Editing is the punishment for writing

There are writers who love editing. I'm not one of them. I have a friend who claims that the editing part is when the book happens that she had in her mind, as the draft/s before are just "raw material". I wish I had that disposition. I'm a one-draft writer. I may tinker and tighten and expand as I go from first draft (V.1) over several versions (V.1.1, V1.2...) to the draft I submit (V.2), and I rarely have much stuff left to deal with, because my first draft is *the* draft. I rewrite and edit as I write (which is one of the reasons why I'm physically unable to write 5k or 10k a day), and work in feedback from my test readers and peers, but generally speaking, it's rare that I rewrite a great deal.

And then my delusions of grandeur ("I'm a strong self-editor") hit reality in the shape of a hardcore editor. Incursion really became a totally different beast under Kristen's care, and my new story, Skybound, which I'm editing right now, is changing in subtle ways as Tiffany challenges everything that's not totally watertight. Once a good editor went through the text, I feel like a bloody beginner, a complete greenhorn.

Could I really be repeating "face" fifteen times on a single page? Could I really have five hands involved in a sex scene, even though we only have two guys in bed? The answer is usually yes. At some point, I get blind to the text, and then shit goes wrong, and that's when an editor catches me out before a reviewer catches me out and tells the world what a lazy idjit I am. Seriously, editors are my last line of defence against disgruntled reviewers and readers. Opening up my edits is always a test of faith and courage. As I scroll through the thousand comments and all the bits where I've been an idjit on the page, my heart sinks and I need a strong drink. Coffee, because it's going to be a long night.

Skybound is special, because it's short, and it's dense, with metaphors and images and meaning layered on top of each other in one tight, poetic package, and tinkering even with a sentence feels like it affects the whole. At just over 13k words, it does. Stories that are that short are much more like poems. As a friend who writes everything from novels to haikus once said: A novel can survive one bad chapter, a novella can survive a bad scene, but a short story really suffers from one bad sentence, and one bad word can kill a poem. I've found that to be very true (the reason why I don't write poetry? I'm not good enough to crystallise so much meaning into such a small space).

Skybound is like that short story. Editing this feels like brain surgery. It's going to be a tough sell in any case, so I'm working hard to get it just right, knowing that's impossible. But my editors at least nudge me into the right direction.


In vaguely related news, the co-project is moving along, my penicillin course is done (and funnily enough, once the pills were done I became productive again - maybe my Muse manifests as little bacteria in my blood - kill too many of them and I'm simply not writing...), I feel a great deal more perky.

But now I have to tackle the last 15 pages of Skybound.