writing, forest, trees

the milestone of the day: I sent my revised manuscript off to Duke for final approval from the folks there. woo hoo! many thanks to those who slogged through various portions of said manuscript, at the stage when every other word was 'thus' and later at the stage when I decided commas were a fine way to join two complete sentences and yes, indeed, having more than two m-dashes in one sentence was just fine. mm. splices. dangling phrases. gerunds.

hopefully much of that is gone from the book now. I will say that at this stage it seems like a large pile of words rather than a book. I've been working on it at the miniscule word/sentence/correction level, and it's now a forest of trees with every pine needle given in great detail. (side note: I just realised that my imagined forest/trees metaphor is a pine forest. does anyone see deciduous trees in theirs? interesting.) I have no idea what the forest looks like. I've been making sure the needles are in their places.

there is a certain terror in letting one's work out of one's hands. luckily it's matched by a certain exhaustion at having done all of this intellectual grunt work. and so they cancel one another out and result in a query about what wine to celebrate with tonight. hurrah.