I sent my revised manuscript to my agent yesterday. After I forced myself to hit the send button, I called a friend and told her it was sent.

    “Did you do a dance?” she asked.

     “What?”

     “Did you do a dance?” she repeated. “You’ve just sent something out. You’ve got to celebrate.”

     After I was done talking to her, I called my husband and told him the manuscript was finally done and gone.

     “Great,” he says. “I’ll bring home something special to celebrate.”

     Now, in his case, I can understand the desire to celebrate. I have been impossible to live with these last few days. I have been driven and grouchy–especially during the final proofreading phase.

     Their words got me thinking. The truth is a couple of  phone calls and a post on Verla Kay’s blueboard are all the celebrating I ever do when I send something out. I’ve read several articles that encourage unpublished authors to celebrate each step on the long road to publication. So why don’t I feel like celebrating?

     I think part of the reason is that I am still subconsiously trying to stay under the radar as a would-be writer. It took me a long time to be able to say, “I’m a writer” out loud without dropping my voice on the last word. A part of me still feels that I’m going to be carded at writer’s conferences and booted out. It’s scary going after my dream, and I figure if I don’t shout about it, maybe I won’t notice what I’m doing.

     Another reason is that I generally finish my manuscripts under a deadline. Okay, I’ll admit that a lot of those deadlines are self-inflicted, but it still adds an element of pressure.  Also, after going over the thing ten or twelve times looking for typos I might have missed, I am completely burnt out. All I want to do after sending out a manuscript is crawl into bed and sleep for a week. (Incidentally, it doesn’t matter how many times I go over a manuscript; there is always a typo in the final copy. Typos in my manuscripts are like spiders in my home–I can never completely get rid of them, no matter how hard I try.)

     Finally, I am just to nervous about the manuscript itself. Will they like it? Will it find a home? Will kids like it? I always run my writing byseveral test readers before submitting, but I tell myself, “Well, they just said they liked it because they like me.”

     I wonder sometimes what other writers do when they send out a manuscript. Do they celebrate? If any other writers read this, I would love to hear what you do.

     Oh, and I did find one other thing I do to celebrate submitting a manscript. I invariably go off my diet.