Good Morning all,
Sometimes I feel like editing my book is the most tedious thing. In 39 days I had the first draft written, but it’s been 50 days since then and I’ve edited 10 chapters. And I haven’t even reached the higher up chapters that I plan on giving complete and total makeovers! I find editing frustrating sometimes because it never seems good enough. Every time I read it I feel like I should change something and I know that’s common, but it doesn’t make it suck any less. Today I will be reviewing chapters 9 & 10 to make sure the past two days of edits are good enough to leave as is and then I’ll move on, because I’m slowly learning that once you’ve edited something, you can’t go back to it, otherwise you will be there forever.
Something else that’s frustrating is how long it takes to edit. In 3hrs I had 1.5 pages edited. Yesterday I spent 2hrs in the morning and then edited straight from 3-10pm and then again from 12-1:30am and I got somewhere around 7.5 pages (or one and a half chapters to be precise). Sometimes it feels like I’m just re-writing the whole goddamn book, and maybe I am. When I think of my first draft, the story line didn’t even make sense because I was still fleshing out most of the plot and characters. As I wrote, the story changed, so by the time I got to the end of the book the characters themselves contradicted each other. So I guess in a sense I have been re-writing things now that I know people better. And it’s easier to know what they would do… most of the time at least.
I’m excited to finish the book and I guess what is frustrating the most is I can’t just edit for 30min. If I want to edit I need to allot a large block of time because, well frankly if I only got 1.5 pages in 3hrs, I’ll be lucky if I get 2 sentences in 30min and its hard to constantly be interrupted like that. It messes with my train of thoughts and then I get half way through writing something and when I finally get back to it I have no idea what I was trying to say. I know I need to still have a life, but I honestly don’t think I would be upset if 90% of my days were spent on the book and then I had 10% of people time. I know that sounds sooooo bad, but it’s hard having all this stuff locked inside you with no time to get it out.
~Kat
Tempest in a Teacup 