Did Tom Hanks every play an editor?

Ugh, I just had my first real clash of artistic temperament meets editorial review. Sigh… It’s fixed (and so much for the media black-out at 10pm… I’d already invoiced for the article so I really needed to get it revised [read as: shell of its former self] so I wouldn’t be short of my contract this month) but I’m spent.

And, wow, I was so jazzed up this evening until I got that email. I was all high on thoughts of planning the next party, had gone out on a recon mission to the party store, jammed out to the radio on the way home, then get hit with: ‘it’s too long, confusing, and too creative’ Seriously, that was the basics. Of course, the editors really didn’t ‘get’ what I was going for (I know all writers probably say that, but there was a serious lack of communication on just what I’m ‘expert’ in and what that had to do with the lamb recipe) and they kept calling it two recipes. No. It’s one recipe, two preparation methods. And not even two full-on methods, it was more of a then vs now with the now being the actual instructions.

Have you ever noticed that the higher emotionally you are the more dangerous the precipice that you dance upon? I mean, seriously, I just about lost it because I took it way too personally at first. Of course, it’s not meant that way, and I knew that, but still at that moment they weren’t telling me the article was broken, they were telling me ‘I’ was broken. Which is stupid because I’m not (though cracked probably wouldn’t be wrong, lol), but I guess I was just lulled into a false sense of security when my other articles breezed through.

The other part really was the timing. We’re supposed to have our articles submitted 4 days before the end of the month. This particular one went in on the 21st (plenty of time) but due to one of the editors having a family emergency (it happens, not much you can do about it) they were backlogged. Still, the article went on “Writer Hold” at least yesterday (if not Sunday… I don’t remember if I checked the status window after I submitted the webcomic article Sat.night) and if I hadn’t asked about it both yesterday and today I still might not know that there were issues that I needed to fix. That didn’t hurt: it pissed me off. I’m still a little irritated but more than that, I’m tired. It took an hour and a half of editing and then moving to the laptop from the desktop because that’s where the image files were that needed to be reassigned.

It was not the ending I wanted for this day and I still have one thing to do before bed if I can get back into proper head-space for it.

I’ll have to see if I can resurrect the euphoria I was operating on before the editing issue arose tomorrow. But relived is never as good as the first time.