Well, of course it’s good. Theo went to England on Monday, got read on Wednesday, approved on Wednesday night, line-edited on Thursday and today he’s on his way to Canada for copyediting. What a guy!

What an editor! Nice turn around. Now if only they’re as swift on the check. Ha. No, actually, once — ONCE — that did happen. I sent in a book and the next thing I knew — like 8 days later my agent called and asked what I wanted them to do with the check. I said, “What check? For what?” It was early December. Had already got my royalty check. No money expected.

And she said, “The check for, um, let’s see, something called THE MARRIAGE TRAP.” And I said, “You’re joking,” because I figured she had to be. But, no, she wasn’t. My editor (not the same editor and not the fastest of the senior editors in those days) was on maternity leave and The Boss had received the book. Apparently when The Boss got the book in those days, if she read it and liked it, she sent money. Pretty slick.

It never happened again. But we cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, so they have quite a standard to live up to as far as I’m concerned. They haven’t lived up to it since, but I live in hope. And less than a week’s turnaround on Theo’s manuscript is pretty terrific. So, thanks, Ed! (no, her name’s not Ed).

In the anticipation that I will have enough money now to pay my taxes, I’m going to actually sit down and do them this weekend. What fun.

But first I’m going to watch the middle DVD of the first season of Veronica Mars, which makes me glad I went to high school in southern California in the darke ages and not now — and then I’m going to walk my dogs and then I’m going to bake grasmere gingerbread and then I’m going to figure out what I want to write about next. Kate Walker is talking about growing books on her blog at the moment (well, at the moment she’s off holding the wonderful Julie Cohen’s hand while Julie signs books with her other hand, Yea, Julie!) But anyway, Kate is right. Growing a book is an interesting process. One of those “don’t look down” events that are better left uncontemplated around here. All I know is: it’s never the same twice.

But I’m not going to think about that now. I’m going to go work on my DVD of Veronica Mars. And if I finish it, I’m going to have another go-round with Damian Lewis’s version of Much Ado About Nothing.

Yep, life is good.

I’d forget my head — my mother says — if it weren’t attached.

I used to think she was kidding. Who? My mother? Not hardly. Worse, now it turns out she is right. Not that I have forgotten my head. It’s still here somewhere.

But I did forget to say that my book, THE ANTONIDES MARRIAGE DEAL is on the shelves. I saw it myself in the drugstore last Thursday when I mailed a copy of it to a reviewer. (Did you get it yet, Heather?) This is the book about Elias Antonides, the long-suffering son of a very trying Greek father, and the woman his father accidentally (well, sort of) drops into Elias’s life. I had so much fun with Elias and Tallie that I was sorry they left. I’m not sorry to see them in print now, though.

Keep an eye out for Tallie’s brother Theo in this book, too. He’s the boomerang who just got revised and sent back to Richmond. With luck he’ll have a spot in production of his own in the not too distant future.

Let me know when Elias gets to your neighborhood! And please put him up at eye level when you see him on the shelves (unless you want to be like my dad who used to stand at the Safeway grocery store and hand people copies of my book and say, “My daughter wrote this. It’s really good. You’d love it!” What a dad!)

Elias is supposed to be showing up in Britain next week, I think, too. With a different cover, which we will discuss later. No sense in complicating things now.

Anyway, keep an eye out for him! Thanks!

It’s gone . . . again.

The manuscript, that is. It used to be , back in the olde days, when we chiseled out the words with the aid of typewriters and that white ink correcting fluid and thought long and hard about whether we really wanted to change “sitting at the table, he ate fried eggs” to “he sat at the table and ate fried eggs” because it meant retyping the whole miserable page, at least when you sent off a manuscript you could count on it being gone for a while.

No longer.

With the advent of instantly gratified (or not) editors who have had the manuscript via email and who have read the whole thing faster than we can type a single page, the damn thing is back before you know it. There’s no time to step back, cogitate, breathe a little, catch up on the things you’ve TIVOed to watch which you didn’t have time to watch while you were writing, read the books you’ve been saving to read, mark down on the door jamb how much your kids have grown since you noticed them last (which was back when you began the book ).

Nope. You’ve got revisions. And they need them back sooner rather than later. Always.

And so you study the revision letter, and you whine a little (or a lot, but in my case actually very little this time because the editor was absolutely right about the draggy bits) and then you get down to doing something about it.

But — and this is the tricky bit — you don’t have the distance you used to have. In the olde days, the book was gone at least a month, maybe longer. There was a bit of distance by the time it — or its revision letter — came winging back. It was easier to be detached and to see the flaws yourself. You weren’t still in the middle of the forest, closely acquainted with all the trees. You were maybe a mile or two away. The book looks different from there.

So I miss that distance. I miss that perspective. I actually like doing revisions. I’m always wary of books that get snapped up on the first dash out of the starting gate. They worry me because they seem a little ‘young’ and ‘unfinished.’ The truth is I’ve never had a book yet I didn’t think couldn’t stand another run through the brain.

(Note to editor: this does not mean you are required to send everything back for revisions. I do a lot of them on my own before you ever see it, thank you very much.).

But I do appreciate the chance to go through and take another look. Usually this is important because I’m still figuring out the story the first, second, third time through. By the time it went across the pond (when it used to fly not go cyberspatially) and returned I had a chance to step back from it and get a sense of the story as a whole. Coming at revisions then was easier somehow. Or maybe I just think it was because we’re not doing it that way anymore!

Anyway, it’s good that Theo came back. I wish he’d stayed away a little longer the first time. When I saw him again, I felt like I did when my oldest son went away to university and came home the following weekend. It was like, what? You again? (I love him, but I really needed a bit of a breather. He was not precisely low maintenance.)

Nor was Theo. But he — and I — got some rest while my eye was recovering from the cataract surgery. And when I finally did look at him, it was with a great deal more color to my palette this time around.

I think he’s a better book — and hero — for having come back for more attention. His story is sharper now. Better focused. More streamlined — though longer, which is not something you should mention to my editor if you speak with her. (But to my editor’s great joy, I have a slightly used granny for sale if anyone wants her for their book. She speaks Swedish — the granny, not the editor — and she would be a great addition to any family-focused contemporary romance — just not mine, according to the ed. Maybe I can put granny on ebay?)

Anyway, Monday morning I flung the boomerang back toward Richmond. It’s the editor’s turn. She tells me she is taking Wednesday as a ‘reading day.’ That’s tomorrow. Yikes.

Well, I hope she likes Theo and his lady and that all his draggy bits are gone. I also hope he doesn’t come back again. If so, I’m going to duck.