Submitting First Drafts
So I’m sitting around contemplating the finer points of tiddlywinks when a story idea comes to me. I don’t think much about it at the time, being much more interested in my previous activity, but later I start thinking about the story and I get all excited about the story. It doesn’t take me long to develop an outline and I go to work writing away. Chapter after chapter, I develop the story and soon I have before me a new manuscript. I go to the first page and I begin reading. “That can’t be right,” I say as I realize my protagonist’s mother is dead in chapter one and he calls her on the phone in chapter ten. Then there’s the problem that his half-sister plays a key role in chapter twenty-five, but he wouldn’t have a half-sister if his mother is still alive. Something has to change. So I set to work making revisions. Then I find more mistakes and I go back and edit. I go back again, just to correct a few things. Finally, I have before me a completed manuscript, ready for the eyes of an...