It's Hard to Be Humble

Mac Davis wrote, "It's hard to be humble, when you're perfect in every way."

Of course, I don't claim to be perfect (at least as far as my writing goes!), but I can't help but think about these song lyrics this morning.

I've been working on The First Year this week and last week, because I want to start sending it in to publishers ASAP. Did I ever tell you how the idea for this novel came about? I was in a writing class at the time, and my husband was working at Shopko. Occasionally, he had to work freight, and he would leave at 4:30 AM. One morning, I panicked, because I had an extremely realistic dream that someone had been watching our apartment, knew I was home alone, and came in to kill me. He dragged me out of bed by my feet, pinned me to the floor, stole our stuff, packed some heat, etc. Obviously, it wasn't real, but I was always terrified when he left me, at least until the sun came up, and this was a particularly bad morning.

Anyway, I wrote a story about it, and I shared it with my mom, who suggested I turn it into an entire collection of short stories about the first year of marriage, since I was in the midst of experiencing it.

But now, back to Mac. I've had people in my writing group read my stories, so I can edit them to near-perfection, and I've been looking at the most recent comments about this story. There was more red all over this one than there was on any other, and I was (am) highly irritated. This was the story I spent the most time on, since it was an assignment that I had to edit within an inch of its life, and I thought it needed the least amount of work.

It's hard to be humble when you feel you've written something that's really close to perfect.

Anyway, I'm going to have to try and swallow the criticism. No story is ever perfect, so maybe if I humble myself, I might be able to make it even better.

But I'm still irritated.