never finished

Last week I sent my manuscript Silenced Voices to Ohio University Press. Whenever I send stuff out (big stuff this time, all 250 pp long) I am reminded of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird in which she talks about the screaming insecuriy she feels once that story or manuscript is out of her hands. A book is never finished and certainly a non-fiction book like mine: new research surfaces sometimes even before the shelf life of one's book is over. But first this one has to make it into a book and of that one can never be sure. I wrote a friend in jest that after I put three years of my life into this book it might be nice if a contract came through and while it looks like this may happen, I am not counting my blessings yet as rejection is part of the game-- and if that's the case I might pull a Sylvia Plath, I wrote my friend, "coz Xmas funerals have an irresistible ambiance". I am joking, daunting fate if you will, but writing like all the other arts in which we produce something that is intensely personal, has to be recognized (and depersonalized)by the public for it to become truly legitimate. We write because we must and we should never write with a audience in mind necessarily but it is the audience, the reader who closes the circle and makes the process complete. So a manuscript is never finished, until it is read, accepted for publication, read & edited, published and read once again. And in the author's mind the book may still not be finished if recognition by the readers and critics stays out. And then writing has become an intensely lonely business, a waste of time perhaps, a trivial pursuit of what could have been but never was. I am writing this because now that the manuscript is out of my hands, I feel powerless and insecure. Redundant even, now that the story has been told...it's an odd business to be in and sometimes I just wish I had become a plumber or a garbage woman,
Inez