Ok, so I lied--this will be my last post before vacation.

While waiting for the washing machine to finish its spin cycle, I clicked on a few of my bookmarks that I hadn't visited in a while, and I found some excellent advice on publishing at Jane Yolen's site:

http://www.janeyolen.com/forwrtrs.html
Getting Published:

Know this about being published: it is out of your hands.

Even if you do everything you can think of to affect that outcome, you can not make an editor take your work.

You can go to conferences. You can take creative writing classes (though I have always wanted to see if it were possible to teach a course in non-creative writing!) You can read books about writing. You can set a work schedule on your computer and make a special place and space for your writing like my Aerie. You can travel to Yaddo and make friends there with peformance artists. You can subscribe to PW and The Writer and Poets&Writers. You can get a BA, or an MFA or a PHD in Medieval Lit. You can work as a day laborer, having heard that it will ready you for writing the great American novel. Or you can work as a librarian, because someone tells you that is the way to learn to write children's books. You can walk around Lower Slobovia for a year, sail across the Atlantic in a water closet, become Arnold Swartzenegger's personal amanuensis, have intercourse with bug-eyed aliens, manage to marry a mass murderer or to murder a mass marrier. Or get thrown off the jury at the next OJ retrial. You can even--God help us--sleep with an editor. It does not--alas-- guarantee a thing. Though all of those are probably more effective than merely having talent or writing well!

Julian Gloag has written rather sarcastically that "If I were to shoot my publisher in some nice public place with plenty of blood, I guarantee my novels would be back in print in plenty of time for the trial. . . and the world would be a lot better off."

So, once you have committed any words to the page and have sent your manuscript off to the publisher, it is truly beyond your capacity to make anything happen in re the publishing of your work. Besides, as Emily Dickinson pointed out, "Publication is the Auction of the Mind of Man." (Are you cynical enough to remember that she wrote that after unsuccessfully trying to market her poems?)

Therefore, once the book is in the mail--relax. Read a good book. Or read a bad book. Just don't worry about it. Better yet--get busy writing something new.