Final Draft of Tree Fall With Birdsong
The final manuscript of my next poetry collection has been sent to the publisher.
There is a moment of relief and release that comes with the click of the send button. It is also a moment of anticipation and trepidation and finality. I just made that commitment for my fourth poetry collection Tree Fall with Birdsong. I guess I can stop calling it a manuscript now; it is in someone else’s hands.
This is a book manuscript that I’ve been working on for several years, so going into final revisions, it didn’t feel like there would be a lot of changes. The press liked it enough to send me a contract, after all. Nonetheless, looking at it for “final edits” was a little daunting. When are you ready to let it go?
On my first read through, I made some minor edits, mostly to rethink commas or possibly a line break here and there, nothing major. The second or third read through led to taking a hard look at the first section. Even though I liked what I had done with that section over several revisions of the manuscript, I still ended up tweaking the order of those poems, I hope (and I do believe) for the better. I added an epigram to one poem late in the collection only because in the final analysis, I really felt the allusion to the other poet was helpful, and I tweaked the epigrams in the section “Co-evolution” in a way that I felt made them slightly clearer.
The other task, that I didn’t have to do just yet, but wanted to get out of the way, was to write up my author bios (a short one for the cover and a longer one for the website) and a book description. These, I’ll also send with the manuscript when I send it out to some poets who have agreed to write a blurb. I’ve found it helpful to get a little direction when I write those. I want to know both what direction the poet is thinking of going with the book, so my blurb makes sense, and what the poet has already said about their work, so I can add something new.
My next tasks are to send the manuscript out to those poets and maybe line up one or two more, just in case; to have someone take a good author photo of me in a place that I feel is significant; and to develop a list of places to send review copies, which is something I’ve been working on for awhile.
In other words, I’ll have a few things, still, to keep me busy while the editor and designer work on the book, and then I’ll have their work to review and to proof before the book goes to press. There’s plenty yet to be done, and yet clicking send on the email to my publisher with the book files attached seems like such a final and yet almost inconsequential step.