll edit happily! 🙂 And fortunately, in this case, most of the suggested changes were grammatical (or — to spend a moment being a writing-nerd — POV slips, which are the bane of my existence when writing in third person; maybe that’ll be its own post some day). Editing is sometimes treated as an insulting or painful process (just like the quote at the top of this page was originally written dismissively). But right now what it feels like is recognition that I am a writer.

So, I spent a large portion of last night dancing around baking cake and loudly singing along to Taylor Swift. My poor boyfriend, in the other room on a Zoom call, probably had to tell his friends that his girlfriend had gone temporarily crazy. Today, I edited.

And for once, I am very happy about it. 🙂