Can you ever truly be finished revising?

Putting the final touches on my MS before querying can only be likened to watching the last 5 minutes of a tied football game. Instead of taking 5 minutes, the game drags out for over an hour. Too many time-outs, and players running out of bounds to stop the clock, and yet the intensity is at 110% the entire time. It is exhausting.

I’m reaching this point where I want to say “screw it”, and just start sending the thing out. But that would truthfully be counter-productive. I took the better part of a year to write the thing, and then spent weeks upon weeks revising, then ignored it for a month, then when back to it with fresh eyes, then revised some more, then tweaked even further… I can keep going, but for your sake, I’ll stop. I’m currently in what I hope to be my final round of revisions: cleaning up odd ends, tightening prose and making final edits tweaks on some fabulous advice from my critique partner. It’s worth putting queries on hold until all that is squared away. I only want to send the strongest MS possible out to agents. But darn it all, I’m also just really anxious and excited to start the next step.

And so this brings me to my main question. Even after all the tweaks and edits and read-throughs are complete, will I ever be satisfied? Will I ever really be 100% done and 100% satisfied with my work. Can I ever rest assured I’m really sending the best possible piece of work out to agents? I’m going to guess no. Because nothing’s perfect.

But what do you all think? Can you ever truly be finished editing/revising? And if no, how do you know when to stop?

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