Anybody got an Albatross handy?

When I was in high school I was an advanced student. That meant, of course, I had to take AP English. Which brought me face to face in my junior year with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

I’ll be blunt. I hated this part of my class. HATED IT. I have never been a lover of poetry, even the deeply symbolic prose of Coleridge. I never thought his tale would have meaning for me.

Until now.

The efforts to get my novel published have become (drum roll, please)…

The Rime of the Ancient Novelist…

Cue wind and rain effects. Lash me to a mast. Find a god forsaken albatross and hang it around my neck.

No, on second thought, fold my manuscript into an origami albatross and hang that around my neck.

You see, I have engaged the services of a new editor. Sort of.

Except this one is a bit of a Luddite. She doesn’t believe in a computer. So she wants my manuscript on paper, and will then feed me changes, a chapter at a time.

I have 42 chapters. If she does a chapter a week, well, you do the math. Hello Summer 2016.

I am slamming my head against the desk in despair even as I print out pages…