Miss Crankypants has known all along that this day would come. With neither fanfare nor a press conference, she prepares to sacrifice one of her children to an open-jawed editor who will no doubt edit said baby until it is no longer recognizable. Her novel is due in to the editor’s desk.
Now, Miss CP understands that SOME of you would give your eyeteeth to have a piece of writing accepted and on deadline. Even Miss Cranky herself gets absolutely apoplectic whenever some hack announces to the Facebook Universe that she has fifteen novels due next week and twelve more in the wings, waiting their turn.
To Miss CP’s way of thinking, this is like moaning that you can’t decide whether to drive the Porsche or the Lamborghini to the market for milk. Give her a break!
Her own mother once married into royalty and all it did was cause Mom to act like the bad rich girl in the old Shirley Temple film, “Poor Little Rich Girl.” One day as we walked the mall, Nouveau Riche Mom sighed. “I just can’t feature myself wearing a dress off the rack!”
Miss Crankypants suddenly wanted to rack up a few thousand bucks’ worth of dental work for Mom.
Luckily for her, Mom eventually came back to Earth and now lives in a trailer park like the rest of the family. But about that Novel.
Miss Cranky is loath to let the Baby go, lest some editor pronounce it Ugly. For months, Miss CP has nurtured and shaped and eaten way too many potato chips, just to write a little 65k novel. Today’s the day she can no longer protect it, dress it in cute little purple phrases or even threaten it with fire, like the Wicked Witch of the West did to Scarecrow in “The Wizard of Oz.” Nope. Today she gives her baby over to the Sharks, otherwise known as EDITORS. Help! If the sharks don’t like the baby, they could refuse to fund its college education.
Her baby is the cutest baby on the planet, remember? Please. All Miss Crankypants need are a few hundred thousand readers to LOVE her novel. Are you willing? Or does she have to call in the Reader Sharks?
