Well, I take that back. Maybe if you're Nora Roberts or Dan Brown. But I can tell you that most, if not all, the published authors that I know fear submitting a proposal as much as they ever did pre-pubbed.
Maybe even more.
I still remember the day that I got a call about my second and third sale. "I'm not a fluke!" I screamed to my sister. "I am NOT a fluke!"
I even confessed that to my editor at the time, and she chuckled. "Nope, you're not a fluke."
Despite all that, sometimes, lots of times, we writers feel like flukes. This next book proposal, that's when the editors will discover it. This next book release, yeah, they gotta figure it out sooner or later.
And when it comes to actually sending those proposals in, oh, my. I, at least, obsess. Is it perfect? Is it as good as I can humanly get it? Will she like it?
My current editor graciously agreed to "edit across the lines" and take a look at my new proposal -- the one that I had ready to go. The line editor, the big cheese, has said she is willing to take a look at a new-old author -- my term for an author who was pubbed in a different line, but is brand new to the line she's hoping to be pubbed in.
So yesterday I got a cheerful e-mail from my very cheerful editor who said, "Send it to me as an attachment, and I'll get it to her as quickly as I can."
Ooooh, but my finger hovered over that send button. The two were like opposing magnetic poles.
What won out? What made me hit that send button?
Simple.
Hope. The same hope that every writer has, no matter what her publishing status is. Just plain old hope.
I've decided that hope is a true gift to get us over all sorts of obstacles. So hope. Go ahead and hope.
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