A good friend (not the one pursued by demons — I gotta lotta friends) is awaiting the fall publication of her first book. She’s remarkably intelligent, and unnervingly insightful, as well as hysterically funny, so I can’t imagine that the novel will be anything but fabulous.

Her anticipation doubles as the weeks close in on the pub date. She dreams, literally and figuratively, of seeing her work between hard covers, the whole thing bound for posterity.

Sounds good? She’s all sunny, cheery, light-hearted, worry-free?

HA!

She has no cuticles left. She’s chewing the edges of her pillowcase at night the same way she did when we were roommates and her boyfriend didn’t call. She swore up and down that if the book got accepted, she’d let it “go” at that and not torture herself anymore. She’d get on with her life, the rest of her work, and settle back down into what passes for normalcy. You know: raise her kids, talk to her spouse, stop banging her head on the keyboard.

I shrugged my shoulders, said I’d heard such things were possible, and purchased additional minutes on my calling plan because I knew she and I would be on the phone a lot.

A lot.

Publication, as most of you know, is a truly baffling process. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve gone through it: you still can’t quite figure out how any manuscript gets turned into an actual book, let alone figuring out how it gets reviewed, sold, or read.

At least I can’t.

One of my other friends (I’m telling you, I get around) says it’s like giving birth — at some distant point in the past you became creative for a moment and then a little while later, after feeling sick and counting the days until the deadline, you’re on your back and people (who are not in the same state you’re in) are telling you what to do. Mostly, you’re just writhing there hoping it all works out okay. At this point, there’s not exactly a whole lot else you can do. You can no more yell out, “I want a different publisher!” than you can yell, “I want to be moved to a different hospital!” You are strapped down by the irrevocable, bound by decisions you made in what now seems like the very distant past.

Plus with publishing, you don’t get any drugs. At least, not ones covered by Blue Cross.

What’s worse, very few people send you cute gifts when it’s over.

There should be balloons or banners proclaiming “IT’S A BOOK!” (Poor de Man, as we know, never could have experienced those balloons. Shame.)

This is what I’m trying to explain to my about-to-be-published friend. Traumatic down-time, after the manuscript is accepted, is inevitable because the book is finally completed. You wander around the house, halfheartedly cleaning surfaces you haven’t dusted since before you started writing, surfaces where the dust has now formed dunes, wondering what you can do to do to make the book’s future as perfect as possible.

That’s what she’s been dealing with this summer.

“Your biggest challenge” I told her (gently, not at all in a brow-beating way because I would never do that), “is to avoid annoying the editorial staff so profoundly that they not only refuse to correct your errors during the copy-editing phase but actually consider adding some of their own, just for spite.”

(I tried to tell her the demon story but she told me it was like Kahlil Gibran, so I stopped.)

(to be continued….)

(Image incorporates photos from photobucket.com and from Flickr Creative Commons user markhillary)