A friend died in my dream last night and I sat next door to her at the funeral. We talked about her eulogy.
‘Too much God and religion,’ I said.
‘Right up my alley,’ my dead friend said. She loved her bible.
Given my belief that dreams can tell you more about aspects of yourself than they do about the people in your dream, was I dreaming about my own death?
What would it be like to be at your own funeral? To hear the things people say about you once you’re gone?
I doubt my mother would have liked the words I said in her eulogy, when I was free at last to speak about her without her looking over my shoulder.
Who am I kidding? My mother’s dead but she’s still there somewhere in the recesses of my mind, still passing judgement on my thoughts and words.
I’ve been having a tug of war in my head of late. A potential publisher has read my manuscript and reckons it needs more work.
Don’t they always?
He recommends I get the help of one of his freelancer editors to ‘commercialise’ my manuscript. For now he reckons, it’s more ‘reflective than informative’.
I’d rather be reflective than informative. You can get information from Google, but maybe that’s not what the general public wants.
I want my manuscript to be as good as it can get.
I want to find a readership, but does this mean I will be selling my soul?
Do I stand firm and keep trying to flog my manuscript in its current form to other publishers?
The rejections have been mounting and most of them in the form of ‘This is not right for our lists’.
Maybe this is why I dreamed of death last night.
Maybe my manuscript is dead in the water, or maybe I should give it a go and take on this mentorship – for a price.
If the mentorship came as part of a publishing deal, I would not hesitate, but given I need to throw still more money after it, before resubmitting, is it worth it?
I read a wonderful piece on Brevity’s non-fiction blog that says it all:
How to make a cake out of cupcakes: or how to turn your essays into a book.