This editing run-through, I’m taking it slow. Though I’ve read through the manuscript a million times, I realise that this is one of the last times - if not the last time - that I’m going to visit it front to back before I head to Staples, buy sixteen-thousand manilla envelopes and stamps, and start my period of advance mourning for my pride.
I’ve been going chapter by chapter, word by word (especially now that I’ve been turned on to some of the more egregious language), and am only printing out a couple of chapters at a time so I’m not tempted to plow through it and short ciricuit the three effective cells in my brain. The improvements that I’ve been able to make in structure and fluidity with the modificiation of simple word choices or the subtraction of superfulous words is baffling, and it’s only one of a whole host of things that I’ve learned through the editing process.
One issue with being so in it at this point is that there are scenes that still stick out as weak or uninteresting, and while I know which ones still fall totally flat, I can’t tell if the others are just my absolute sickness at their memorized choreography, or if it just really isn’t hitting. I suppose that’s one of the dangers of never having done this before - you’re not entirely sure of the things for which you’re supposed to be looking.
The next step after this last run through is finding time to write a synopsis (this piece is absolutely dreadful), the thightening of my query letter (read: probably rewriting its beginning), and the start of a massively intimidating spreadsheet listing everyone to whom I’m submitting and what they need.
I don’t quite know how I’m supposed to be feeling, and if this love/hate with self and “art” is normal, natural. I’m scared knowing I’m so young and so new, while in the same breath, I know that, if my prose lives up to the hype I must create in order to get some attention, it’s part of my asset and marketing angle. Packaging yourself as a product is an incredibly curious thing that reveals a lot about your own character. How do you say, “I have to tell you this is the greatest thing ever written so you’ll pay attention to it, but I know I have to be humble because I’m a twenty-two-year-old shit with no fiction creditentials to date?” It’s a distubringly unnatural balance.
I’m anxious and excited to push on, and I know I can’t waste this positive head space. Someone lock me in a cafe and throw away the key.
M
