Back In The Saddle Again

A week or so ago, I sent my work in progress out to three first readers and yesterday I received the last of the comments.  Overall, they liked it.  (Whew!) Now I'm working on the rewrite.

I wish I could say I have a nice, leasurely amount of time to turn this puppy around, but I don't.  It has to arrive on my editor's desk on September 7th.  Last time around, I pushed the envelope and didn't get the manuscript ready to go until the day before the deadline.  No problem, I said, and moseyed on down to the local UPS Store.  I nearly hemmoraged (or at least my wallet did) when I learned that to overnight the manuscript was going to cost me a whopping $40.  That ain't gonna happen again.

The rewrite is going well, and I might even finish up later today.  The thing that's holding me back?  Testing those recipes.  I have a feeling I'll be cooking my butt off this weekend as I make several different versions of each dish until I'm satisfied.  (Including a coconut cake--but wait, it's my birthday.  What's wrong with having three birthday cakes, right?)

Rewrites are either a pain in the butt or a lot of fun.  This one is fun because so far my first readers haven't found too much wrong.  And I love it that they've (hopfully) found all the typos and glitches.  That makes me look good.  I want to please my editor and if he enjoys reading the ms. and is happy he doesn't have to do much work on it--we're both very happy.

But in the meantime, it's back to those recipes.

Oh, let me eat cake!