Hitting "Send."

           Whether it’s an email of significance or a blog post I’ve spell-checked repeatedly, sometimes I have a really hard time hitting “Send.”  But it’s not just the age of email and blogging that causes me to hesitate.  I remember writing letters---way back when people actually did that--- and reading them a zillion times before sliding them into the mail box and raising the little red flag.

            I think this has something to do with why I’m such a Facebook/texting junkie.  Statuses and texts are brief.  They’re easy to review and get out of your hands quickly.  And if there’s a mistake, it’s almost expected.  For example, how many times have you made an effort to correct someone’s misspelling on Facebook?  You pretty much know it was done quickly and that your friends don’t lack an understanding of capitalization and punctuation. 

And let’s face it, if you have an iPhone, you have definitely sent at least one embarrassing text due to the autocorrect feature.  My favorite is when I invite someone on a “playdate” only to discover later that I invited them over so we could have a “Playmate.”  Yes, it actually capitalizes the P.  Try it.  I also like that when I type the word “probably,” it is sometimes replaced with “proletariat.”  Because that’s a word most people use on a daily basis.

But all kidding aside, it just took me almost three weeks to hit “Send” when I found out I needed to send five pages of my working manuscript to the Executive Editor of Random House.  Given, those first five pages have been written for months.  They have been read, re-read, edited (Thanks Ray!), altered, re-written, and then sat as an attachment in my inbox since the last week of June.

I wish I was one those people who could just hit “Send.”  But at this point in life, I have to accept that I am not and respect my own goofy writing process.  And now you know why you get 100 short texts from me instead of one lengthy email.  Because I am a ruminator down to my core.