Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Aargh!

UPDATE: Email from Tupelo Press:

7th Annual First Book Award Winner Announced
David St John has selected:

Cloisters by Kristin LaTour

as the winner of Tupelo Press's 7th Annual First Book Award.

Runners up:

Phebus Etienne, Montclair, NJ Chainstitching
Diane Kirsten Martin, San Francisco, CA Demimonde
Susan Settlemyre Williams, Richmond, VA Ashes in Midair
Pamela Sutton, Philadelphia, PA Bone House Broken
Angela Shaw, Swarthmore, PA The Beginning of the Fields
Eleanor Stanford, Philadelphia, PA The Book of Sleep



And (sigh) so it goes…
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So late last night I was printing out a submission from my manuscript, and I discovered a mistake. A prose poem of six paragraphs or sections is missing the last section. I'm pretty sure this happened when I moved the manuscript from FrameMaker to Word sometime last spring. Adobe doesn't support FrameMaker for Macintosh System X, so I was forced to do that. Yes, I intend to get a MacBook (hello, son!) when I can so I can run both operating systems, but I haven't been in the position to.

I don't know whether to email the press where my manuscript is being considered or not. I don't want to make a pest of myself. Surely, it doesn't matter that much, and yet it does. This poem leads the section it is in, the third of five sections. I wonder how many other mistakes have crept into my manuscript over time. I hate to think.

I'm generally feeling stressed out of late. I leave for the high school reunion the day after tomorrow. I'm working on finishing my contract by the last week of September and starting a new contract with a different company on October 2, my thirtieth wedding anniversary. I need to make reservations for a trip to NYC at the end of that month. We've got two weddings to attend on consecutive weekends in that neighborhood, so we'll be doing NYC for our anniversary. Anybody know some reasonably priced B&Bs or other places to stay there? We're both from there, but it's been years.

I wish I would get some good news to pack away and sustain me during this reunion trip. The kind of news that doesn't wrinkle.

2 comments:

Peter said...

Congrats on being a finalist! That's pretty impressive. Your day will come.

Unknown said...

Thanks, Peter. I was already a finalist. The announcement let me know I was a runner-up. Something pretty perverse about letting people know how excruciating close they get.