Editing Fun and Projects

I cannot claim to be a successful writer. Not in good conscience, anyway. I know that Mur Lafferty advised that a writer is someone who writes, and I'm trying to fill those shoes, but there's a part of me that wants define a writer as someone who writes and has an audience, preferably paid, as a form of validation of success. It's a tangible way to say, "Look! I've made it!"

But I think I'm getting some clue of what it is like for new writers to try to balance practical life with writing life.

I have a day job. Not one that I've been really loving lately, but it pays the mortgage. I've been spending spare time working on the novel I wrote. The first draft ended at 112,240 words. I'm going back through it and trimming material out; as of this moment, OpenOffice is saying that my novel is 108,023 words, so between my wife and I we've cut 4,217 words, and I'm only about a quarter of the way through the manuscript.

(What can I say? Paula B. was right...it takes a lot longer than we think to get through these things!)

The problem I've had lately is that I'm not spending discrete blocks of time working on the novel. While writing it, I would sit for an hour here, an hour there, and have a word count goal of 500 words at least per sitting (usually hitting 1,000 to 2,000). With editing it doesn't work like that (although I could do it in blocks, I just don't). I don't have a concrete goal each session, and setting one like "work until I chop out 500 words" would be silly, as it kind of imposes an arbitrary limitation on the work. I should be trying to edit to make it sound better and not edit just to cut things out ("I like this scene, but I really need to get to bed..." )

The other problem is that I look at my Writers Block Notebook my wife gave me for Xmas and I feel a pang to work on those ideas for stories. I already told myself I can't work on two of these at once...I simply can't keep splitting time up more and manage to get this done in a decent amount of time. I want (need) to get one ready for submissions and rejections before moving on to something else. That was kind of the reason for the notebook; a place to put ideas so I'd have a back burner to refer to.

But there's an allure to the idea of moving on to the next idea. What if this one tanks? What if this one sucks?! Then I'll have something that could possibly be better ready to go sooner!

And I have no illusions that this first story is great. I really think that it needs some feedback and work. That's part of the reason I'm giving it a once-over, and my wife is giving a second-over to it. A different set of eyes catches things that I don't. And she kind of does this sort of thing for a living since she has an English degree, so I'm confident in her abilities.

I am pulled to try another story and see how it goes. But each time I stop myself. "Get back to what you promised yourself you'd work on," I tell myself. "Fun stuff later. You need to re-read the work you already did."

"But I'm a worse editor than I am a writer!" I whine.

"Doesn't matter. You'll only get better, even if it's just a tiny bit better, if you try it again. Now, EDIT!" says my brain.

I frown, I pout, I procrastinate, but I open the word processor and have at it again.

I'm slowly going through the manuscript. I keep the more fun projects on the back burner, and as ideas come to me I write them down. Occasionally I remind myself that working on a new story is a reward for finishing the editing task at hand first...