Near the cutting edge...but carrying a dull knife.

A day late and a dollar short. Yeah. Yeah. I can hear my dad saying it now. Little did I know how prophetic his words were.

It's happened over and over. I get just within reach of the cutting edge, and it moves. I master old math, the week before new math is introduced. I can't wait to be 18 to booze it up, and the week before my birthday they change the age to 21. I take my last college semester of photography with film and darkrooms, as film gives way to computer imaging.

And now here I am with my buttocks bleeding because I'm perched on the wrong side of the cutting edge once again. This time it's the literary publishing world that's waiting to pull the plug on my plans.

I've spent the last 6 years plodding along on a manuscript, knowing someday an agent and publisher would be clamoring for it and that I would see my work in hardcover - beautifully bound, eye-catching cover gracing the windows of Barnes and Noble. I never pictured it to be self-published or read on a Kindle. In my dreams I've been able to smell the ink on the pages as it came off the press, to touch the glossy outside, and turn to the first page to read - by Lee Ann Ropes .

Ah, you say. That could still happen. Maybe, if I had the damn thing completed and ready for press, which I don't. No. By the time I write THE END, cutting edge in the writer's world will undoubtedly be paperless.

Maybe those of us who are always a day late and a dollar short of the cutting edge were put here just to make the rest of you over-achievers look good. Maybe we pave the road to make it smoother for your progress.

But for now I sense I'm foiled again. I'm at least two steps behind the cutting edge. It's like the time I decided to finally go back to work after an extended maternity leave...the Company filed bankruptcy and shut down. Oooh. That dull knife hurt.

By the way, I'm finally ready to cash in the thousands of S&H Green Stamps I've been saving up for years. I hope I'm not too late. They do still redeem those, right?

between the lines,
thanks for reading. :-)