In Youngblood Hawke, author Herman Wouk, chooses to speak (quite cleverly through his protagonist) about his own experience of being an author:
"No man can know what it is like to be a woman taking her firstborn in her arms for the first time, but a writer who holds a freshly printed copy of his first book must have a fair idea of what the woman feels. It lies rectangular and spotless in his hands, with his name on the jacket. It is his pass to the company of the great. Fielding, Stendhal, Melville, Tolstoy wrote books. Now he has written one... The exultation does not last. It cannot. It is too piercing. It has gone before he has drawn twenty breaths. But in that twenty breaths he has smelled the sweetest of all savors, the savor of total fulfillment. After that, no matter what success he may achieve, he is just another writer, with a writer's trials and pleasures. That joy never comes again in all its first purity."
My editing continues slowly, as I am now working full-time too. Soon I may be holding a completed work and as Mr. Wouk suggests here regard it as "my baby" too.
