When my first book proposal was turned down, I submitted it to another publisher, and another, and another, until eight publishers later, my manuscript finally found a home. That’s when I decided to re-read my manuscript, and felt immediately dismayed.
You see, every time my proposal got returned, I simply wrote a new cover letter, put everything in a new envelope and mailed it off to the next publisher on my list. Then–well over a year later!–when a publisher finally said yes, I re-read my manuscript. That’s when I realized how much I had changed, how much my writing had changed, and how much re-writing I still had to do!
Even after a piece is published, I sometimes wish I could re-write or add to it or deepen it in some way—sometimes because I’ve found a better way to say the same thing, and sometimes because my thinking and my life have moved on since then.
