Me and Eduardo

Just handed in the revised manuscript for my next book.

Gulp.

I am very excited about this book. In fact, I think it kicks some serious butt. But the act of hitting "send"... of saying "I'm done"... of taking my hands off the keyboard and stacking the pages of the manuscript in a nice, neat pile on my file cabinet... No matter how excited I am about the book itself, sending it in to my editors kind of seriously freaks me out.

I sort of feel like I've just been force-fed twelve cups of coffee and then released into a very tiny room with a large hungry trollish creature who looks something like Eduardo from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends but not as nice... and then I discover that the very tiny room actually has a mirror for a wall, and the large hungry trollish creature is actually me because I haven't gone to bed before 2am, eaten anything other than Raisinets, or washed my socks in an appalling number of days (don't tell my mother)... and so I run around in very small circles because the room is very small and because I don't really know what else to do and because I've had far too much caffeine and because I need a bathroom, since twelve cups of coffee is a LOT of liquid...

Or, as my mother would say, I feel a bit at sixes and sevens.

Me, just after submitting my manuscript

But it's in. And I love it. And I hope everyone else loves it too.