Editing

Editing has been both the delight and the bane of my existance. I adore editing. The college I attended had terrible food. (You went there too?) I used to earn free meals off campus in exchange for editing papers. I could almost guarantee at least a letter grade bump after I edited a paper. The problem has been, that writing requires "shitty rough drafts" (Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird--great book) and I can't resist polishing up the muck. This has meant that not much gets put on the page. I have so many manuscripts that are languishing because I can't stop editing the first few pages. I keep revising the entire structure every other paragraph.

This blog has become my secret weapon against my inner editor. I have given myself permission to edit away here on the blog. I nip. I tuck. I trifle. But the manuscripts for my other projects are off limits. Suddenly, I have huge amounts of unedited material, just piling up and demanding folders. I'm not even bothering with actually doing much editing over here. I'm just writing and writing and writing and writing and well, you get the idea. If I'd known it was this simple I'd have finished something big a long time ago. Live and learn.