At long beautiful last you have your first draft done. Your celebration is tempered by the long and arduous revisions to come. Months pass as you toil through major and minor revisions. Every time you finish what should be your final read-though you find something to change, something to tweak.
Too many sentences start with noun-verb combinations one time. Next time you don't have any sentences that start with noun-verb combos and it sounds too flowery and passive. Too many long sentences. Too many short ones. The character's names are too common this time. Next time you decide they're too unusual.
At this rate the revisions are taking longer than the first draft. You've worked and reworked it to death and you're starting to burn out computer disks. You're getting sick of your story and your characters, as you would with any story you'd read twenty times in a row.
Relax. Format that manuscript with the page numbers and make that title page, print it out and send it out. That editor or agent will like or dislike your story and no amount of tweaking will change that. Besides, that editor or agent who takes you on might just ask you to cut that section you sweated over for two months, and that was two months you could have been using on something else--like your next story. :)
Out of the Slush
The Writer's Page
