on the (lack of) essay submission

I haven’t sent it yet.

I’ve gone through a litany of terrible excuses as to why it’s not sent yet (most recent: I have to write a cover letter. Cover Letter! What do I say? Ack!)

I had my husband, Dane, read over it last night. Now, I know he does this for a living. I know he is, in fact, quite good at it. I know he is even paid to teach editing classes. However. I think I wanted him to be blown away by my perfection, shocked at the brilliance of my word choice. Him? Not so much. (If you have ever met Dane, you are not surprised to read this. Gushing praise is not his thing.)

Instead, it went something like this:
ME (in a huff): You can’t just rewrite my essay!
HIM (joking, wondering how he got roped into this): At this point, I think I’m really writing my own! Ha, ha, ha...(faltering laugh trails off)
ME (maturely): Well, I’m going to go take a shower!

and then, later:
ME: Thanks, you were very… helpful.
HIM: I know I was helpful, but I’m not sure you realize just how helpful I was.
ME (again, maturely): Oh, let me tell you, I know JUST how helpful you were.

I think he failed to appreciate that this essay has already gone through eighty-six drafts, and that I am now overly attached to the language.

Also worthy of mention: at one point he told me I had “an illegal use of a colon,” which, in case you’re worried, sounds FAR uglier than it really is.

When I sat down (alone) to do some revision, the freaky helpful Track Changes feature was still enabled, so blue and red text was popping up everywhere and I was irritated and still overly attached to the language, so I decided to just go to bed and deal with it today.

And today it doesn’t seem so bad—he suggested a bunch of word changes and punctuation changes and rewriting like two sentences, but he didn’t say to throw the thing out entirely or that it made no sense or anything else really big-picture. Of course, that could be because he was afraid of me by the end, but whatever. And I mostly held my tongue when I wanted to yell NO! You’re wrong, just WRONG! which is good, because now, twelve or fifteen hours later, I can see that he was actually kind of right. (Dane is totally reading this thinking, “Sheesh, woman, that was you HOLDING YOUR TONGUE? Because what would it have sounded like if you DIDN’T?” But I really did. Really.)

And now it is Quiet Time at our house, and everyone is more or less doing what they are supposed to for Quiet Time (yes, it must have capitals each time, it really is THAT important). So I will get to the revision thing now. And I’ll let you know how it goes. I promise.

Update (finally) available!