Down the Rabbit Hole

I'm sick, I'm staying in, I'm not up for serious editing so I'm looking at savage reviews of bad books and worse cover art.

It isn't helping my confidence.

I am once again wishing I could retroactively delete my book. Not because I'm embarrassed, per se. It is more about feeling I didn't give good value. Asking someone to read a novel is asking them to give up a chunk of their time and attention. A big chunk, these days.

I wouldn't want to serve bad food or be a poor worker when I'm getting paid (which is why I am home; I could drag myself in but then I'd have to park myself under the heater and get little work done. I'm getting paid hourly. If I can't give them a full hour's work for that pay, I don't want to be there.)

***

The savage edit continues. It is the only way it can work. I sweated these sentences, I sweated the details. I checked spelling, I checked dates, I checked grammar. But the only way I can get some of these excursions and extras out of the big is to chop them out with an axe.

I'm not even bothering to excise them neatly from an otherwise sound paragraph. Instead, out the whole thing goes.

I'm on the worst infection now. The chapter at the museum. Actually, there's less that's extraneous there. The problem it has it that it could have been better in the first place. So this edit is my excuse to try to focus it in more.

The weirdest part of the process is I'm having to edit my protagonist herself. I lived within her. I wrote 80,000 words in her voice. And now I'm gaslighting her; all of a sudden, the story needs to say she doesn't know anything about, say, Mycenaean Greece.

I'm changing the character because the story needs it, and that is a process that peels the plastic face off the robot underneath. After so long trying to make her feel like a person, she's back to words on a page. And that's the most uncomfortable part yet.

Especially because this means everything can now be on the table. Any part of her background or personality, I could stroke through with a pen as I complete this edit.

So I don't feel in control of the book any more. It doesn't feel like a book. It feels like a bunch of words, far too many of which are wrong. And it is only making me more and more feel like deleting the thing entirely.