The Horse has Left the Building

 A Moment in Time:

We've all done this because to err is human (setting aside the issue of man's inhumanity to man--or woman): who hasn't pressed the 'send' or 'publish' or 'submit' button once too often, an instant too soon, and there is no way to undo what now has been done?

This is metaphoric as well. Our errant actions can be anywhere from in bed to in-the-closet to in the supermarket, at work, wherever. And the harm they can do can be anything from trivial to disastrous.

In all-too-many cases, disastrous can mean anything from death of a loved one (or oneself) to loss of a job, loss of a contract at the moment of signing, to a friend, to a potential love relationship. Or a life or business partner.

My most recent such moment in time was not disastrous. At most, it may cost me my $20 submission fee: trivial to some, less so to others. I'd just entered the first chapter of a novel I'm working on in a contest called the Chapter One Prize (The book in question will be #5 of my Jake Fleming Investigations series, which has just been launched with my novel A Tiger's Heart, hot off the literal and proverbial press). In my new novel, Return of the Dragon, Jake becomes involved with cracking a sex slave operation operating from China to Los Angeles, because he'd worked in China both together with and (at times) in opposition to the local authorities there, and had formed a relationship with a woman there, who was the sister of the Chinese cop in charge of the case and is now en route to Los Angeles. 

I'll leave it at that, but what I had done v/v my Chapter One was neglect to re-read it prior to pressing the 'submit' button. This was a horrible offense for a writer, but I'd done it on impulse, thinking 'Hey, this looks cool, what've I got to lose?' (Other than 20 bucks). So then I sat down after the fact, opened the Word file, and damn me if there wasn't a typo in paragraph one! And it gets worse. I'd made a major stoner boner in the writing a month or two earlier in a two-paragraph-long spoiler regarding the plot of the book's predecessor (not yet sent to my publisher, so no harm, no foul there, at least). So that section got deleted, and its author (moi) given a brisk slap on the proverbial wrist. 

But then, as I read on, the characters, most of the dialogue, and the plotlines all held up. So thus I thought: well hey, this book is a work-in-progress. This prize is for a work-in-progress first chapter. In my case, definitely a work-in-progress. So who knows, maybe it still has a shot. 

And if not, there's always next time. The road in a writer's life is a road well-traveled. Apart from the Bronte sisters, that is. 

E.C.