Revision-phobia

Let me just tell you, I'm a master of procrastination. I'll get to that in a minute.

Last week I got another rejection, but then I got my first non-rejection in a while. I have this story called "The Bad Girl" that I wrote during my first semester at Mills, in Amanda Davis's class, which I revised a bit last summer and was planning to work on some more. But I got impatient and sent it out anyway. I sent it to Catamaran Magazine, a publication for South Asian American writing.

So I got an e-mail last week from one of the editors of Catamaran, saying that they think the writing is good and the character is compelling, but that certain aspects of the story could be developed more. (I agree. But cf. impatience in previous paragraph.) They elaborated on that a bit, and said that if I was willing to revise it "thoroughly" (argh) they would be happy to reconsider it.

This is quite good news, possibly. But this morning, when I turned on my laptop to try to tackle some of those revisions, I became paralyzed by anxiety. Instead of just plowing into it, which is what I have to do, I:

• watched a couple of episodes of Star Trek
• drank two cups of coffee
• washed some dishes
• sent a fax, which involves lugging the fax machine out of the closet and hooking it up, as well as printing out a cover sheet
• typed a blog entry.

And now, I'm about to exercise for 30 minutes or so, and after that, I'll take a shower, and probably run a few errands.

Damn. Gotta get out of vacation mode. I'm going to attempt to take this mixed media painting class at MJC starting next week, and my Office of Education Job-That-Won't-Die is soon going to rise from the dead for a while, too. Not to mention my freelance research job starting up again for six months. Good thing I got that novel proposal sent out again before all that stuff happens.