Tag Archives: amediting

Two of Forty-Eight Hundred (a rough guesstimate)

Posted on by
Reply

What’s your second edit look like? For some reason, I was thinking I’d been all brilliant with this latest project, that my editing would go faster and smoother than the last book because I’d nailed it the first time through. Yeah, well, let’s just say I overestimated my brilliance by just a micrometer. A micrometer to the eleventy-billionth degree.

Sure, I got the basic story going, but I’m rewriting whole chapters into intelligible language, rather than basic phrases that might be understood on a certain dosage of hallucinogenics laced with droplets of my blood. Needless-to-say, editing is not going to be a quick once over.

How could I possibly think it would be easy? Mostly, I think it was just over-eagerness, or simple optimism. I’m way behind on my deadline, so I convinced myself it was fine because the edits would be smooth and I’d be able to catch up some time. Riiiight. Maybe for my next book I can just think really hard at a blank page and the story will fall right out all neat and clean and full of genius. I won’t even bother crossing my fingers…

We have to put in the work. Every time. Every time this is the process. Every time it comes in stages, slowly sculpting it out to its best form. Rushing is a mistake I’ve made, and I won’t again. Sure, some people will be disappointed to have to wait longer, but they’d be more disappointed to get a rushed piece of work. Still, I need to focus and get the work done, regardless of where I’m at with it.

I hope all your projects are moving forward, regardless of the pace that happens.

First Drafts Can Suk it!

Posted on by
Reply

Writing is hard. Like, seriously.

One of my favorite quotes come from All The Bright Places and comments on said fact.

Writing is so difficult that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

And first drafts. Seriously, they can suk it. Like, all of it. They make me wonder if my brain even works. Do I sound like this big of a moron when I speak? I need to stop speaking. Like, when you go back to some quickly jotted notes, and you can’t decipher your own writing, that’s what a first draft is to my thoughts. I’m reading what must be a sentence. There’s a period at the end of a string of words. That’s a sentence, right? But this makes all kinds of sense that is nonsense. How am I supposed to EDIT this into coherency when there isn’t even a base coherency to be found?!

But, somehow, it gets there. Probably with multiple missed chances at brilliance. Those pure moments of genius that didn’t form themselves well onto the page because my meager human existence struggled to decipher, it and it’s now lost forever. Who knows? Maybe my basic fun, adventure novels were meant to be more, if only I’d trained my brain to translate from the muses better.

It’s a question I often see on author posts, asking what part of the processes is their most and least favorite. I could never answer. Well, I can now. First Drafts can SUUUUUK it.

Needless-to-say, I’m a little bit with the struggles right now on my current first draft. It’s not even that I don’t know where its going, or where it is, or what I want to happen. I have a plan for this story. I’ve even written the ending. But I just can’t get the words onto the page.

Maybe I should be the one sukkin it. Maybe I’m just having an aversion to work, because the first draft, I think, is where the most work goes in. The literal creation of something from nothing. I like when it’s finally here, when I can go in and fine-tune, when I can sculpt a clean product from the ragged suggestion of it. That means, finishing this first draft. *insert annoyed, toddler-tantrum expression here*

What do you think? Are you sukkin first drafts, too? Or you just think I don’t have the chops? Go on, be honest 🙂

And here. Let’s all suck it…