edit my book

I just reread my manuscript that I wrote during NaNoWriMo and found it to be too much of a rush drive to have the potential of a novel as most of it is too random and disordered to even be worth editing. Although the good news is that with a few changes I could salvage the first part of the book to serve as a short story that could stand on itself.

Today my mom came by with cinnamon buns and an offer to play with Isak for a few of hours while I worked on this (which I’ve been beating myself up about). I really appreciated it, it gave me a chance to get my head clear.

I’ve decided to take off the personal pressure to have a stack of books at my side, wrapped, bowed and ready to go by Christmas. It would be so nice and I’ll still try, but this is supposed to be about sharing scattered pieces of joy (things I find beautiful, words I’m happy with), so I want to put them together in that head-space, not one where I’m flogging myself to get it done in time, sweating deadlines, threatening postmen.

Just deciding this has made it less of a chore and freed something up for me – things are flowing better, I’ve been happily adding/deleting/playing again.

I’ve been too thinky lately. I had several ideas squashed together, when it makes more sense to channel them into several different books, not force everything into a single overly congested one. It doesn’t have to be perfect, and I really feel that I need to enjoy the process.

And there’s nothing wrong with epiphany presents.

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours poking about online for information about colour profiles, how to avoid printing errors, and how to convert RGB to sRGB in Photoshop so the editing will come out correctly. Then my eyes started to cross.

A little procrastination inspiration?

* * * *

Today I spent several hours scrolling through photos, marking ones I particularly like and checking the hundreds I’d previously marked – which was sometimes for totally unrelated reasons, so I sit here wondering “Why? Was it to remind me to buy cheese?”. I already have too many words, too many pictures. Next it’s time to whittle them down.

I had three people read my book, and have a few idea’s which I’d like to implement into it now. This means adding a few chapters, and completely re-writing much of the end. I’m having a hard time focusing on that because I keep getting caught up trying to read it from the beginning again and I end up editing. I guess I should ignore any edits until I get to the point where I want to edit, if there are “small” edits before that, I should ignore them.

In the meantime, I keep having little visions and inspiration for the second book in the series, so I’ve been writing more in that. I guess it’s ok. Someone told me the first book usually sucks anyway, so why not go onto the second? I just really want to finish editing the first book first.

Editing seems to be more complicated than I thought. Writing it was much easier!

This morning I went through all of my haiku from the last few years, cutting and pasting seasonally obvious ones into one of four categories. This has given me 4 pages each (about 40 – 45 per season) that I can now whittle down to the ones I really like, probably cutting 2/3 or so.

This is decent progress, since I’ve previously been focusing mainly on the photos. Markus has offered to take Isak on some sort of adventure at some point over the weekend so I can do some more editing.

I’ve been asked to bring a stack of the published book to a Christmas arts night, but it’s at the end of this month and unfortunately I don’t think it will be possible to have them delivered & ready to go by then.

This motivation bump feels good though.

Horrors, my last post about this was a whole month ago. I want my energy back – for this goal in particular. I was hoping to be working on a secondary edit by now, but apparently I need to find a place that sells creative juicers first.

I think I’ll try to get up earlier and offer metaphorical crackers to my elusive inspiration. Maybe if I pledge to just open the editing program and stare at what I already have it’ll eventually get the wheels moving again. Or perhaps I should send the boys out somewhere fun, uncork a nice bottle of vino, and play irresponsibly. There’s always a revert button. Sigh.

This has been frustrating, since I had just made a big jump forward on the book publishing goal when this health speedbump knocked me off the road. It feels like someone walked up and punched my muse in the face. However, anticipating being trapped at home for several weeks, I pushed to get the new hard drive rolling so I can jump back in when my head clears and my muse dusts herself off.

I’m trying to woo her by scrolling through photos and writing, picking things I like and editing what I’ve done so far. I still can’t sit here for as long as I want to (yet), but hopefully by the time I can, infectious inspiration will hit me again. I doubt I’ll make my previous self-suggested test copy date, but I’m hoping to have something by the end of the month.

Extra thanks to DoubleN for her longtime & continued kicks in the bum support on this. Thanks to a lot of you for that, actually.

I have finally gotten to the point where I can have others look at my work. I had someone edit it who just got back to me this week with edits, and they said they liked it. Next week I’m meeting with the second editor. I need to write a query letter soon so that I can find an agent. I’ve already compiled a list of agencies which work with my particular genre. Of course this has nothing to do with editing, so I won’t go into that here. I guess I’ll just say..it’s on it’s way. (Guess the agent does play a part, because they usually ask you to edit anyway..if you get that far).

The small second edit isn’t a small second edit at all. I seem to be taking this book really seriously now for some reason. One day last week, I spent two hours on one paragraph. It was insane I tell ya. Granted, that was the only paragraph I’ve spent so long on so far, but still..geeez. I need to lighten up or something haha