It’s odd to be actually sleeping, instead of just lying in bed while my brain serves up millions of “what ifs” and “worry about this-es”. I did a lot of digital housekeeping lately, just generally attending to loose ends before starting a merry-go-round of revising the epic fantasy and reformatting ebooks.
The concomitant feeling of safety, and the pressure-release of being out and away, is doing good things. The relief when I attended to the last bit of housekeeping was so profound as to stagger me; I’m glad I was sitting down.
Things aren’t ideal, but at least I don’t have that energy expenditure hanging about my neck, an albatross of politeness siphoning away energy needed for other things.(Like writing, like revising, like getting these reformats done… you get the idea.)
In any case, I spent hours on a single scene yesterday, ripping at the underpinnings and ending up with something that looked very much like the initial work, but with a completely different thrust and tone. Sometimes you have to get down to the foundations before you can fix what’s wrong. Usually I’m a lot better about noticing something’s gone wrong during the initial writing, but sometimes… well, sometimes I’m not.
That’s what revision is for.
Still, I’m feeling the drag of “this is the third book in a series, it’s already 168k, it’s going to be bigger, why do I get myself into these things, just set it on fire, I hate everything.” It’s a usual, albeit uncomfortable, part of the process. I’ve got an extra week to get the revisions in and I should have known, because they always take three times as long as one thinks they will–about as solid a rule of thumb in publishing as there is. The only time things don’t take thrice as long is when they take six times as long.
At least there’s coffee. And at least there’s a lot of energy freed up by finishing housekeeping. I hadn’t realized just how deeply some things were bothering and draining me until I stepped away and felt the relief. I call it “the energetic bends”–so much pressure, removed so abruptly, makes for a short, uncomfortable period where one realizes just how bad it was. The trick is not to beat yourself up with “why did you stay so long, then?”
The only solution I’ve found is putting a Post-it with “just be glad it’s over” somewhere I can glance at it several times a day, like among the crop of notes festooning my desktop. They range from quotes to character lists, and one more doesn’t hurt. Quite the opposite.
Anyway. Now it’s time to get the dogs walked, run my poor corpse now that all the snow is gone, and stagger home to fall into revisions once more. I still need to reward myself for finishing the last zero draft I stabbed to doneness, but I can put that off until I get this revision out the door and then, then maybe I’ll give myself a double prize.
Not quite sure what it will be, yet, but now I have the time–and the energy–to figure it out.
It’s a nice change.