Literary Gratification

        I recently finished all of my forwarded submissions! It was so gratifying to watch the thirty or so that I had in my inbox gradually dwindle. One of the editors took interest in two manuscripts that I put through, also a very gratifying feeling. I have to read them in their entirety and write a slightly more extensive reader's report on them. It's liberating to not read submission after submission, many with absurd plots and heinously bad grammar. It baffles me as to why anyone submitting a manuscript wouldn't edit their piece repeatedly. If they want us to care, they should care too. When I read a manuscript with abundant, careless errors, I almost immediately reject it.
        I'm also still proofreading a manuscript, which is proving to be a long and tedious process. I enjoy finding errors, writing the changes in red and then putting a post-it on the page. The text itself is not something I would read on my own. It's a book of essays about the nature of poetry. There are a plethora of references to Greek Mythology and to Walden- one of my least favorite books in history. Thoreau can go on for pages about the nature of an apple and I find this insufferably boring.
        Luckily I'm reading an interesting book recently published by Milkweed. I'm reading The Pakistani Bride by Bapsi Sidhwa. I've only about forty pages in but so far much has happened. The protagonist's family has all died from smallpox except for him and after his family is gone, he manages to rescue a little girl who reminds him of his late daughter. I recently realized that my  entire life centers around reading fiction. I read fiction eight hours in a row for my internship, I read fiction for my two academic classes and I read fiction for my own personal enrichment. Basically I have the perfect life. For a writer, anyway.