Eating Your Vegetables

The editing process is attacking me again.

I've always, always said that if a book is like a meal, writing it is the main course. It's the part you spend the most time on, it takes the most work, it does the most for you. Reading it is like the dessert. It's not particularly the best thing for you to be doing (why read your own books, shouldn't you be writing more?), but it's fun to do, and it's probably the thing others enjoy the most, too. But in the five-course meal that is a complete novel, editing is eating your vegetables.

I didn't eat my vegetables as a kid. Even as an adult, I have to smother my veggies in the rest of the food so I can barely taste it. (I like most things that go in a salad; I neither like nor dislike corn; I think beans are all I need to make a case for the presence of evil in the world.) I sat at the table long after my parents were done, toying with whatever vegetables my mom decided I needed in my system that evening. I would ask how many bites I needed to eat before I could be excused; I would negotiate, trying to get an exact measurement for a bite (is it any wonder I'm essentially a pre-law student in college?); I would beg, plead, and get theatrical, but I wasn't allowed to get up from the table until I ate those vegetables.

It's the same with writing. I love writing. It's such an essential part of myself that everything else I do in life is incidental; my life is reckoned in terms of my writing. And, as uncomfortable as it makes me at first, I love letting people read what I write. Why else do I write it? I get quite a lot out of the written word, I want to try and emulate that and give that to others. But the only way to get from writing something to letting others read it is that bane of my existence, editing.

Editing is difficult. I don't like to do it. I cringe whenever I come across a particularly bad sentence. It's unsettling to come across word choice that upsets the rhythm and flow of my work. I waffle on tenses; should I use he was sitting in the chair to make it seem more immediate or he sat in the chair to make it more emphatic? I trace threads of the plot from where they were first laid out to where they fizzle because I forgot about them, I pick them up and reconnect them, I gut whole sections of the novel, sometimes completely eradicating a character from the storyline... (There's a pernicious figure who had nothing more than a cameo appearance in Seafear whose role didn't expand in Stormsong, so he'll have to go the way of Old Yeller. It's a shame, I kind of liked him and that means there's at least 30 pages I need to completely rewrite.)

I don't like to edit. But I want people to read my book. And they can't read my book until I edit it. So onward I plow, trying to make this thing fit for human consumption. Er, reading. Whatever.

Don't eat my books, please.

Il Est Fini

At 466 pages and 103,868 words, the first draft of Seaquel is complete.

The actual title, for the record, is Stormsong.

I'll let you lot mull that over, I have printing to do.